The PhD: Online resources for doctoral writers - an annotated bibliography

by Sian Lund, Doctoral Writing SIG:  https://doctoralwriting.wordpress.com/2021/05/14/online-resources-for-doctoral-writers-an-annotated-bibliography/

Image: phdstudies.com

Hi everyone,

Great resources created by great educators is what we need if we are going to succeed in the long PhD and Masters thesis journey. To this end, a terrific article has just landed in my inbox outlining, and reviewing, a whole host of great resources for thesis writing and all that goes with it - by Sian Lund from the Royal College of Art PG Art and Design college in the UK. Enjoy the article and the resources. 

Our guest blogger is Siân Lund from the Royal College of Art PG Art and Design college in the UK. She has been the EAP (English for Academic Purposes) Coordinator for almost 6 years. She has a background in language education and is passionate about exploring diversity in communication with a special interest in acculturation processes. At the RCA she is responsible for providing Academic Literacies support for all students at MA and Doctoral level as well as promoting pedagogic strategies for enhancing learning.

By Siân Lund

While building up support in academic literacies skills for our students, I was struck by distinct epistemologies of Art and Design disciplines and how this impacts on the way students develop their research and writing. Through interviews with staff, I recognised the importance of a reflective process of enquiry underpinning the research process in these fields. Tutors often expect the students’ experiences, inspirations and reflections to become part of the writing with individual perspectives and interpretations. 

Combining this creative and often very personal approach with more conventional and critically objective elements of academic writing has caused difficulties for many students. We are often asked ‘how can I combine my individual journey and voice with criticality and academic writing?’ At the risk of opening a huge can of worms here around terminology, I am thinking of ‘objective discussion’ as a genre along a spectrum of ‘academic writing’. Sometimes a tutor’s conversation with students which involves encouragement to use personal perspectives, narratives and a creative approach in the writing process can lead to a struggle for students to combine these elements with critical, more objective discussion. 

To read the rest of this article, go to:

https://doctoralwriting.wordpress.com/2021/05/14/online-resources-for-doctoral-writers-an-annotated-bibliography/

The PhD: the thesis discussion – making the move work

Hi everyone, 

I came across this excellent post by Pat Thomson the other day outlining what goes in a thesis discussion. Enjoy!

by Pat Thomson, Patter:  https://patthomson.net/2021/05/17/the-thesis-discussion-making-the-move-count/

This post comes back again at the discussion “chapter”. It seems you can never say too much about this tricky bit of the thesis.

A caveat before I start. This post is written from a social science perspective and offers a fairly orthodox view of what a thesis has to do. I think it has applicability in other disciplines – but do read this from your particular perspective. I’m not attempting a one size fits all explanation here. If that’s OK with you, read on.

The key to the discussion, whether it is a chapter or not, is understanding its place in the logic of the thesis argument. It’s the nearly final step in a chain of moves. And the discussion leads up to the big claims for contribution and significance.

To continue reading, go to: 

https://patthomson.net/2021/05/17/the-thesis-discussion-making-the-move-count/

The PhD: My many fancy notebooks for all my fancy moments

by Manpreet Kaur, PhD Life: https://phdlife.warwick.ac.uk/2021/05/05/my-many-fancy-notebooks-for-all-my-fancy-moments/

Organisation is key to keeping all the ideas and thoughts during a PhD in check. It is helpful to have everything written down somewhere to prevent everything from overwhelming you. Manpreet Kaur shares how having notebooks for different purposes has helped her to organise her PhD related ideas.

I love lists and tick-boxes. I get overwhelmed pretty quickly if there is too much going on in my head and one of the coping mechanisms I have found is writing things down. When I did the Sprint programme during my undergraduate years, this was one of the tips I learnt. If there is a nagging thought in your mind, write it down and then get on with your day. Allocate time to go back to those intruding thoughts and have ‘worry time’ to focus on those.

But not all intruding thoughts are negative. Sometimes, while sitting and staring at birds I remember an email I need to send or something I want to discuss with my supervisor. I’m not the most screen-friendly person and therefore pen and paper is what I like to turn to (and turns out I’m not alone in being this way; check out Ellie’s blog here). So, I have notebooks for several different things in order to keep all my thoughts organised.

