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.
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.
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.
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.
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 DoctoralWriting SIG has had a few posts onwhat was so huge and different about 2020, churning over what has happened to us all,how we might best handle it,andhow kindness to each other is one very positive responseto 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.” eLife9, 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
This is a brief post. It’s a brief post about a brief strategy which helps you to get started on writing that feels a bit – well – a bit boring. It’s the five minutes a day strategy.
Boring? Yes … sometimes we all have to write things that don’t excite us. We often try to put off tedious writing. We find it hard to get going. We have no energy. Just thinking about the writing makes us feel tired. And perhaps resentful.
When faced with an enervating writing task, it’s tempting to put it off. To do something that’s more interesting. Or perhaps we could sit and look at the blank screen for a while, then switch to email, or marking, or analyse some data, or one of the many other tasks that need doing.
So the boring bit of writing stays unwritten. It becomes increasingly pressing. But no less tedious. You can’t face it. Rinse and repeat.
Here is one way to get going. Set aside five minutes. Five minutes only.
For the first minute, brainstorm on your screen or on a piece of paper as many elements of the boring piece of writing as you can. What are the bits of stuff you have to write about? Just bullet point them. Don’t fret about it, you’ll know the most important.
Now you have a list. That’s already an improvement on a blank screen or page, but you can do more.
Pick the most boring of all of the boring items. Set your timer for four minutes and write or type as fast as you can about the boring topic for the four minutes. You goal is to reach 250 words. That’s it, just 250 words. Don’t pause, don’t correct the syntax, and leave a blank or write “something” if you can’t think of the right word. Just get stuff down. Your goal is not to generate a coherent flowing piece of writing but to get out as much of the boring stuff as you can.
At the end of the five minutes you’ll actually have made a start on the boring bit of work. You might like to reward yourself for getting going.
Now, if you have time, you can repeat this procedure straight away. Choose the next most boring thing on the list, set your timer for five minutes and write like there’s no tomorrow. Or continue on with the first one if you think you have more to say. Another 250 words down. Again another little reward.
If you don’t have another five minutes, or the will to go on, put the list and the new 250 words aside and do the same exercise tomorrow.
Five minutes is not a lot of time. And two lots of five minute writing gives you a whole 500 words (but if it’s not working for you, you have only spent ten minutes seeing if it will. Not a lot of time compared to staring at a blank screen). But if it has worked, good for you. You’re underway.
You can keep going in five minute slots a day. Once you have four slots done, you’ll have 1,000 words. Who knew a few days ago that 1000 words could be written without significant pain?
At the 1000 word point, you may want to put the chunks of writing together, and in the order that you think they will go in the paper. You can also add into the document the leftover bullet points from your initial brainstorm. And you now have something like an outline.
You may now be able to go ahead and fill in the various pieces, writing around the remainder of the points. Without timer. Without rewards.. Or you may like to keep going on five minutes a day, point by point, with rewards, until you have the entire outline – lots of chunks of stuff.
These chunks all need work, and they need to be strung together, to link into a narrative chain. But hooray. You do have, at the end of a sequence of only five minutes a day, something that is pretty close to a crappy first draft. Well done you.
So that’s the five minutes day strategy. It’s an adaptation of a common creative writing exercise, tailored to an academic purpose. While it may appear that the major part of this strategy is a short pomodoro, the more important aspect of the strategy is the development of tiny targets, sometimes called micro-goals. Each bullet point from your brainstorm is a tiny writing target.
For people who find getting going hard, or who have very little time to spend on their writing, developing and sticking with tiny targets can be very helpful.
You don’t have to confine tiny targets to boring writing. You can apply tiny targets to anything. With an initial focusing – the brainstorm leading to choice of the mini pomodoro – tiny writing targets can add up very quickly to a text that can then be worked on as a whole. It’s a crappy first draft for sure, but it’s not a blank screen or page. And even a lot of that next stage of second drafting, where you focus on structuring the argument, can happen in little five to ten minute slots.
We often here people talking about theory as a lens – kind of like a microscope or telescope that enables you to ‘see’ things you couldn’t otherwise see.
We look ‘through’ the theory at data or the world.
We also hear of theory as a tool – something you use, or put to work.
These are both metaphors of theory use. I find them both helpful in some ways, but increasingly I am troubled by them. Recently a colleague of mine David Kellogg mentioned an alternative – theory as musical instrument – which I found fascinating.
David has kindly written this post in which he explains this idea a bit more, giving extra background on metaphors and language. After David’s post I will offer a few of my own thoughts as to why I think theory as musical instrument is such an exciting and useful metaphor.
David is Assistant Professor of English Education, Sangmyung University.
David’s thoughts on metaphors for working with theory
At a recent Summer School, Nick presented us with the following bit of data, written by a child who feeds using a tube (rather than orally). Nick shared it to show how amazing things can happen despite challenges in life – in this case, challenges associated with tube-feeding.
