Writing skills and post-PhD employment

Tags

employability, post-PhD life, writing skills

By Cally Guerin

Researcher development workshops are increasingly focused on what is learnt during the doctorate that graduates take into their non-academic jobs on graduation.  Here at DoctoralWriting we usually concentrate on the kind of writing that is undertaken during the doctorate, but much of that is building a skillset that is invaluable outside the academy too. The writing skills developed during a PhD are right up there at the top of the list of desirable skills that employers are looking for.

Leading By Exemplar: The benefits of asking good questions about other people’s writing

Tags

analysing thesis writing, teaching writing, thesis writing, thesis writing manuals, writing skills

Robert B. (Rob) Desjardins, PhD, is the graduate writing advisor at the Student Success Centre, University of Alberta (Canada). Here he explains his insights into how best to help doctoral writers learn about research writing.

By Robert B. Desjardins

Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a new manual for students struggling to craft theses and dissertations. The working title – still in the “playful conceit” stage – is The Incomplete Guide to Thesis-Writing.

Why “incomplete”? It’s a riff on the dangers of authorial hubris, and on the need for writing advice that helps students to start their critical work, rather than promising an easy path to the end. It’s also a tribute to the pedagogical value of the question – a speech act that sets writers on an unpredictable path, making them responsible to define and then contend with the rhetorical problems that a major writing project presents.

How do I write thee? Let me count the ways (with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Tags

employability, writing skills, written communication

by Cally Guerin

Research students are required to write many different kinds of documents and genres over the course of a degree. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of how doctoral candidates can demonstrate to potential employers just what capable writers they are. One very useful tool for noticing all these writing skills is the Vitae Researcher Development Framework. This framework lists in detail the “knowledge, behaviours and attributes” developed through the course of doctoral candidature, organising them under the headings of: knowledge and intellectual abilities; personal effectiveness; research governance and organisation; and engagement, influence and impact. While writing probably comes under all these domains, the last one, “engagement, influence and impact”, is the most obvious, as it includes a section on “Communication and dissemination”. Yet there is a lot of written communication required of doctoral candidates before they reach Vitae’s endpoint of “Communication methods/communication media/publication”.

To start with, even being allowed to start a PhD requires the ability to negotiate the writing literacies needed to complete lengthy and detailed application forms. Some students I’ve spoken to find this a daunting writing task which perhaps develops both complex positional and rhetorical writing skills but may also teach valuable lessons in how to construct such forms in other areas of their careers.

Then there is the task of writing a proposal. This writing must succeed in providing the right level of detail about the project to persuade readers that this is not only an original and interesting idea, but that it is do-able in the set timeframe. The writing demonstrates that the aspiring researcher can organise the stages of the research in a logical order. Some familiarity with discipline expectations about methods, theory and writing style will also be shown.

After that, the doctoral writer might start doing some more conventional academic writing of thesis chapters, book chapters, journal articles or textbook entries. Here they show that they understand the expectations of the scholarly audience who might read their work, that they know how to use discipline-specific language and have a command of the knowledge in the field. Employers who are looking for evidence that an individual can perform the traditional role of an academic can be reassured that this writer knows the ropes. Writing conference presentations relies on some of this, but often takes on a more conversational tone (though that might depend somewhat on the discipline and/or the particular atmosphere of the conference).

But there are other important documents that candidates might write that demonstrate other kinds of writing skills. For example, those who need to submit ethics applications will soon realise they need to present complex ideas and projects in a manner that the ethics committee—generally composed of people who are not experts in their particular research field—can engage with. And then there might be all the attendant documents, written for participants who are often much further removed from the academic field of research: recruitment materials and invitations to participate in the research (emails, flyers); information sheets; consent and complaint forms. The ability to communicate complex ideas in ordinary language becomes essential—and can be oddly hard to do after becoming adept at talking discipline jargon. Some projects require candidates to learn the skills of writing survey and interview questions. These need to be unambiguous; they also need to be easy for a lay person to understand if they are to get accurate responses.

Others will write grant applications and learn the skills of presenting the significance of their work to a well-informed but not necessarily specialist audience. This is a time to learn how to promote the value of the research, rather than a moment for modesty or humility—the tentative hedging required in other writing has little place when important funding is at stake. And if successful, there are likely to be requirements to write reports on how that funded research has progressed, writing that might be aimed at an industry audience, or those whose priorities may not be identical to those in the academy.

