I have been writing parts of this post in my head for a while. This has been an issue I have been thinking about a lot in relation to my writing centre work with the tutors and also with students, as well as in relation to my own ongoing writing. I mentioned a post or two ago that my MA mini-thesis did very little to prepare me for PhD research and writing – not because it was mini, but rather because I was not very conscious of what I was doing and why I was doing it. I didn’t get a great deal of guidance and formative feedback during that process. The PhD, therefore, was a BIG step up for me, and for the most part because I needed to fill so many gaps in my research capability and in my research writing. The biggest gap for me was the c0nsciousness gap.

What do I mean by this? Well, two things. The first is beginning to understand what you are actually doing in your research project and, incredibly importantly, why you are doing it. How to then go about achieving the what and why is also important, but as I had already learnt, trying to complete a research project focusing on how rather than more on what and why gets it done, but is not the most conscious or even satisfying process. Understanding what you are doing your research for and about, and also why you are taking the steps you are and where they fit into your overall study is so important because you need to be able to sustain a narrative, not just for your readers and supervisor over 80,000 or more words, but also for yourself. Most PhDs take over 3 years to complete, and are broken up until the last year or so into pieces that don’t start coming together, in the writing anyway, until you start putting your first full draft together. You have drafts of chapters and pieces of the whole and it’s so easy (and probably also par for the course) to get lost. But if you understand, in your own words, what you are doing and why, and how the pieces fit or could fit, then you can keep the narrative going and keep coming back to your path. This makes it more likely that you will finish within a decent timeframe, and also helps reduce the frustration and craziness that are part and parcel of doctoral study. Keeping a research journal and trying to write to and for yourself as often as you can really helps with developing this research narrative, and the consciousness about your own writing and research process.

The second thing is a meta-consciousness about the thinking and writing moves you make. It’s a more focused narrative than the bigger picture one where you are looking at your research project as a whole and its parts. This kind of consciousness is one I developed in a big way over the course of my PhD, and not without formative and challenging feedback from my supervisor. Here I am talking about the choices you make when you write – what words you use, or what terms, and how you actually write your research for your readers and supervisors. For example, rather than simply using modals (might, may, could, should etc) to temper statements because they seem like a useful feature of written English, really understand what the modal is doing to the meaning of your claim or argument. Hedging is a key feature of academic writing, but it needs to be done consciously rather than mechanically for the text to then be coherent and also pleasurable to read. If you use modals incorrectly you can sound too certain and strident when you need to be more cautious and curious, like in your introduction where you are posing rather than answering your questions. I had to work hard on this, and became far more conscious about the choices I was making around my writing. The move from how I was writing before my PhD to how I write now was a little like Neo’s journey in The Matrix – I went from not seeing that there was a whole world beneath the surface of my texts that I needed to understand, to seeing that it was there, to starting to write the code that could reshape and change that world and my writing in a variety of ways. Being so much more conscious of what I am writing and why has given me more control over how I write, and it’s a good feeling. It feels like a much more solid and tangible base to keep building one than the one I had before the PhD started.

Conscious writing involves being able to read your own text as an editor and a writer, asking yourself questions about the choices you have made in terms of words, terms and concepts used and well as structure, organisation and coherence. It means being able to explain not just what you have written about, but also being able to tell the story of why the choices were made and how things were included, excluded and shaped in relation to the overall aims and objectives of your research. It’s a crucial part of the PhD process, and one that, while incredibly challenging and a lot of hard work for a long time, yields such satisfying rewards during and also way beyond the PhD itself. Once you have been inside the Matrix and have learnt to write the code itself, you can’t go back. Why would you even want to?