Helpful videos: Doctoral writing as thinking

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Doctoral writing, Precision, Researcher identity, writing skills development

By Susan Carter drawing on Cecile Badenhorst

Cecile Badenhorst MA (UBC), PhD (Queen’s) is a Professor in the Adult Education/Post-Secondary program in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University in Canada.  Her research interests are post-secondary and adult learning experiences particularly graduate research writing and academic literacies.  She has written three books in this area:  Research Writing (2007), Dissertation Writing (2008) and Productive Writing (2010). She has also co-edited with Cally Guerin, Research literacies and writing pedagogies for masters and doctoral writers (2016); and with Britt Amell & Jamie Burford Re-imagining doctoral writing (2021) which is available via open access: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/international/doctoral/

The value of videos

While I have long appreciated Cecile Badenhorst’s publications as her interests overlay my own, only recently have I found the rich trove of videos that she has given to the world. I am keen to share these gems with the DoctoralWriting community over the next few posts. There will be four posts in total: this one focusing on doctoral writing as thinking will be followed by one on some of the pragmatic factors of doctoral writing (for example, fluency, structuring, plagiarism avoidance), then one on different genres (article, conference abstract and presentation, different thesis chapters), and finally a post relating to literature review.

Why my excitement?

Doctoral Writing 10th Anniversary!

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

By Cally Guerin, Claire Aitchison and Susan Carter

We are delighted (and somewhat amazed) that we’ve arrived at the 10^th anniversary of the Doctoral Writing blog. The world seemed such a different place when we put up our first post in September 7^th 2012! 

Photo by Anna-Louise

The three of us were still relatively new as colleagues back then; however, we shared a vision for a platform to foreground our collective interest in doctoral writing.

Best use of exemplars for doctoral writing

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English language writing skills, Writing motivation, writing skills development

By Douglas Eacersall and Cristy Bartlett, with Susan Carter

It’s common that as supervisors and advisors we tell doctoral candidates to get online and look at other theses—any theses that can be found online are successful and available for students to get ideas for how to write their own. This post comes from Douglas and Cristy who took the time in their institution to build a library of full thesis proposals, those documents that candidates need to satisfy first year review and confirm their registration in the doctoral programme. They described their work in a DoctoralWriting Conversation in which they also discussed their book chapter on preparing students for candidature review – Confirmation of candidature: An autoethnographic reflection from the dual identities of student and research administrator.

To some extent, that is another story, and at the end of this post, there is a little more on how to gather examples of that quite covert genre, the full thesis proposal. What this post focuses on, though, is the advice that can be given to doctoral candidates so that they make effective use of exemplars of any item of doctoral writing.

Showing critical analysis, right from the full proposal

Tags

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

Susan Carter

This post comes from talk at a digital writing retreat recently where I provided advice about things that were troubling the distance doctoral writers who attended. These writers were at different stages of their theses, from those in their first year worried about preparing their full thesis proposal to one who was about to submit and working on final revisions.

At our institution, the first year review is tantamount to confirmation of candidature. It’s a big deal, with quite critical review. Of course, submission is an even bigger deal. I ended up presenting something of a manifesto to doctoral writers – a culmination of my current thinking about doctoral writing. Here’s the advice I offered.

Read more: Showing critical analysis, right from the full proposal

Start with people. Just people, not academic rigour and pedantry because those aspects of doctoral writing can fill you with anxiety. Writing is a social negotiation. Who are you talking to? What do readers need? How do you need to convince them? What expectations regarding deference, dominance, obligation and work will they have? Who does the work, to what degree of perfection, and who decides what is good enough?

None of this is unusual—we know this all the time, we do this all the time. In every household, in every job, in every friendship we work these things out. Usually, we do it unconsciously—we’re social animals and we have antennae that alert us to what the social expectations are and how far we can go with breaking rules and getting away with it.

What is unusual, what we don’t know instinctively, is the academic expectations of the writing of fully fledged researchers within the academic community, including how we “demonstrate critical analysis.”

