Managing supervisors with doctoral writing: some advice for candidates

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Managing supervision, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

The other day I attended a doctoral morning tea with a panel of two doctoral candidates and one supervisor giving advice on how to manage your supervisor. The chair probed with questions about different stages of doctoral writing. Some foundational advice came from the supervisor, who noted that human beings were all different (that is not too profound, yet advice on good practice often does not take account of individual difference). Her main point was that because of difference, clear communication was important. She had found that what worked well with one student did not work well with another, and that only open communication enables a good relationship. The doctoral candidates had some anecdotes of their own experience, and, by recounting them, showed that both they and their supervisors were indeed different in terms of work-protocol preference. One said that he hadn’t thought about managing his supervisor nor considered whether the relationship was okay until he heard his doctoral colleagues telling their tales and realised that he had a superb supervisor.

This post gives me a chance to give the advice to new doctoral students on managing their supervisors that I would have given had I been invited onto the panel. I’m keen to do this because having worked extensively with both doctoral students and supervisors, and researched doctoral writing exchanges, I know how important a good relationship is: it affects personal wellbeing over four years or so. And doctoral students have a part to play in figuring out the protocols for working together happily.

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Citation: what you might cite for and how you might show critical analysis

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literature review, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other, writing skills development

By Alistair Kwan

Alistair Kwan is Susan Carter’s colleague and his thoughts on citation in a recent conversation prompted this post. Alistair envisions a workshop from his thoughts, and you could respond with a comment to let us know whether you agree. He provides the learning objectives and enough examples to prompt substantial thinking.

I have been complaining for years that students and learning assistance staff don’t understand how citation works, and in fact our support people and supervisors often guide students unwittingly onto the wrong path. One of our students, and some journal submissions that I’ve reviewed this year, have me at last thinking that it’s time to act.

So here is a start of an idea.

Doctoral writing and supervisor feedback: What’s the game plan?

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Emotion & writing, supervisor feedback, talking about writing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

Last week’s post and its comments provide an entry point to this one. Last week I drew on Peter Arthur’s thoughts on how to teach metacognition, which takes the teacher further than just teaching material, to teaching students how to manage their own learning. Reflection on this topic took me to the fact that, in practice, supervisors are learners too when it comes to the cycles of feedback and revision in doctoral writing.

Developing doctoral writing in four dimensions: Helen Sword’s baseline

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Desire to write, Doctoral writing, Emotion & writing, Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

This post is premised squarely on the base line of Helen Sword’s latest book on academic writing. She begins by asking the reader to self-audit their own strengths and weaknesses as writers. This task orients them into the book, one rich with data from interviews with successful academic writers as to how they work. Sword has recommendations for each of the dimensions in this exercise. Yet she begins not with good advice, but with an affective approach, reaching into the core of each reader by asking us to reflect on who we are as writers. To self-analyse, we are given an exercise evaluating the different aspects of academic writing that influence development.

Voicing writing: exploring the link between body and text

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voice, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

During my own doctorate, I was troubled by voice and identity. As an undergraduate, I aspired to sounding like an academic; at doctoral level, it felt important to sound like myself. This post picks over some of the purposes of having doctoral students read their work aloud.

Most of us who support doctoral students with writing will repeat this handy bit of revision advice: ‘read the sentence out loud and you’ll hear when it is too long, or when the syntax is a bit skewy.’ It is the case that the process of voicing written prose will bring to light what’s going wrong in a way that helps revision.

Supporting graduate student writers: Research, curriculum and program design (2016).

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Doctoral writing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

This book review is written by guest Susan Mowbray, Western Sydney University. The book seems highly pertinent to our community, so we thank Susan for alerting us to it with her detailed critique.

Supporting graduate student writers. Research, curriculum and program design. (2016). Edited by Steve Simpson, Nigel. A. Caplan, Michelle Cox & Talinn Phillips. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press.

Supporting graduate student writers captured my attention as I have recently taken on a literacy support role with our Graduate Research School. The idea for the book was conceived at an invited colloquium on graduate writing support in 2014 and the result of the editors’ labours arrived via the University of Michigan Press in March this year. The book is organised in three parts. Part 1: What do we know/need to know? broadly covers supporting graduate research. Curriculum is dealt with in Part 2: Issues in graduate program and curriculum design. How to acclimatise students to the contemporary university is the focus of Part 3: Program profiles. Within the three parts, 14 chapters detail issues, concerns and/or initiatives in graduate education with 11 providing insights into North American contexts and the other three presenting perspectives from Canada, Sweden and Australia. The most striking aspect of the text for me is its explicit advocacy, and example of, cooperation and collaboration amongst members of the international graduate education community. Caplan and Cox are co-founders of the online Consortium of Graduate Education and this book exemplifies their commitment to actively sharing and building knowledge and engaging with members of the global doctoral education community. I found myself nodding in agreement with many points in each chapter and dog-earring multiple pages to return to later to think and read more about the information being shared.