Everybody, with the possible exception of the child, realized that this sentence means a great deal more than it intends; it was a long moment before the presenter could continue [Nick: I get rather emotional]. I too am somewhat susceptible to tears, and to distract myself, I found myself looking rather carefully at the spelling of ‘favrote’. I decided that it was not a deliberate pun—on the past tense of “eat”. It was only a misspelling based on the typical pronunciation, in Australian English, of the word “ate” when it is not being stressed. It sounds a lot like “it”.
So there is a sense in which all language use is really metaphor, because you are asking something (some sounding or some spelling) to stand for something else (the wording of a meaning, or the meaning of a wording, depending on whether you are doing the speaking or the listening). But after a few years, a child has done so much of this that it loses its novelty, and it will only regain it when the child learns foreign languages. This loss of novelty occurs at the lexical level as well; very few of us, listening to someone speaking of how to run a business, imagine that this is a metaphor of a footrace and few of us would be surprised to learn that “run a business” is much more common than “run a race”. [Nick: this makes me realise how saturated our everyday communication is with metaphors!]
When the child begins to learn school language, one of the hardest nuts to crack (so to speak) is to recognize that there are grammatical metaphors—that teachers often take meanings which by rights ought to be worded as verb phrases, like “to grow”, and manufacture abstract pseudo-entities, like “growth”. They do this in order to measure them, construe them as subjects, and discuss them as if they were objects you could hold at arms-length in the palm of your hand and examine through a magnifying glass. In high school, these grammatical metaphors become marked with Latin and Greek: “speed” is replaced by “velocity”. Anytime you have some less canonical wording replacing a more typical one, we can rightfully speak of a metaphor.
Now imagine a conference… we are likely to hear phrases like “In this paper, I will use Vygotsky’s theory as a lens to excavate the layers of formation of moral imagining in First Nations adolescents” or “The cultural historical tool kit allows us a wide range of instruments for examining emergent agency in toddlers.”
If we have the temerity to propose that metaphors like this would actually sound better the other way around, with the lens used to examine and the tool kit used for excavation, we are rightly accused of pedantry and faux naïvete. We are not naïve: the metaphors have long since lost their novelty, the meaning of “lens” no longer has much to do with seeing, and “tool” is just as likely to be used on an idea as on a material situational setting. The metaphor has been naturalized (like running a business).
But what do we do when lenses grow too foggy to function heuristically, and tools are too blunt to cut our way through the withered vines that block new theoretical modeling? We make up new metaphors, at once weirder and more apt.
And how does this happen? A personal example. While I was complaining about the overuse of “lens” and “tool” at the summer school, it suddenly occurred to me to consider a class in jazz music I have been asked to teach as a lens or a tool for fresh thinking about my own subject, linguistics. Riffing, I suggested that we could sharpen our metaphorical tools by thinking of theory as a musical instrument: a traditional tool with indefinite creative potential that is sometimes, and in this instance, better served by improvisation than composition.
Nick has asked me to write about the background of this metaphor. As far as I can tell, there isn’t any: it’s another instance of improvisation, although like most improvisations that stick it has doubtless been done before. Moreover, I suppose that strictly speaking musical instruments are not really metaphors for theory, because they form an integral part of music theory itself. They are synecdoches: a part that is a metonym for the whole.
There is another way to make metaphors dangerous again, should we wish to. Un-do them: rise to the concrete, and de-metaphorize them. Even small children know that that grammatical metaphor can go different ways: “because” can be reconstrued concretely as a process “to cause” or more abstractly as an entity, “causation.”
This child whose favrote [sic] room is the kitchen is acquiring the potential to say “my favor-ate place” and collapse in a dessert of sweet giggling and knowing laughter.
Nick’s reflections on David’s idea: theory as a musical instrument
Jacqueline du Pré playing the cello
The thing that bothers me about theory as a lens, is that it can be a bit passive, and a bit pre-determined. By passive, I mean (thinking literally about the metaphor!), that if I switch from one pair of goggles to another, what I see changes, but I don’t have to do the looking any differently. The lens does the work for me. That doesn’t feel right to me when thinking about how theory works in analysis.
I also am wary of the risk that using theory as a lens closes off on possibilities, and sort of pre-determines the answer. Imagine, say, Foucault’s theory of power was like a pair of green goggles. I put them on: whoa! everything is green! Yes, but that was always going to be the case if you look through green lens.
Will the wearer see anything other than green?
What about theory as a tool? Better, maybe, because at least this implies some active effort on behalf of the tool user. I also like the idea that tools are designed and most valuable for particular purposes: a hammer is great for banging in nails, less good if you want to saw through a log. Same with theory – the match between theory and purpose is really important. But I also think of the power tools – the electric screwdriver. They are there to save us effort. That is not how I understand working with theory. Theory doesn’t make analysis easier. Doesn’t save us effort.
