Tag: research writing

Iterativity in postgraduate writing: making peace with the mess

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Lovely husband and I were talking recently about a workshop we both attended on postgraduate study, and our respective conversations with our own postgraduate students about what postgraduate study involves them in, specifically the over-and-over again nature of the reading, writing and thinking. Iterativity, we concluded, is the name of the game at this level, and in post-doctoral academic research; yet, it is an aspect of working at this level that produces much frustration, self-doubt and struggle.

Ernest Hemingway famously said: ‘The first draft of anything is shit’. He was, certainly in my experience, right. If you look up writing advice on Pinterest, you will find many soundbites to inspire you; for example: ‘First drafts  don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be written’, ‘A crappy first draft is worth more than a non-existent one’, and writing first drafts as being like ‘shoveling sand into a box so that later [you] can build sandcastles’.  There is truth in all of these inspirational tips: first drafts are messy things: often incoherent in parts, full of both useful and useless information, lacking a proper focus. But, they are where we start any writing, and the key word here is ‘start’: writing is a non-linear, often chaotic, process, where we learn as we write, and our thinking develops with each round of feedback and revision.

This ‘logic of discovery’ is at odds, though, with the ‘logic of dissemination’ that we display in our finished thesis: the iterative process that produces the thesis is hidden from the view of the reader, as they are presented with our neat, polished, coherent argument. Many postgraduate students start their thesis process believing that these two logics are the same: that you start with Chapter 1, and the process unfolds neatly and logically from there. They become frustrated, then, when this turns out to be a lie:  when the truth is multiple drafts and mistakes, time spent writing paragraphs or pages of writing that have to be deleted when they are no longer relevant, and sometimes unexpected changes to your research questions, theory or methodology as the project evolves. This frustration can breed self-doubt if not carefully managed through supervision: many students believe that the more drafts you have to write, the worse you are as a writer; so many students I have met erroneously believe that the best writers don’t write that many drafts, and don’t make that many mistakes or revisions.

The opposite is the truth. The more successful writers, and postgraduate students, have learned to embrace the chaos and the frustration; they have learned to manage a balance between having a clear research plan and letting that process evolve so that they can still be surprised by what they find, or learn, as they write and work the data. This is a hard thing to do, live in a space where you know probably less than you don’t know, and where you have to be okay with the not-knowing, and move willingly between knowing and not-knowing over and over as your research moves forwards. This requires not just mental fortitude, but emotional resilience.

Researching and writing a thesis feels, at times, as if you are on a many-roaded route, trying to keep your eye on the GPS when it’s giving you more than one possible route and asking you to choose the best one to get you to your destination within minimal traffic and in good time. You may choose one route, and then find halfway you’ve made an error in judgement, and then choose to turnoff, and take a back road back to the main route you were on. There may be unexpected detours that the GPS didn’t know about and so couldn’t warn you of. You may feel like you are going around in circles at some points, and in a lovely, free-flowing straight line at others. A research degree, especially a PhD, represents a long road, with several possible routes to your destination. And it’s not a straight line. You may have to re-drive parts of the route at times, or try out different parts of the route than you expected to. But, if you try to trust the process, and make peace with taking your time and living with a bit of mess and non-linear chaos, you will hopefully get to your destination in one piece, and with a really good understanding of the area you’ve been driving around and around.

In research terms, this means getting more comfortable with the iterative nature of research, writing, and thinking. You cannot expect to write a chapter once, and be done. And you can’t expect to read something once and fully understand it, especially if it’s pivotal to your project, like theory. Writing multiple drafts, making mistakes, including knowledge and reading you don’t need along with that which you do, and making revisions that improve your writing, further your thinking and push your research forward is part and parcel of valuable, challenging postgraduate study that makes you a more capable researcher. Doing worthwhile research that pushes your field forward will require you to have a really firm understanding of that field, and the place your research can occupy within it. This means getting a bit lost sometimes, but having the means (through supervisors, peers, reading) to find your way onto your route again.

Terry Pratchett’s soundbite on first drafts is my favourite: ‘The first draft is just you telling yourself the story’. If you see your thesis as a story, evolving as the characters and plot take shape, and as the twists and turns reveal themselves through working with theory, methodology, data and analysis, it can be easier to embrace that uncertainty, and iterative rounds of writing, feedback, revision, and rewriting that push your research, and you as a researcher, forward. You start by telling yourself, and move to telling your supervisors, examiners and finally your wider audience – and you make a contribution that is valued and relevant. It won’t happen in a nice, linear way, but the depth of knowledge you gain, of your field and the research process, will be worth all the ‘driving’ in the end.

Strategic reading: filling gaps in your writing

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Reading: it’s a tough subject for postgraduate students. I have written here, here, and here about reading – how much to read, what to read, how to find reading you need to do. In this post I want to think a bit about strategic reading: reading to fill certain gaps in your writing, or to add additional or necessary authority to claims you are making.

