Helping Doctoral Students Write

Pedagogies for supervision

Barbara Kamler, Pat Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317802129
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Helping Doctoral Students Write offers a proven approach to effective doctoral writing. By treating research as writing and writing as research, the authors offer pedagogical strategies for doctoral supervisors that will assist the production of well-argued and lively dissertations.

It is clear that many doctoral candidates find research writing complicated and difficult, but the advice they receive often glosses over the complexities of writing and/or locates the problem in the writer. Kamler and Thomson provide a highly effective framework for scholarly work that is located in personal, institutional and cultural contexts.

The pedagogical approach developed in the book is based on the notion of writing as a social practice. This approach allows supervisors to think of doctoral writers as novices who need to learn new ways with words as they enter the discursive practices of scholarly communities. This involves learning sophisticated writing practices with specific sets of conventions and textual characteristics. The authors offer supervisors practical advice on helping with commonly encountered writing tasks such as the proposal, the journal abstract, the literature review and constructing the dissertation argument.

The first edition of this book has helped many academics and thousands of research students produce better written material. Now fully updated the second edition includes:

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• Examples from a broader range of academic disciplines

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• A new chapter on writing from the thesis for peer reviewed journals

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• More advice on reading and note taking, performance and conferences,

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• Further information on developing a personal academic writing style, and

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• Advice on the use of social media (blogs, tweets and wikis) to create trans-disciplinary and trans-national networks and conversations.

Their discussion of the complexities of forming a scholarly identity is illustrated throughout by stories and writings of actual doctoral students.

In conclusion, they present a persuasive and proven argument that universities must move away from simply auditing supervision to supporting the development of scholarly research communities. Any supervisor keen to help their students develop as academics will find the ideas and practical solutions presented in this book fascinating and insightful reading.

Chapter 1

Putting doctoral writing centre stage

Getting the dissertation written can be as problematic for supervisors as it is for doctoral students. Our conversations with colleagues suggest that the issue of writing often remains a problem from the start to the finish of candidature. Supervisors describe students as either ‘being able to write’ – or not. Frustrations over turgid prose, badly structured arguments and laboured literature reviews are common. Supervisors have numerous questions. Why can’t my students write an argument? How can I help them say things more simply? What can I do to get my students to write more logically? Why is their writing so tentative?

There are few places to which supervisors can refer for discussion specifically about doctoral writing, few places which might assist them to think differently about the textual practices of scholarship. This book begins to address this gap. It is written primarily for supervisors, although doctoral researchers may also find it of use.

But this book is not a self-help manual. It is not a how-to-do-writing-supervision compendium. Supervision is a complex pedagogical practice. It is a partnership between an experienced and an aspiring scholar which shifts over the number of years it takes for the research to be done and the thesis to be written. The supervisor begins with expertise in all aspects of the process – the literature that must be read, the design of fieldwork or textwork, the production of the thesis. Over time, the supervisor must relinquish control and the doctoral researcher must use their growing expertise to speak and write with authority. A ‘student’ identity is gradually replaced by that of ‘researcher/scholar’.

This is not a straightforward process. It does not proceed in simple linear steps. As we will show in this book the process of becoming a scholar is irrevocably an integral part of writing the dissertation. However, most of the self-help books written for students focus on textual matters and largely ignore the complex tangle of emotional and intellectual work that is the doctorate. Supervisors, of course, are acutely aware of the personal dilemmas their students face, although they do not necessarily connect these to ongoing textual struggles. Our intention is to put the enmeshed nature of textwork and identitywork (addressed in detail in Chapter 2) at the centre of supervision pedagogy.

In this book we avoid the direct address – the ‘you can/must/ought/will benefit’ of the advice mode. Tempting as it is to tell people what to do, we try instead to talk about things that we have done and found useful, and we provide sufficient detail for readers to imagine how they might use or remake strategies for their own supervision contexts. We write about pedagogy, the work of teaching and learning. We draw on: our reading in socio-linguistics, critical discourse analysis, policy sociology and pedagogical theory; our experiences in doctoral supervision (not all of them easy); our research into academic writing practices; and our own writing biographies.

We foreground issues related to language and texts. We object to the ubiquitous term ‘writing up’ as the dominant way to think about writing the dissertation. Instead, we work with notions of ‘research as writing’. We attend closely to the language used to describe doctoral writing because we believe it shapes not only how writing is produced, but also the writers themselves.

