The PhD: Five Top Tips for Upgrade Success

by Ellie King, PhD Life:  https://phdlife.warwick.ac.uk/2021/07/28/five-top-tips-for-upgrade-success/

All PhD students have to do an upgrade review. Read below for blogger Ellie’s top tips for your upgrade success.

Apart from your thesis, your upgrade report is one of the most important pieces of work you’ll need to do for your PhD. At Warwick, in your first year you’re registered as a Research Masters student, and it’s only after your upgrade that you’ll be upgraded to a full PhD student status. But, there’s nothing to worry about with this piece of work and its accompanying review meeting. Here are my top 5 tips for upgrade success.

Know what your reviewers want

Your upgrade involves a written report, varying between 4000 and 10,000 words depending on your department, plus an hour or so long meeting with two reviewers (usually two related academics within your department). These reports and meetings can vary massively between departments and even between individual reviewers, so it’s important to know exactly what is required of you. For your report, follow your department’s guidance – they usually have information on their website or even hold an information session for you.

For the review part, you’ll find out who your reviewers are prior to the meeting. These meetings can vary wildly – my meeting was quite a rigorous viva-style defence of my work, but my fellow course mate had to prepare a 15-minute presentation of their work. So, once you know who your reviewers are, send them an email introducing yourself and asking if you need to prepare anything specific. Knowing what to expect will make your upgrade a lot easier to prepare for.

You’re not meant to know everything

Your upgrade usually takes place around one year (or part-time equivalent) since you started your work. Rest assured, you are not expected to know everything by this time. The upgrade is not a viva (although in my personal experience it really felt like one). You’re not meant to know all the answers at the point, but you are meant to be asking the right questions. This is the ideal place to be at the one year mark – an idea of the literature of your subject, a good set of questions you want to ask, and an idea about how you’re going to answer them.

Nobody wants you to fail

In preparation for your upgrade, you’ll have heard the various outcomes available: a pass, a resubmission, a recommendation to complete the research at an MRes level, or a withdrawal. This sounds incredibly scary, but in reality the outcomes are very flexible and are designed to ensure the right course is taken for you. It is highly unlikely that you will be asked to withdraw, and it is very rare to hear students at Warwick ‘failing’ their upgrade. It’s even more important to remember that NOBODY WANTS YOU TO FAIL. The upgrade review is not there to catch you out and show up your inabilities, it’s there to ensure you have everything you need – the guidance, the skills, the support – to complete your research. If things aren’t quite in place, the upgrade is an opportunity to review and revise your plans to ensure you’re most likely to succeed. It’s not a bad thing either if you’re asked to resubmit – I did and it really helped me clarify what I was doing.

Use it as an opportunity

Following on from this, it’s important not the see the upgrade as a test, but rather as an opportunity. Your first year is often filled with lots of different readings, ideas, and plans, and so writing the report is a good chance to sit down and take stock of everything you know and where you’re up to. It helps you get your ducks in a row for when research really ramps up during second year. It’s also a great chance to have other people look at your work and give you their thoughts. Your reviewers will be subject experts in a related field and will have lots of experience and advice. Use this opportunity to tap into that: ask them about potential ideas you have, what they think the best approach for a bit of research is, or if they can recommend any papers you may have missed. The review meeting feels like it should be the reviewers asking you questions, but you can turn this around. Ask them questions too – it’s a rare opportunity to have two (often senior) academics really focus on your work and give it attention. Use that time wisely.

Look Smart, Think Smart

This may sound very daft, but my last piece of advice is about how you present yourself. This mantra of ‘look smart think smart’ helped me through many years of exams – I felt that if I wore something smart I would take the day more seriously and it really helped me concentrate. I’m not saying you have to do the same, because the most important thing is for you to feel comfortable in yourself. But, this is probably the most formal situation of your PhD, apart from your final viva, and you should really treat it as such. Presenting yourself well and showing that you care about the event is important, it shows your examiners that you care about your work too. It may also give you confidence to talk about your work with gravitas, and that’s important too.