This kind of reading is, I think, a little bit controversial. This is mainly because it doesn’t always require you to read the whole of every paper you are planning to include on your paper or chapter. This kind of reading could be considered a cheat code of sorts. In gaming, cheat codes (as my sons have led me to understand) enable you to take certain shortcuts through the game, circumventing tough sections that may wipe you out otherwise. The kind of strategic reading I am talking about here is a writing cheat code. It enables you to add to your writing without necessarily spending hours doing additional reading.

cheat codes

*There is an important caveat here though: this kind of reading can only be used effectively under particular conditions. It cannot be used to replace deep, sustained and considered reading that gets you into your field, introduces you to theory, empirical research, the thinkers you will be ‘conversing’ and ‘debating’ with in your own research and writing.*

Now that I have added that caveat, let me explain how I think this tool works, and how and when it could help you. There are two common scenarios in which I use strategic reading:

1. I am writing a paper with two colleagues on the ways in which tutors use different forms of questions to structure conversations with student writers in a university writing centre. They have actually written the first draft, and I have come in to edit, add to and reshape it, before they have another go. Several of the cited sources are older, and if I was the paper’s reviewer I would certainly be suggesting that we bring the reading material up to date, as there is more recent research that we could cite, that would add to our paper. But, I don’t actually have time to re-read 10 papers right now, all of which I have actually read at some point over the past few years. I have a basic sense of where I could add particular points or authority in the form of sources cited. I am thus using this cheat code: selective strategic reading.

reading 1

Basically, I am finding papers in my archive that speak about some of the issues we are touching on in the paper. I am them skimming these until I see key words or phrases, and I am reading around these, to see if a) what the author is writing about is useful, and b) if I can add it to the paper as a useful reference that adds authority to our argument, and also extends it in productive ways. I am only reading parts of these papers, some of which I recall well, and others which are a little more vague. I am using my judgement here to see how much re-reading I need to do, and I have to be careful not to take what the author is saying out of context just to suit my purposes.

This is a potential catch of this cheat code: by not reading the whole paper, I may inadvertently claim that the author has written something that supports my argument, when they actually meant something else. But, because I am only selecting papers I have already read, and that do actually connect with the argument I am making, this risk is largely mitigated.

2. I used a different kind of strategic reading tool in writing a paper I published last year, for which I was on a very tight deadline (hence less time for long periods of deep and thoughtful reading for every part of the literature review): gap filling. Here, what I did was work put very carefully exactly what the gap in my contextual framework was, and what I needed by way of literature to fill it. I needed a few tight, clear paragraphs on academic staff development, in particular how new staff members are mentored in higher education. I then ran a focused Google Scholar search for people I know have written about this, and found 6 or 7 authoritative studies/papers. I read the whole of each of these papers, but with my eye on my argument so that I was really pulling out pieces of what they were writing about that would help me fill my gap effectively. I made limited and focused summaries in my reading journal, rather than my usual general summaries, with a focus on my paper at the end thereof.

reading 2

This gap filling strategy works best when you know what you need to write about and you have a basic structure worked out, because then you can see the gaps, and choose only what you have to read to fill them. If you have a good sense of what the gaps are, you can focus better on a few key readings, or writers/theorists, and not worry overly much about not having read everything on that topic. Usually within a few papers, with reading notes, you can start to see the gap filling up, and you can learn to judge when you have read enough or need to keep going. It does require a measure of confidence, and knowledge of your field, but usually when you get to writing papers you are on your way to this.

If you are using these kinds of strategic reading cheat codes in an MA or PhD, they would probably work best towards the end of the thesis, when you are going back, connecting chapters, creating overall coherence, and ensuring that the argument you have ended up making by the conclusion is well supported by the earlier contextual and conceptual literature you have cited. Using these tools early on in a research project is not advisable: cheat codes are usually only useful, in gaming and in writing, when you know where you are going, but just need a little extra help in getting there a bit more efficiently than otherwise.

 

Acts of self-sabotage

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I have been pondering the issue of self-sabotage lately in relation to various parts of my life. I have been wondering, mainly, why I do this, and trying to spot the signs so I can try to head myself off at the pass. Lovely husband and I then started talking about all the parts of our personal and professional lives we can affect with acts of self-sabotage, especially writing and the PhD.

As you may know if you read my last post (which was a while ago), I am writing a book. At this stage the qualifier ‘trying to write’ should replace ‘writing’. I am doing this in fits and starts in between pieces of other work, some of it essential work of the paid variety needed to pay bills, some of it of the essential unpaid variety, such as supervision and blogging, and some of it of the not very essential type at all. Obviously, I cannot stop doing the essential work, but I can rethink some of the non-essential work; I can also rethink how I do the essential work, and where my writing fits into my time.

superhero-emojiI wrote a post a while back about how you make, rather than find, time to write. I am clearly not very good at taking my own advice (not at the moment anyway). I left the writing retreat I was on when I posted my most recent post with a resolution that, at least 5 days a week, I would start my work day with two pomodoros (which roughly translates into 50 minutes of focused writing). Before 9am, I would have written part of my book for almost one hour, and then I could move on with the rest of my working day. I did this for about a week, every morning. I felt like a freaking superhero. My back had a red mark on it from being patted so much. And then, and then… I stopped making this time to write. I got busy with managing journals, and writing reviews, and responding to emails and reorganising folders on my desktop, and my pomodoros fell away. And now, having done no writing for over a week, the book has become Annie Dillard’s feral creature**, and I am rightly afraid to go into its room, without or without the chair.