“Critical” in “critical analysis” is not the same as critical in “She was critical of his language”. Critical analysis means thinking carefully. That careful thinking is what you want to demonstrate in doctoral writing for both your provisional year review and your final thesis submission.

In academic writing, we need to see that:

• You know what you are talking about;
• You are careful to say things accurately;
• You are respectful of other research, but assume your own research is equal to theirs and importantly, yours is central;
• You respect your reader, providing what they need to know, avoiding clutter in your writing, and avoiding repetition;  
• When you cite literature, you never behave as though you expect the reader to go and read what you are citing so that they can follow you—you always make it clear for them in your sentences;
• You use the language of your discipline and research niche to show you fit in here;
• You expect to have to defend everything you do because academia is pretty tough.

Full proposal

Research writing is public not personal, so presenting a full thesis proposal is like coming out at a debutante ball: you make an entry that is significant, watched, judged. (I’ve never been a debutante – and you probably haven’t either – but you may, like me, have read fiction about this weird formal ritual.)

At our institution the full thesis proposal is evaluated by two academics who are not the candidate’s supervisors and this provides a safety net for the project going forward. So, what are full proposal reviewers judging? That the writer will not waste years of their life on a project that has obvious weaknesses, mismatches, is too skimpy or too bulky, too unimportant to be worth the effort, or too hugely important to complete within three to four years. 

Here’s a check list for the full thesis proposal. Writers could read through their proposals imagining that they were the over-burdened academics charged with checking for viability.

• A full proposal shows that the project is viable: the topic is weighty enough to earn a doctorate without being too big to accomplish.
• The proposal identifies a gap in knowledge or understanding by reviewing the literature convincingly and critically.
• Research questions are accurately expressed, clearly showing how the project will fill the gap.
• Methods are carefully described with benefits and any limitations, showing this project can be finished and answer the research questions within three years.
• The time-line looks doable and creates a sense of a candidate who thinks about practicalities.
• Theory matches research questions and methods. The writing style and use of terms fits the discipline’s epistemology. You situate yourself as someone who can handle theory but who is also very pragmatic and realistic about the work.
• Literacy and competence in formal English language is demonstrated, with the understanding that this continues to improve over the next two to three years.

All of the above is more about people than about pedantry, in my view. In this case it is about people as readers with needs and expectation. Please comment if you have other ways of making the demonstration of critical analysis in doctoral writing seem like normal social behaviour.

He aha te mea nui o te ao
What is the most important thing in the world?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata
It is the people, it is the people, it is the people
Maori proverb

Doctoral writing across disciplines: style and voice in the borderlands

Tags

identity and doctoral writing, Writing across disciplines, Writing for publication, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

I’m returning to a theme that intrigued me back when, as a doctoral learning advisor, I worked across disciplines with doctoral students who consulted me with their problems (Carter, 2011). Candidates sometimes wanted to talk about problems that surfaced specifically in the borderlands of doctoral interdisciplinarity. Back then, research interdisciplinarity was recognised as valuable but in my experience as a doctoral learning advisor, there was never a cohort of peers to ask for advice and mutual support.

Now, post-Covid, and in the face of evident climate change, it seems that solutions to tough global challenges might be best found by working across disciplines and we need to establish support for interdisciplinary doctoral research. And yet my hunch is that, in the tradition-hugging entrenched disciplinary norms and biases of academia, candidates could run into the same problems. Here’s my practice-based list of what can be tough.

A, the, an or some? Articles with abstract nouns in doctoral writing

Tags

English language writing skills, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

Whenever I correct articles in doctoral writing, I get tangled trying to explain why, and often, like now, can only conclude that English is a sod of a language with tricky slithery rules that you simply have to learn and apply. Rules with English grammar do not always have an apparent logic. Those little prefixes to nouns, the troupe of articles, are as troublesome for many doctoral writers as getting journal articles published is for others.

It’s quite hard sometimes deciding whether a noun needs an article, and which one it might need. That is because many nouns in research writing are abstract, sometimes influenced by theory. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether abstracts are countable or uncountable, for example.  This post grapples with the task of suggesting how to make those ‘to article or not to article’ decisions.