Then (perhaps most importantly of all?!) is the written communication with supervisors, often via email. Here, doctoral candidates learn another kind of writing that is private but at the same time needs to be appropriately professional. In some situations the expectation is that this has a formal, polite, deferential tone; in others, a casual, abbreviated note is perfectly acceptable. Negotiating this while maintaining clear communication requires great skill (we all know emailers who have had the uncomfortable experience of having their messages misunderstood, potentially with very damaging effects). Effective email writing is an asset in any workplace.

More and more doctoral candidates are also writing about their research or doctoral experiences on social media, for example, through blogging and tweeting, or on professional academic sites like Linkedin. Presenting and maintaining a presence in these kinds of forums requires a host of other writing skills and literacies to communicate effectively.

All of this writing happens before the collation of the final thesis or exegesis, a document that demonstrates how doctoral candidates are capable of carefully proofreading a long document. The document must be consistent throughout, present complex skills of referencing accurately, and meet the highest expectations of persuasive argumentation and scholarship. This capacity for sustained, precise presentation is, again, valuable for other long reports or publications.

Through these different writing experiences, doctoral writers learn how to express their ideas clearly, how to structure material so that all sorts of readers can engage with it, and consider the appropriate layout of the document to indicate how it fits together. They learn about the nuances of genre and audience—what’s appropriate, expected, and useful in a range of different writing situations.

It’s a huge list of writing skills developed through the “depth and breadth and height” of a doctoral degree; these skills can be used in all sorts of contexts outside university departments. There are no doubt all sorts of other writing and genres that I’ve missed—please tell me what else I should add to this list to remind doctoral writers of the vast skill set they’ve developed during candidature (and how they might present them to potential employers).

“Help with writing” vs “learning about writing”

Tags

Doctoral writing, role of writing support, writing help, writing skills

By Cally Guerin

It seems to me that students often turn up to workshops run by academic developers and learning advisors, or join writing groups, because they have realised that “I need someone to help me with my writing”. It’s encouraging that they recognize that their writing isn’t as effective as it needs to be, but I don’t think this is the best way to think about the issue, especially at doctoral level. Instead of conceptualising their situation in these terms, they might be much better off thinking: “I need to learn more about writing”.

My impression is that sometimes PhD students are looking for someone who will sit with them one-on-one in order to provide extensive editing and proofreading of their work. Or even better, simply “fix it up” for them. Occasionally I get the impression that they hope someone can tell them the “answer” to research writing so they pass the “test”. Unfortunately, this approach takes no account of how they’ll cope next time in a similar (but not identical) situation. After all, research writing is not just a simple process of imposing a formula; rather, it’s a complex matter of understanding and applying the concepts, adjusting and adapting to each unique writing situation.

I suspect that at the root of this problem is the mistake of thinking that doing a PhD is really only about making an original contribution to knowledge in the discipline. From that perspective, the focus is on the technical skills required to undertake the experimental work or to gather and analyse the qualitative or quantitative data. Writing, by contrast, is regarded as secondary.

Of course disciplinary knowledge is the linchpin of the whole enterprise – one of the key criteria for examination at most universities is that the research reported in the thesis makes an original contribution to the field. However, it is also important that doctoral candidature is a time for learning the broader skills required to be an effective researcher. This is part of the current discourse about the PhD as “research training”, rather than an end in itself. Learning to write well about research is central to this training. Good writing skills are a necessary graduate attribute for PhD candidates, yet doctoral candidates can be resistant to accepting just how important writing is. But it turns out that not everyone is as focused on doctoral writing as we are in this blog community (probably no surprises there, really!).

I’m repeatedly reminded of this when I run a workshop for PhD students that includes an exercise using Boote & Beile’s (2005) literature review assessment matrix. This matrix lists the criteria that could be used to assess literature reviews in doctoral theses. The assessment criteria are organised into five categories: Coverage, Synthesis, Methodology, Significance and Rhetoric. In the workshop, participants are asked to imagine they are PhD examiners who will use the matrix to assess their own (i.e., the students’) literature reviews. The task is to decide what percentage should be assigned to each of these elements. Nearly always, students award only 5-10% of the marks to Rhetoric, which they understand as relating to the quality of the writing. While they argue that the other criteria can’t be done effectively without good writing, they rarely want to place too much importance on the writing as a separate category.

As supervisors, learning advisors and writing teachers, we might provide the most useful support for doctoral candidates if we were to encourage a shift in attitude to learning about writing as a necessary doctoral skill, rather than offering to “help students with their writing”. We are interested in whether anyone has tools or language that they routinely use to persuade doctoral students that writing skills are part of the transferrable set of skills they need to acquire before graduation, even though the acquisition is not always easy or painless.