The first notebook I have that probably many people do is a planner. I bought this one that I really like because it doesn’t have dates already printed so I only write weekdays and weekends are free (unless there is a looming deadline). There is a section for note-taking for every day where I write down what I did that day. This helps me with feeling productive as well as keeping track of days, and I can always go back to something if I need to.

The next notebook is for all project meetings with my supervisor. It is the place where I write it all down as we’re discussing things. Besides, I take notes from group meetings here too. It’s helpful to have a nice big title about what the meeting was about; it’s like using tags, but offline.

The third notebook is for to-do lists. Hand on heart, I have tried the Reminders app on my phone, given a chance to Google Keep, and Microsoft To-Do as well. However, my hands never grab my phone at times like this. I impulsively pick up a piece of paper and pen, and therefore decided to buy a small notebook for this purpose. I have a margin in the middle of every page, and jot down all my tasks in there.

Another notebook I have is a leather journal my sister got for me. It feels very serious, so I use it for the least serious purposes. This is where everything miscellaneous goes, ranging from notes from an online webinar about laboratory sustainability to the third draft of my next poem. This is also where I jot down notes from project-related online talks and conferences that I attend.

I also have a journal that I use as a personal diary. I am currently on my third one and I go for all the fancy textures for these ones. I have found journaling to be very motivating and writing helps me organise my thoughts.

With the papers I read, I like to make hand-written notes because it slows me down and helps me to think about what I am reading. I have several notepads for my reading, all papers numbered with an index page. This takes a long time sometimes, especially when I find a paper that becomes a favourite, however I remember that during my MRes I found these hand-written notes very useful when writing up my thesis. I’m doing this all in the hope that it’ll prove useful later on.

One thing we can safely conclude is that I am, despite being so passionate about climate action, an absolute tree killer. Believe me, this bothers me a lot, however, nothing else works. As much as I love fancy images of people sat in a comfy sofa with a laptop typing away, I am all for an old wooden desk, and pen and paper. I think I just do better when handwriting. Of course, there is the other stuff I do such as buying FSC approved paper/notebooks, recycling paper and stationery and using all the notebooks to the fullest. These notebooks truly help me with staying on top of things. It means that I have less to store in my head as it all rests safely in the pages.

Do you prefer notebooks or screens to keep organised? Tell us about your favourite habits around keeping track of to-do lists and monitoring your progress. Tweet us at @ResearchEx, email us at libraryblogs@warwick.ac.uk, or leave a comment below.

by Manpreet

Manpreet Kaur is a first year PhD student in the Department of Chemistry. She has been at Warwick since 2016, and did her BSc and MRes here. Her research project focuses on the design of photoelectrocatalytic systems for the synthesis of nitrogen containing compounds. You can follow her on Twitter here and further details about her project and background can be found here.

Doctoral writing across disciplines: style and voice in the borderlands

by Susan Carter, Doctoral Writing SIG:  https://doctoralwriting.wordpress.com/2021/04/30/doctoral-writing-across-disciplines-style-and-voice-in-the-borderlands/

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.

• doctoral level research undertaken in areas where the candidate doesn’t have relevant undergraduate level knowledge
• trouble finding supervisors with the confidence to work in new and unknown ways;
• supervisors competing with each other for dominance of their discipline’s epistemology;
• everyone involved is always out of their comfort zone at some stage—that can cause project-damaging emotion;
• difficulty finding examiners (potential examiners fear their own inability to understand the project in all its aspects and this makes it easy to say no to a chore);
• innovation looks riskier when it’s coupled with interdisciplinarity;
• employment post-graduation can be difficult to get, and for those wanting academic work, can mean teaching content that is not well-known when the only job offer is in the least well-known discipline; and
• crossing writing styles along with crossing disciplines can make it hard to get the thesis done

Because this blog is writing focused, it is the last item on the list I am addressing here, although I know from previous doctoral learning advisor experience that often intellectual discomfort and emotional insecurity make interdisciplinary writing’s style and voice really hard to produce.

