Helping Doctoral Students Write Helping Doctoral Students Write is a proven approach to effective doctoral writ- ing. 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 dis- cursive 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: • examples from a broader range of academic disciplines; • a new chapter on writing journal articles from the thesis; • more advice on reading and note-taking, performance and conferences; • further information on developing a personal academic writing style; and • advice on the use of social media (blogs, tweets and wikis) to create trans- disciplinary and trans-national networks and conversations. The discussion of the complexities of forming a scholarly identity is illustrated throughout by stories and writings of actual doctoral researchers. Kamler and Thomson present a persuasive and proven argument that uni- versities 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. Barbara Kamler is an Emeritus Professor at Deakin University, Australia. Pat Thomson is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies at The University of Nottingham, UK. Helping Doctoral Students Write Pedagogies for supervision Second edition Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson Second edition published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 B. Kamler and P. Thomson The right of B. Kamler and P. Thomson to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2006 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kamler, Barbara. Helping doctoral students write : strategies for supervision / Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson.—Second edition. pages cm 1. Dissertations, Academic. I. Thomson, Pat, 1948– II. Title. LB2369.K313 2014 808'.02—dc23 2013035149 ISBN: 978–0–415–82348–7 (hbk) ISBN: 978–0–415–82349–4 (pbk) ISBN: 978–1–315–81363–9 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon Contents List of figures and tables vi Preface vii Introduction x 1 Putting doctoral writing centre stage 1 2 Writing the doctorate, writing the scholar 14 3 Persuading an octopus into a jar 30 4 Getting on top of the research literatures 49 5 Reconsidering the personal 67 6 A linguistic toolkit for supervisors 89 7 Structuring the dissertation argument 113 8 Publishing out of the thesis 138 9 Institutionalizing doctoral writing practices 158 References 174 Index 184 Figures and tables Figures 2.1 Fairclough’s model of discourse 23 3.1 Lucinda’s dinner party 41 4.1 Detailed questions for note-taking 55 5.1 Hyland’s resources for building writer stance 84 6.1 From verb forms to noun forms 92 6.2 Modality markers 104 6.3 Theme analysis: Mia’s first draft 107 6.4 Theme analysis: Mia’s second draft 108 6.5 Theme analysis: Calvin’s first draft 109 6.6 Theme analysis: Calvin’s second draft 110 6.7 Zigzag patterning in Theme 111 7.1 Storyboarding the thesis structure 124 7.2 Four moves in a thesis abstract 126 7.3 Meta-commentary template exercises 131 7.4 Moves and signposts 132 8.1 The three layers of the journal article 139 8.2 Four moves in a published paper 149 8.3 Questions to ask of abstracts 151 Table 7.1 Genres in IMRAD 117 Preface We did not intend to write this book. We began having a conversation about doctoral writing as a result of a presentation Pat gave to a doctoral summer school at which Barbara was present as a university staff member. Pat’s discussion of the writing decisions she had made in her PhD thesis sparked lively conversation. We discovered that we thought in similar ways about writing, despite the dif- ferences in our backgrounds and professional training. Barbara was trained as an educational linguist and after her PhD moved to combine this with critical dis- course analysis in a range of research projects on gender and school literacy. She describes herself as a teacher and researcher of writing across the lifespan, most recently focusing on cultural narratives of aging and cross-generational literacy pedagogies. Her interest in writing is deeply connected to issues of social justice, identity and representation. Pat is a late career academic, having spent most of her life as a school principal and school system policy maker; she combined journalism teaching with extra-curricular activities in print and radio media. She describes herself as a scholar committed to social justice and her research focuses on policy, questions of power, place and identity, and democratizing education. Her interest in writing stems from being a compulsive writer herself. We came together in a serendipitous manner, but our mutual concerns about the relative scarcity of well-theorized material about doctoral supervision and writing have kept us in dialogue. We began writing this book after giving a performance at a conference about ‘writing up’. We explain our exasperation with this term in the first chapter. But sometime during the writing of the paper, we realized we had the makings of a book. We gave a series of workshops in Canada, Australia and South Africa to help us sort out key moves in the production of a doctoral thesis – working with litera- tures, writing abstracts, constructing arguments and writing conference papers. At every workshop there were more people than we expected, and this affirmed our belief that doctoral writing was a kind of present absence in the landscape of doctoral education. It was something that everybody worried about, but about which there was too little systematic debate and discussion. We interviewed our colleagues and our students as well as workshop partici- pants, and their voices appear in the text in semi-fictionalized accounts. We have viii Preface adopted a convention of combining actual words and events drawn from actual interviews with fictional characters. We also use the writing of students, both exemplary and problematic texts, but modify these so that they are not identifi- able. This is partly about ensuring confidentiality, but it is also about trying to capture the patterns, emotions and experiences at issue rather than anything spe- cific. For that reason we have not given citations for any of the student writings. Rather, we focus on the way in which they have written and argued. Fictionalizing accounts has also given us more licence to write imaginatively in ways that we hope will resonate with readers (see Clough, 2002). We thank our students and colleagues for the gift of their words and hope that they agree with the ways we have represented them. We want to acknowledge from the outset that actually getting words on the page is difficult. Anxiety about how to begin a piece of writing is not confined to doctoral students, nor does it necessarily go away once the doctorate is com- pleted. We have separately and together made several starts on various parts of this book accompanied by much pacing, tea-drinking and cleaning. Since one of us lives in England and the other in Australia, we have worked through these periods by simply following our own advice – just sit and write anything! When we have worked together it has become obvious that one of us takes more time considering each section of text, while the other tends to write furiously and then spends time reflecting on it. Nevertheless, each of us has made several false starts and we have ultimately written ourselves into the production of this text, just as doctoral students do. The second edition We wrote the first edition of this book eight years ago. Since then, there has been a significant increase in the attention paid to doctoral education, doctoral supervi- sion and doctoral writing. Indeed, we have contributed to this burgeoning litera- ture ourselves, separately and together. We have edited a collection on pedagogies for publication (Aitchison, Kamler and Lee, 2010) and two doctoral companions which provide a guide to the key debates in research methods and doctoral litera- tures (Thomson and Walker, 2010; Walker and Thomson, 2010). Most recently we have written a book on writing for peer reviewed journals (Thomson and Kamler, 2013) and continue to run workshops, courses and supervise doctoral research, where we have learnt a great deal more about the practices of doctoral writing. We have people to thank. We have already acknowledged how important our students and workshop participants have been to this book. Without them we would literally have had nothing to learn and say. But other people have helped us too. We would like to put on record our intellectual debt to Bill Green and the late Alison Lee whose work so firmly wrote doctoral pedagogies and academic literacies on to the scholarly map in Australia. We also want to thank Philip Mudd at Routledge for his early enthusiasm, energetic support and continued patience. Preface ix We have also been helped by critical friends along the way: thank you to Lesley Farrell and Rod Maclean for their close reading and productive suggestions for the first edition. Then of course there are our partners, Randy and Greg, who have endured endless reports of progress on the book (or not) and fed and nur- tured us during our intense periods of writing together in each other’s homes. We know that the pleasure of completion is common to writers everywhere – be they doctoral researchers or supervisors. But we actually don’t want to be finished with the topic. We would be delighted to hear from others about their supervision experiences and pedagogic strategies to support writing: we see this as part of an ongoing dialogue about how to help doctoral students write.