So, those are my top tips for upgrade success. Do you have any others you’ve found are helpful? Tweet us at @ResearchEx, email us at libraryblogs@warwick.ac.uk, or leave a comment below.

by Ellie

Ellie King is a Second Year PhD student in Warwick Manufacturing Group. She has been at Warwick since 2014 in the History department, and has recently moved faculties to research applying user experience to the museum sector. Ellie is partnered with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. You can connect with her on LinkedIn here, or follow her on Twitter @ellietheking

The late stage (or lock down) loopy la-las

by Thesis Whisperer: https://thesiswhisperer.com/2021/08/04/the-late-stage-or-lock-down-loopy-la-las/

Image: DIYGenius

There's a period of PhD study that I have come to call 'the loopy la-las': when you become highly capable of doing PhD work, but start to become incompetent at, well - almost everything else.

I remember the day it started to happen to me.

It was 2008 and I was deep in a Foucault book, when a call came through from our lovely research administrator (thanks Jane!). Apparently I had missed some fields on my conference funding application, specifically my name. Could I please check my email and get back to her so she could process the form?

I duly logged on and downloaded the form. Then I just stared at the form for the  longest time, trying to understand what it wanted from me.

I thought about the structure of the form and how it forced me to put in two names. This made me think about the processes of colonalism, where surnames were randomly given to people so they would conform with the English way of naming things. I thought about the patriarchy and how my name reflected my father and my husband, more than my mother or myself. Then I started wondering what  'name' meant anyway.

This was getting ridiculous! I shook my head and wrote my name. I then looked at my name for a further 3 minutes, wondering if it was spelled correctly. I couldn't work out if it was ok, so I just saved the form and replied to Jane.

Jane kindly rang me back to point out that I had sent her a return email with no form attached. She started laughing, hard. "You're all like this Inger!" she said, "I spend half my days chasing people to fill out forms. PhD students are so smart, why can't they follow simple instructions?!"

Jane's words resonated with me for a long time. Because I had at least six months of the loopy la-las to go. I regularly struggled to follow simple instructions, but was able to think and write about incredibly complex, abstract ideas all day. Living in this two speed headspace was bizzare and, for a while, I wondered if I was losing it. But now I've worked with PhD students for a very long time time and seen it happen so often I think the loopy la-las is actually be a by-product of the thesis writing process. The classic 'absent minded professor' trope did not come out of nowhere (this -problematic- article onTV tropes reckons it's been around since the 1800s).

The loopy la-las are not all bad. I remember the sensation of my brain lighting up with so many ideas and connections about my PhD. It was great! My notebook was overflowing and the writing was pouring out of me. At the same time this out pouring of creativity was DISTRACTING.

I've watched the loopy la-las play out in many different ways. A mild case of the loopy la-las might mean you just repeatedly misplace your keys. With more severe cases, you start having trouble with things like shopping lists, kids' excursion forms, funding applications and turning up to appointments on time. The worst thing about the PhD loopy la-las, for me, was losing track of my commitments to others. I became that unreliable person who doesn't return calls and emails, forgot peoples' birthdays and turned up late to work - frequently.

I need not point out that it's this stage of PhD life that people can let a mild health problem develop into something more serious because of lack of attention. And watch out for those knives in the kitchen! Seriously - we have been running thesis bootcamp for late stage PhD students for many years now and have noticed our bootcampers are much more accident prone than candidates in their early stages.

I experienced similar difficulties doing simple things like filling out forms during the one period of lockdown we had in Canberra. It's been well over a year since we had any Covid here, so I don't have a lot of experience of the lockdown loopy la-las, but it seemed quite different. Lockdown has the same end of PhD head-in-a-bucket feeling, but perhaps without the urgency of a project deadline and the thrill of creative connections. The problems with keys and knives, however, were the same.

I've noticed the PhD loopy la-las get worse the closer the submission date gets. The tick tock of the PhD clock is always there, but at the end I think it gets louder and starts drowning out other things. The space the PhD project occupies gets bigger and bigger until it's dominating waking thoughts, pushing out other, pretty important stuff.

So, why do the loopy la-las happen? It might have something to do with cognitive load.

I'm no expert, but from what I've read, the brain can only process a limited number information 'chunks' in short term memory (four to seven). This is the kind of memory essential for filling out forms. By contrast, our long term memory relies on 'schemas' or frameworks of thinking that connect related things together.  In other words, we 'automate' a lot of our long term memory, which frees up time for short term, on the spot thinking.