Inevitably in those past conversations we’d end up back with the practicalities: you will have to decide which journals to target, where you want to work afterwards, what you want to teach if you aspire to become an academic.

Grounded reality often directed choices about writing style.

We’d turn to consider the journals, looking at conventions regarding referencing systems, predominance of active or passive verbs, and use of personal pronouns, sub-titles, metaphors, quotation and other markers of epistemology. Choice needed to be based on where genuine passion resided in the interdisciplinary project. The student’s preference in style when they read should guide too: it helps with perseverance to like your own writing style.

Often interdisciplinarians would make the case that no particular discipline dominated their research so it felt inauthentic and untrue to their research to arbitrarily privilege one of them. But they would recognise that interdisciplinary jobs aligned with what they were doing would be unlikely to crop up. Preference of one discipline then became important if an academic job was a goal. If it wasn’t, thinking quite practically about the likely places that might offer work also suggests the kind of writing style that might be acceptable there.

Writing for journals may then become making a case for bringing in practices, literature, methods etc. from a different discipline to contribute to thinking within the discipline of the target journal. Framing becomes important. It can get round reviewer dislike of the unfamiliar to explain overtly ‘To [what is usual and familiar in this journal] I bring the benefit of [the unfamiliar] because this theory [or scholarship or methods] enables insight into [whatever it helps].

Well, framing is always important; one of the most important skills that doctoral candidates learn is that researchers must take what they find and frame it so that the worth of their original contribution to knowledge becomes clear to examiners, and to their discourse communities, and in the best case scenarios, to the rest of the world.

The need to publish may shed some light on decisions. Talk about journals as the starting point might seem off track when the most immediate need is to choose style for the thesis, but the style within the thesis should be a good fit for future publication. The upside of interdisciplarity is that research framing may make it possible to take the same research findings into two articles in different disciplinary outlets. 

Then within the interdisciplinary thesis, defence of writing choices can deflect examiner criticism. Here’s an example: ‘I chose the epistemology of Social Science with respect to how crucial it is in this area to factor in the cultural, social and political preference of users. Thus personal pronouns governing active verbs occur in many places in this Engineering thesis.’

One candidate drew on hard science methods in a highly cultural and spiritual research project ‘to counter any possibility that what I find would be dismissed as native “mumbo jumbo”’ (Baker, 2014, p. 26). Baker’s (2014) thesis is worth looking at for how bravely it crosses disciplines with a fixed purpose, how firmly it defends the crossing and how rich the result is.

That leads back to the idea of borderlands. When I wrote on interdisciplinary doctorates in 2011, I used borderland theory. That functions as an extended metaphor for the trade that people make across borderlands: often illicit, so both risky and potentially very profitable; often with rules that shift; always working across cultures. Does it help with thesis-writing to keep that metaphor in mind as confirmation that borderland crossing is something people have done for ever, because it is worth doing?

If you have experience in supporting interdisciplinary doctoral writing, please post a comment, or let us know if you would like to offer a blog post on this topic. Interdisciplinary research seems more relevant now than it was in 2011, and we could share ways to support it.

And as a postscript, that borderlands metaphor is in play in a Special Issue of Teaching in Higher Education journal on doctoral education: ‘Working in the borderlands: critical perspectives on doctoral education’ which is now formally published as Volume 26, Issue 3. 

References

Mary-Anne Cheryl Tapu Augustine Baker, M-A. C. T. A. (2014). He Ariariatanga Whakangawari No te Maori: He Rangimarietanga i Tua o Te Arai: A Theory of Maori Palliation: A Peaceful Journey through the Veil. PhD, University of Auckland.

Carter, S. (2011). Interdisciplinary thesis practicalities: How to negotiate the borderlands. In Batchelor, J. & Roche, L (Eds.), Student Retention and Success: Sharing and Evaluating Best Practice: Proceedings of the 2009 Annual International Conference of the Association of Tertiary Learning Advisors of Aotearoa/New Zealand (ATLAANZ) (pp. 1-10). Christchurch: ATLAANZ.