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| Doctor of Philosophy (Photo credit: lounae) |
The 2012 Three-Minute Thesis Trans-Tasman Competition (3MT) final has just been held at the University of Queensland, displaying the range of extraordinarily talented individuals doing PhDs all across Australia and beyond.
If you haven’t seen what the presentations are like, do check it out.
It’s a wonderful competition at
every level - from the local presentations in Schools and Faculties,
through the University finals, and onto the Trans-Tasman event. PhD
students get to show off their capacity to speak fluently to a lay
audience about their amazing projects.
Watching students at every stage
of preparation this year has made me notice just how valuable it can be
to talk about what you are writing about.
The
enormous benefit of participating in the 3MT (regardless of how far you
might go in the competition) is learning to step back from the detail
of the research and think about the bigger picture. The long, intense
project of doctoral research often goes off on lots of relevant and
irrelevant tangents, and the task of finding a structure for the
resulting complex arguments can be more than a little daunting (in fact,
it can seem just about impossible at times!).
The exercise of trying to
explain it succinctly to someone else is a really valuable way of
finding out where the focus needs to be. Was it really Einstein who said
that if you can’t explain it simply, then you probably don’t really
understand it yourself? Patrick Dunleavy, advising doctoral students,
uses words to that effect too, in his book Authoring a PhD (2003 - check our Library for details).
When
the writing gets stuck, it is sometimes much easier to talk about it to
someone else (if your listener is a little reluctant, I’ve found it
helpful to do this on a long car trip when they are trapped in the seat
next to you …). After that, you can translate the verbal explanation into
a written form - preferably reduced to just a few sentences.
Going a
step further, try to write the central argument, the main point you want
the reader to get, in just one sentence. Narrowing of the focus like
this can make a huge difference to creating a coherent thread of
argument within a section, and also throughout the whole thesis.
Another
useful approach my colleague uses is to think about writing as a verbal
presentation when planning the outline for a chapter. You can imagine
or actually create a powerpoint slide show. What will be the topics for
each of your slides? What order should they appear in? What does your
audience need from you in order to follow the steps of your argument?
If
you think about the slides as representing a paragraph each, that also
helps to block out the steps of the argument. And, of course, slides are
easy to move around when you realise the sequence isn’t quite right, or
to add an extra slide to make the transition clearer from one point to
the next. Imagining yourself talking to the audience encourages a bit of
objectivity about what’s interesting in the presentation, too.
I guess the final reason to talk about your writing is also to help you realise that writing is really a social activity (Lee & Boud 2003),
not something that has to happen in isolation with you locked away with
your computer in a dank, dark room somewhere in the depths of your
university building.
It’s all about communication of ideas, after all.
You’re not doing it just for yourself, but to get those ideas out to a
wider audience in your discipline. Personally, I have some sympathy with
those who say that research is meaningless if it just stays inside your
own head.
What
other techniques have you found useful in talking about your writing?
Any further tips or suggestions from supervisors and academic developers
on how to get students talking in ways that focus the writing? It
would be great to share your stories with our readers - and maybe help
more doctoral writers get their message out. So, if you’re not already
doing it, start talking about your writing.
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