This is just me spitballing here, but writing a PhD depends a lot on making connections between ideas, theories, data points: classic long term memory work.

If you're devoting a lot of processing time to long term memory work, perhaps you get less good at short term processing. Or maybe you have more trouble switching between the two ways of thinking (can someone please do a PhD on this?).  Considered in this way, the PhD loopy la-las may be an evitable side effect of all that deep thinking, which is why the loopy la-las need to be embraced and managed, not 'cured'.

In that spirit, how do you lean into the PhD loopy la-las without annoying everyone else in your life and constantly losing your keys?

Here's some ideas:

1. Try not to let your email inbox get too out of control, this will make the problem of keeping track of commitments worse. Try a program like to-doist, workflowy, Things or (my favourite) Omnifocus. The key here is to move tasks that emerge from email to another system - don't let your inbox become your default 'to-do' list. By putting things on a list, you assist your short term thinking capability.
2. Speaking of lists: get yourself a good list program for your shopping and house- management needs. I use Anylist, which has a meal planner if you want to go to that level. You can share your lists with the rest of your household and lighten the organisational load. No one can claim they didn't know we needed milk!
3. Start a bullet journal to keep track of both your work commitments and your creative ideas in one place. The bullet journal was invented by Ryder Caroll, who has ADHD as an assistive tool for cognitive processing. I'm a recent convert to this method, but I'm a fan. I've talked about the bullet journal in the 'On The Reg' podcast I started with Jason Downs. I should write a post about how I use it sometime, but there's a great post on Bullet Journaling during your PhD by Tharika Liyanage on the On Circulation blog. Thanks Tharika!
4. Make as many of your personal appointments on a repeating basis as you can. When I go to the hair dresser I book my next appointment before I leave. Likewise with my skin check, breast scans and regular blood tests. I started doing this during my PhD because I started to have health problems that spiraled because I wasn't keeping an eye on them. Self care is vital and your diary is your friend.
5. Finally: warn people in your life that you are experiencing the loopy la-las and reach out for help. Heck - send them this blog post so they know that it's not just you, ok? People may have to 'nudge' you more frequently to do things for them - some people will hesitate to do this because they know you are busy and distracted. Make it ok for them to step up and manage you a little more so you lighten the overall cognitive load.

Good luck with your loopy la-las and if you are in lockdown right now, solidarity! There's some links below. I've left the comments off, but feel free to tag me in social media if you want to chat.

Inger

Related links on the Whisperer

Thesis Prison
Listen to the bullet journal love fest in our back catalogue of the 'On The Reg' podcast

Links to other resources
Bullet Journaling during your PhD by Tharika Liyanage
ADHD and bullet journalling
Cognitive load in teaching and learning
Book: Project management for the unofficial project manager

Suggested tools
To-doist
Workflowy,
Things
Omnifocus.
Anylist

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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.

The PhD: a very neat hack to avoid repetition and duplication

by Pat Thomson, Patter: https://patthomson.net/2021/03/22/a-very-neat-hack-to-avoid-repetition-and-duplication/

 

Do you repeat yourself? Most of us do. It’s not unusual.

Repetitive writing takes many forms – several sentences that say the same thing using different words, a word or phrase used over and over, paragraphs and sentences that have identical beginnings, one point made multiple times using different examples.

But repetition is not necessarily a problem. Purposeful repetition can be a stylistic choice. Rhetorical theory for example lists anaphora – the repetition of a word of phrase at the beginning of a sentence or clause used to create dramatic emphasis and affect. Think of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in which poetic reiteration built up a picture of a possible future, a socially just United States. There’s also episeuxis – the serial repetition of word, usually within the same sentence – as in Tony Blair’s “Education, education, education.”

Repetition can also be integral to a professional practice. Teachers for example deliberately repeat themselves. Saying the same thing in different ways is a pedagogic strategy which gives students varied ways into a topic, gives options for understanding a concept or process. Inclusive teaching practices rely on multiple illustrations and explanations. And restatement is an approach often taken in pedagogic blogs like this one – I often say the same thing a few times in different ways, in case my first explanation doesn’t make things clear.

