Doctoral writing: to think ideas or to sell them to the reader?

Tags

Accurate word choice, English language writing skills, Precision, thesis editing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other, writing skills development

by Susan Carter

This morning a colleague who was to provide a workshop for doctoral students phoned in sick. Stepping in at short notice to replace her, I’m used Amanda Wolf’s four sentence formula for writing a research proposal in the workshop.  As we worked through Amanda’s exercise, I noticed how this great post is an exercise about writing to sell ideas to the reader rather than an exercise in writing to think. In this blog I ponder two related aspects arising from my fill-in workshop using Amanda’s sentence formula.

Advertisements

Supervision: the key relationship to get right as a doctoral writer and researcher

Tags

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

By Ian Brailsford.  Ian is Postgraduate Learning Adviser in the Libraries and Learning Services at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. With doctoral advising as his core work, Ian has an insightful approach to doctoral writing and the personal context that supports it.

Postgraduate research marks a transition from structured teaching and learning, with the lecturer deciding the course content, learning outcomes, assignment tasks and schedule, to fully fledged academic independence. To manage this in-between space, universities have for decades adopted an academic apprenticeship model where the less experienced researcher works under the supervision of a ‘master’. When it works well, as it does in most cases, postgraduate supervision is ‘win win’: the emerging early-career researcher is guided through the project to completion and the supervisor, as one experienced academic, Professor Robin Kearns, once put it, gains a new colleague. In an ideal world the balance of power shifts towards the end of the project; the postgraduate researcher becomes the expert and teaches the supervisor about their new-found knowledge.

However, we’re all human.

Managing supervisors with doctoral writing: some advice for candidates

Tags

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.

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

Tags

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?

Tags

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

Tags

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.