We therefore offer new metaphors and ways of understanding the labour and craft of doctoral writing. We foreground writing and writing strategies. We pay attention to the field of scholarly writing, its genres and conventions. We explore the connections between academic writing practices and the formation of ‘the doctoral scholar’. We offer a theorized approach based on current understandings of writing, identity and social practice. To begin, we interrogate some taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘writing up’ and the way these have marginalized serious attention to the practices of doctoral writing.

Talking down ‘writing up’

When doctoral researchers talk about the writing they do in the doctorate, it is common for them to say ‘Oh, I’m just writing up’. The phrase ‘writing up’ is ubiquitous in the various advice manuals on the market and on websites which proffer advice about writing. Even some of the most useful books on research writing, such as Wolcott’s (2001) Writing Up Qualitative Research, embed the phrase in their title. We object to this way of talking about writing, primarily because it suggests that writing is ancillary or marginal to the real work of research. First we do the research, then we ‘write it up’, as if that were a fairly straightforward and mechanical act of reportage.

Writing, however, is a vital part of the research process. The activity of research is one that, from the outset, involves writing. Researchers keep notes, jot down ideas, record observations, summarize readings, transcribe interviews and develop pieces of writing about specific aspects of their investigation. These writings are not simply getting things down on paper, but are a process of making meaning and advancing understandings. Then there are public texts – conference papers, articles and the thesis itself – all of which do productive work. It is through these writings that researchers produce knowledge and become members of their various scholarly communities.

The phrase ‘writing up’ actually obliterates all this labour and complexity. And we are not just being picky about words. Our concern is that such ways of speaking have effects. They can actually mislead students about what is entailed in writing the doctorate. A pivotal study by Torrance and Thomas (1994) noted that students who delay completion, or fail to complete their dissertation, often do so because of writing-related issues. These students see a ‘strict demarcation between collecting data, or doing research, and the writing of this material as a dissertation’ (Torrance and Thomas, 1994: 107); it is this perception that creates problems for student writers.

Other research findings about the connections between writing and academic ‘success’ (Hendricks and Quinn, 2000; Leibowitz and Goodman, 1997; Lillis, 2001; Lillis and Turner, 2001) suggest supervisors need to address the writing issues that actually prevent students from developing productive research writing practices (see Mullen, 2001). For us, one of these issues is reconceptualizing research writing so that it is not reduced to ‘writing up’. This ubiquitous metaphor is most commonly used to denote a distinct phase of post-fieldwork activity. But like Lee (1998), we contend that the metaphor does important work in making doctoral writing both natural and invisible. We can state our objections as three propositions:

‘Writing up’ obscures the fact that doctoral writing is thinking. We write to work out what we think. It’s not that we do the research and then know. It’s that we write our way to understanding through analysis. We put words on the page, try them out, see how they look and sound and, in the writing, we see things we had no idea were there before we started writing. If the goal of research is to make sense of the data we have produced, and to theorize it in order to develop understanding, then writing the research is central to the process of inquiry itself.

‘Writing up’ obscures the fact that producing a dissertation text is hard work. Writing is physical, emotional and aesthetic labour. Sitting at a keyboard for hours on end is hard on nerves and bodies. Many scholars carry their scholarship deep in their psyche, bones and muscles. But the dissertation is also about the craft of word-play. Choosing words that encapsulate an idea, selecting quotations that effectively summarize an important point, and making decisions about syntax and subheadings are all important to how the final text flows and is read. In no way are these ideas of labour and craft captured in the matter-of-factness of ‘writing up’. Rather the phrase evokes a glibness: ‘Oh I’ve done the hard work, now I’m doing the easy bit, I’m just “writing it up”’.

‘Writing up’ obscures the fact that doctoral writing is not transparent. Researchers do not simply write up ‘the truth’. Language is not a transparent medium through which we capture and communicate findings and facts are not already there, waiting for the researcher to discover and grab. What writing creates is a particular representation of reality. Data is produced in writing, it is not found. And the data and subsequent written texts are shaped and crafted by the researcher through a multitude of selections about what to include and exclude, foreground and background, cite and not cite. These choices often have profound ethical dimensions and raise issues that need the conscious attention of doctoral writers. Such issues are not even imaginable in the oversimplifying, apparently neutral term ‘writing up’.

So why do we say ‘writing up’? Tradition, bad habit, misconception? Why not writing down? Writing over? Writing around? Better yet, why don’t we say ‘I’m writing my research’, where the present continuous verb writing implies a continuous process of inquiry through writing? We agree with Laurel Richardson (1990, 1994) when she says that researching is writing. It is not separate from the act of researching. Later in the chapter we offer principles that underpin this alternative to ‘writing up’. But first, we expand our discussion of research writing by interrogating another misconception about doctoral writing: namely that it is only a set of skills rather than a situated social practice.