So why do I like the theory as musical instrument metaphor better?
I like David’s improvised metaphor because:
It points to both effort but also creativity in the act of working with theory. Just like the musician performs a piece that does not ‘live’ in the instrument, so the researcher offers something beyond the theory itself.
It points to the need to practice – musicians learn their scales, breathing techniques, bowing techniques, etc. You don’t just pick up an instrument and produce glorious tone and melody. Same with theory: it takes effort, practice, work. Working with theory is something you (can) get better at.
It retains the idea of ‘match’: if you want to create a sustained, low-pitched melody, a snare drum might be less useful than a cello. Same with theory: what do you want to be able to do? That may, in part, govern the relevance of one theory or another
Finally, it suggests that the quality of the outcome is not built-in. Yes, some musical instruments are ‘better’ than others. But, you could give me the world’s best viola and I’d still make only a mediocre sound with it at best. It is not the instrument itself, or the player alone, but the combination of both that creates a good sound. Same with theory: any value theory brings to research lies not fixed in the theory itself, nor in the researcher alone, but in how the two come together – metaphorically how the researcher plays the theory.
What do you think?
What metaphors have you come across for using theory?
You’re writing? And feeling a bit pulled in two directions at once? Perhaps that’s not surprising. Writers have two inter-related personae – the Creator and the Editor. Well, that’s according to Joni B Cole, and indeed a lot of other people who offer writing advice.
Don’t scoff just yet. Thinking about this inner duo can be very helpful for academic writers. According to Cole, who teaches creative writing, the Creator is an “artistic genius prone to bouts of agonising self-doubt” as well as feelings of exhilarating over-confidence. On the one hand, the Creator’s job is to allow “rich unfiltered material … to flow onto the page”. The Editor, on the other hand, “cleans up the Creator’s mess” and is “capable of achieving miracles in the revision process”.
Cole notes that these two writer personae are temperamentally opposed to each other and can easily sabotage each other if they are both in play at once. The Editor can stop the Creator from writing, and the Creator can be so attached to their words and so fearful of change that they stop the Editor from doing their job.
Now Cole’s conjoined writer twins can be read as a split between writing and reading – with the Creator writing and the Editor reading. However the Creator reads their text as they go along, but their reading focus is on generating and developing their ideas (narrative, characters, theme etc. - for more on reading while writing, see for example Brandt 1990). And the Editor doesn’t just read. They write too. They might make notes, and restructure and rewrite sections of text (or cut some things altogether). So both Creators and Editors read and write. But differently.
Now, equating writing only with the Editor can cause problems. If the writer in Creator mode automatically switches into Editor mode when reading their draft, then this can seriously disrupt the writing-reading-writing practice of generating text. Creators need to read like Creators when they are first-drafting, not like Editors. Or they may need to switch into Editor mode for a little while, and then reboot their Creator.
Getting the right writing-reading functions happening at the right time is important. But there are further implications of this dual writing heuristic too, particularly for the giving and receiving of feedback.
Cole suggests that writers often approach any public feedback, perhaps given during workshops (read supervision here), as Creators. They want reassurance and affirmation, sometimes adulation. Writers can forget to switch off their Creator when the conversation shifts – and then they don’t hear the constructive criticism they are given – rather, they experience it as a rejection of their work.
Cole advises that those giving feedback need to deal with both the Creator and the Editor. They need to give some reassurance to the Creator first of all, and engage with the positive aspects of the work that has been presented. This is the academic equivalent of the supervisor discussing what’s already strong. Then the person giving feedback needs to signal that they are about to address the writer’s Editor. And their task becomes one of helping the Editor focus.
Even when writers are in Editor mode they can easily get overwhelmed by feedback which gives too many points for revision. Editors need to tackle problems strategically, dealing with the most serious to start with. As Cole helpfully puts it, “the rougher the draft, the fewer the variables you need to throw at the writer at once.” The feedback goal is to energise the writer. Feedback to creative writers, Cole says, often starts with characterisation as this generally drives plot. But when dealing with a thesis, supervisors often begin with the structure of the argument rather than the substantive detail of particular sections.
Cole suggests that giving feedback strategically often ends up with the writer in Editor mode doing more than what was suggested. This is because the big and early strategic changes often lead naturally to other readjustments.
When the Creator feels secure, and the Editor has made major changes, the feedback can become more detailed, more focused on finer details. Line edits are usually left to near the end of the rewriting process.
Cole also notes that not all Creators and Editors are the same. “Some writers” she says, “can choke on a crumb; others are able to handle more feedback at a sitting” – although all writers, she suggests, need help setting priorities.
So maybe not a problem to feel a little Yin and Yang about your writing. Just got to get the balance happening. And perhaps Cole's version of Creator and Editor can be of help to you.