But repetition can also be a problem. Readers and listeners get bored and switch off when hearing or reading what rapidly becomes the same old same old. They may even get irritated if it takes them a while to find the point amid the verbiage. Writers are thus always advised to revise by checking for unintended repetition. Cutting out the déjà vu effect is part of becoming concise – making the point as simply and effectively as possible.

So to revision. You may be aware of some of the places in your writing where you repeat yourself. I often repeat someone’s name at the start of every paragraph when writing references. Dr X does this. Dr X is, Dr X worked for me and …  Because I know I do this, I can check my first draft for this particular problem. And another of my first draft problems, I often use superfluous sentence beginnings – It is clear that, it is worth noting that … and I know to look for these false starts during the revision process.

Checking sentence and paragraph beginnings can quickly locate some repetitions. However, it’s not always so easy. Searching for repetition can be tricky. Part of the problem is that we often use what are called “crutch” words – single words, phrases or clauses that are habitual. We use “crutch words” in drafting because they help us get the ideas down. Because they are so familiar, we often miss them when we come to revise.

Checking by reading aloud for “so, but, therefore, thus, nevertheless, however, on the one hand, not only but also” may pick up places where you need to get rewriting. You can also print out your text, using a highlighter every time you find a sneaky “crutch”. You might alternatively use the search function in Word. Searching is particularly helpful when checking for repeated common research terminology as well as specific disciplinary terms.

Duplication can be a real issue when composing the meta commentary used in academic writing – we might use the verb “argue” or “investigate” rather too often in a few paragraphs. Sometimes you can pick most of the repetitions hiding in plain sight if you change your font, or put your manuscript into an e-reader rather than read it on your customary screen. 

However – and here is the point of this post – there is a short cut. As the illustrations suggests, one of the very best hacks for finding duplicates and repetitions is to make a word cloud. What a gift it is to put an entire chapter or paper into one of those free platforms that looks for either words or phrases. Almost instantly you can see what terms are used most frequently. If there are any that are a surprise, or are used rather more than you would like, you can then simply use the search function in word to check for each one. Word clouds can save hours of reading and highlighting. Yep, a word cloud can be one of your close revising friends.

Word cloud made from the first draft of this post.

The PhD: Should the COVID-19 pandemic be addressed in doctoral writing? And if so, how?

by Susan Carter, Doctoral Writing SIG:  https://doctoralwriting.wordpress.com/2021/03/08/should-the-covid-19-pandemic-be-addressed-in-doctoral-writing-and-if-so-how/

Image: nature.com

The DoctoralWriting SIG has had a few posts on what was so huge and different about 2020, churning over what has happened to us all, how we might best handle it, and how kindness to each other is one very positive response to something that is generally frightening, depressing and worrying: a global pandemic.  I’m sure that you will have your own experience of how COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns have affected the doctoral writers you know. We all know that we’ve lived through something extraordinary.

There are some pretty impressive empirical studies investigating the effect of the pandemic on the academic community, and on early career researchers in particular, and on doctoral researchers to be precise. One early analysis comes from Vitae working in conjunction with SMaRteN, the UK’s student mental health research network. With data from just under 6,000 doctoral students, Byrom (2020) reports:

We found that more than three-quarters of respondents were experiencing a negative impact of the lockdown on their ability to collect data, discuss ideas and findings with colleagues, and disseminate research findings. More than half also identified a negative impact on data analysis, writing, and working on grant or fellowship applications. In addition, almost a third of respondents identified that they had reduced or no access to the software that they needed for research … (n.p.).

The big doctoral writing question that the 2020 pandemic raises is whether doctoral candidates should describe how the pandemic affected their research, and if they do write about this, how they would do so. Is the thesis a place where the COVID-19 pandemic should be present?

This question challenges a central assumption that a candidate’s life outside of their research project is irrelevant to what goes into a thesis. Doctoral examiners are asked to check that methods, methodology, literature review, data analysis, critical analysis are all appropriate within a thesis. They are not asked to consider personal difficulties or challenges when they mull over whether expectations are met, whether the original contribution weighs in, and whether limitations are reasonable. In fact, examiners generally declared that they were not influenced by content in thesis acknowledgements even when the researchers showed this was unlikely (Kumar & Sanderson, 2020). 