Doctoral writing – just a question of skills?

Whole sections in academic catalogues and entire shelves in bookshops are now devoted to a new kind of self-help book – the how-to-write-your-dissertation manual. These invite doctoral researchers to buy advice from experienced scholars to supplement the assistance given by their own supervisors.

The proliferation of such guidebooks is not simply a savvy niche-marketing strategy by publishing companies, nor should it be theorized away as an example of the democratization of expertise that is characteristic of high modernity (Giddens, 1991). Rather, as everyone involved with doctoral education knows, doctoral work is associated with a number of anxieties. Students have numerous questions. Will the work be good enough? How can all of the relevant literatures be read in time? What brings all of the data together? How can the research be organized into 100,000 words? These dissertation primers address these concerns by offering to ‘skill up’ doctoral researchers.

The problem with a skills-based orientation is that it is founded in a notion that language is transparent, a straightforward conduit for thought. The process of writing is simplified into a linear process, where students are exhorted to think first, then write. They need to plan, get the chapter outline clear, and proceed, bit by bit, chapter by chapter, as if meaning is already formed prior to the writing. When a draft is produced, it is treated as if there is no more meaning making to do. What is required is simply tidying and polishing. The writing process is made analogous to setting a table – once the cutlery and plates are out of the drawers and cupboards, it is just a matter of setting them straight.

Problems with writing are then treated in skill-deficit terms. They are located in individual doctoral researchers who don’t ‘get it’ or don’t ‘have it’, rather than in the broader disciplinary and institutional contexts in which they write. And the advice given to solve writing problems often focuses on the surface features of writing. Spelling, punctuation, grammar or simplified models of text structure or citation rules are offered because these are the more tangible aspects of academic writing.

When we first searched research writing websites, we mostly found handy tips and oversimplified guidelines for writing. This advice indicated not even the most basic understandings of writing developed in genre-based (Derewianka, 1990) or process approaches (Graves, 1983; Murray, 1982) in the 1980s and 1990s. Here is a typical, reductive tidbit:

Ask yourself what would have been the perfect paper for you to have read in order to understand everything you need to know. Then write it …

Papers must be understandable and meaningful. Papers are for replication and understanding … Each sentence must be as informative as possible. Include all relevant information. Never use anything you do not know is absolutely and totally real. Outline the paper until it is perfectly clear, then write it …

The following list of questions steps you through the major issues which must be addressed in a research paper. After each question is answered the construction of the research paper is simply developing transitions between items.

(http://www.jsu.edu.depart/psychology/sebac/fac-sch/rm/Ch4-5.html. Accessed October 2001)

Implicit in such advice is the assumption that writing problems and their solutions are fairly straightforward, easy to identify and resolve. Since then, a new generation of online writing centre materials and blogs have been produced, offering much more nuanced support and strategies and we discuss some of these in the last chapter. However, there is still a great deal of poor advice around which doctoral researchers need help to critique and use selectively. The best people to help them in this ‘crap detection’ task are their supervisors.

Skills-based books on doctoral writing are also abundant. The oversimplification of some approaches is evident in titles such as Completing your doctoral dissertation or master’s thesis in two semesters or less (Ogden, 1993) or Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day (Bolker, 1998). The contents of such books, which are intended to give straightforward heuristics, often offer a straightforward and linear norm for the doctorate, which positions supervisors and supervisees as deviant if they don’t adhere to the stages set out.

Writing is often given short shrift in such books. The research student’s guide to success (Cryer, 2001), for example, covers topics such as: liaising with an institution, settling in as a new student, keeping records, producing reports, developing skills for creative thinking, producing your thesis and afterwards. Writing is discussed at various points throughout the text but always in terms of technique, and the emphasis is on tips ‘that work’.

Even when writing is treated as more than formulaic, a skills orientation still oversimplifies the textwork involved in authoring a dissertation. For example, in Writing the winning dissertation (Glatthorn, 1998), a chapter titled ‘Mastering the academic style’ asks students to follow these steps:

Write a paragraph. Stop and read what was written. Revise that paragraph.

Write another paragraph – and start the cycle all over again.

(Glatthorn, 1998: 109)

Further on, students are offered the following suggestions for achieving the persona of a knowledgeable scholar: ‘strive for clarity’, ‘project maturity’, ‘project a sense of formality’, ‘strike an appropriate balance between confidence and tentativeness’ (Glatthorn, 1998: 112–13). While supervisors might agree with these assertions, they are presented as commands and the examples provided are framed as cor...