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown light on how much life circumstance affects doctoral research, though, and maybe it is time that the circumstances of life need to be considered when they are extreme. I’d recommend that doctoral writers do write about the pandemic if it affected them negatively. There’s structural impacts relating to lockdown, and personal effects relating to the pandemic. Will writing about any of this be seen as seeking a sympathy dispensation, or is it a sound approach to something significant that should be mentioned?

For doctoral writers now, considering whether to write about the pandemic in work they submit for examination may mean that they are stretching the boundaries of what is done in their disciplines. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine just not mentioning something as significant. So, how do we advise and support doctoral writers considering the possibilities they have?

Here are some options:

The objective ‘insurance claim’ list: It would be possible to itemise what affected the research, such as restricted access to equipment, gear, and data sources. Cultures might die in locked up laboratories; the lockdown may mean not being able to get out in the field for data. Most of the research coming through suggests that doctoral candidates have generally been satisfied with the support their institutions have given them, but lockdown conditions cause somepractical obstructions to completing research.

The psychology report: Data from Byrom’s study shows widespread anxiety, stress, and depression amongst doctoral candidates. When participant rates had reached almost 6,000, data showed that 75% of them suffered in terms of mental well-being due to the pandemic (Byrom, 2020). Such stress might be something that current candidates have in common for ever, and mention in happier future times; right now, though, it’s a factor that may affect how much research was successfully accomplished within the time frame of a doctorate. Discipline epistemology is likely to guide whether it is reasonable to mention psychological obstacles to progress or not.  

The longitudinal observation: Would it be wise for a candidate to point out that they have been short-changed by the happenstance that a pandemic settled in during the few rare and formative years of their doctorate? One article speculated that ‘Of those affected, early-career researchers, including PhD students and postdocs, perhaps bear the brunt of the blow, as crucial timetables in their career development are disrupted’ (Cheng & Song, 2020, [my italics]). This one is risky, I think, to write into the thesis, as it draws attention to the fact that perhaps the writer has not reached full independent researcher capability.

Silence: Silence has the benefit of showing that a candidate knows the traditional premises of doctoral work, that any personal experiences unrelated to the research question do not belong in a thesis. But silence also could be read as a lack of interest in the academic community’s current dilemma, a lack of confidence and supervisory support and a failure to show interest in the wider assumptions of how research and examination ought to work. Then, quite simply, examiners might want to know how the pandemic affected the research. Is this time when we might welcome change?

Of course, disciplines affect how to write—silence about personal factors is foundational in STEM subjects, whereas it has been challenged in Social Science. In Social Science, it is expected that an author needs to position herself within her research writing as an act of integrity. Readers can best assess claims when they know what it is that the researcher herself brings into the study.

It’s common in any discipline, though, to write about changes in the research project due to factors beyond the researcher’s control. Seasonal change that affects habitats can limit the ability to study the natural world. Social changes can mean that access to participants is unexpectedly withdrawn. When there are unavoidable changes to research, that usually makes a story somewhere in the introduction, discussion and the conclusion. The story goes: ‘Initially, the research design included … However, circumstances beyond my control called for a change of plan. The circumstances were … To compensate for this … A limitation of the new design is that …’. Somehow in there too, I think perhaps a case should be made for how response shows learning: ‘Yet, my response has demonstrated flexibility, a quality that, arguably, is an essential skill in an experienced researcher …’.

I’d love to hear from you if you have thoughts on this topic. The pandemic is something new to the world of doctoral writing, and it would be great if we could mull over how to respond to it in the thesis together.

References

Byrom, N. (2020). “COVID-19 and the Research Community: The challenges of lockdown for early-career researchers.”  eLife 9, no page numbers, DOI: https://elifesciences.org/articles/59634

Cheng, C. & Song, S. (2020). How early-career researchers are navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. Mol Plant. 2020 Sep 7; 13(9): 1229–1230. Published online 2020 Jul 27. doi: 10.1016/j.molp.2020.07.018

Kumar, V. & Sanderson, L. J. (2020). The effects of acknowledgements in doctoral theses on examiners,  Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 57:3, 285-295, DOI: 10.1080/14703297.2019.1620625