What I have been doing is sabotaging myself. I have been doing all the Other Things before writing, thereby devaluing, and scuppering my writing time. Maybe some of those things are important, but I could do them after 9am. Maybe some of those things are actually not all that important at all, today, and I can just not do them and write instead. I am, rather actively, standing in my own way. The question is, if I want to stop doing it quite so effectively: WHY? Why, when I am actually really excited about this book, and believe it should be out there in the academic world, am I so seemingly intent on making sure I never actually write it? Why, by the same token, do PhD students who really want a PhD scupper their progress by taking on extra work, procrastinating to the point of craziness, hiding from their supervisors and so on? Why do we self-sabotage?

I have one theory, maybe two. The first theory is that we do this because actually finishing the book or the PhD means we have to show it to people. People will read it. It will be published, either by an actual publisher or in your university’s repository. It will appear in Google Scholar searches, people will be able to obtain it, read it, dislike it, critique it. That is pretty bloody scary, no matter how much we believe in what we are writing about. I imagine it must be even scarier if you are unsure of what you are writing about, or writing about something you are not passionate about. It is impossible to separate your writing and thinking work from your self. My writing is so much a part of me. I cannot but take it personally if you don’t like what I have written, or criticise my argument. And that can hurt. So, perhaps, we self-sabotage to avoid that potential hurt. It’s a protective instinct, possibly.

allie-brosh-work

Credit: Allie Brosh

The other theory is connected. When you do put your work out there, and it is critiqued and commented on (by PhD supervisors, critical friends, examiners, book reviewers and so on) (and it certainly will be) (and even if they are all very nice to you) you will have more work to do. You will have to do more reading, more head scratching, more sighing, more scribbling, more thinking, more writing. And, while most of us who choose an academic life are more or less okay with that, it is a lot of work. Life is full, and busy, especially when you are a working parent and student and person. Often, I just want to be done with work. Revisions are hard, and they take time, and I don’t always want to do them. I therefore think I self-sabotage to head off the inevitable additional work I will have to do further down the line – the really difficult thinking work that will certainly make my writing better, but will be tiring and challenging and just plain hard to do.

The thing I am trying to do now is talk myself off that distant ledge: I am not there. No one has read my work yet, or been able to dislike it (or like it); I don’t have to anticipate all the negatives here. They may come, they may not. Past experience of peer review has shown me that as much as critique hurts, it is almost always helpful, and I have been far prouder of the revised papers than I would have been of the first versions I wrote. I have to get out of my own way long enough to be brave, write the thing, and send it to people who are willing and keen to read it and offer me input and advice.

psychcentral-blogs

Psych Central Blogs

The thing that gets theses and books and papers and blogposts written is writing them. I have to be better at taking my own advice, make time for those promised pomodoros, and protect my writing from all the other work I use to sabotage it. I need to just focus on now, and what I need to write today, and tomorrow and this week, and then next, and stop trying to see so far into the future. Perhaps that will mitigate the fear of critique and more work that seems to be freezing me up now. I just have to write, and I will. Simba, here me roar!

 

**

“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, “Simba!”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Research problems: too big, too small or just right?

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I have been working, in recent weeks, with two groups of postgraduate students working on research proposals. These workshops were planned specifically to assist these students with clarifying their research problem, research questions and potential argument. This is turning out to be a little tougher than I thought it would be. There seem, right now, to be two reasons for this: the first is that focusing on just one small, manageable project is difficult when there are so many possible things that could be researched and written about. The second is more about experience, and learning to trust that if one follows a research process and a supervisor, the results will be positive in the end.

Size and scope: finding a research problem you can solve

The first place you start with any research project is with the problem that needs to be solved. Sometimes, as postgraduate students (especially at more junior levels, like Honours and Masters) you may be guided quite firmly to a research problem by your supervisor, perhaps connected to their own research. Most of the time, hopefully, you are able to find one that excites and interests you, and that you really want to find out more about. In the first case, it may be easier to focus on a problem of manageable size and scope, because that may well be part of the process of guiding you to that problem. But most of the time, you will need to work out, through a process of reading, writing and working with supervisor feedback, what the right size and scope of your project is.

goldilocks

 

This is not necessarily an easy or even quick process, and finding your way to the research problem that is neither too big, nor too small, can be frustrating. I started my own PhD sending my supervisor an email outlining my research problem, thinking – here we go! She emailed back a week later outlining the four or five (!!) PhD theses I could actually be researching based on that email. She helpfully outlined them all as she saw them, and then asked me which one I wanted  pursue. This, of course, was partly very helpful and exciting, and partly anxiety-inducing. Surely just that one seemingly small problem was in no way big enough for a whole PhD? I had to trust her experience and wisdom on this, and I am so glad I did because that problem was indeed big enough, and if I had fought her and tried to think I knew better, I may have had a much more frustrating time researching and writing my thesis.

I think, based on my conversations with these students in my workshops, and my own experience, that part of the anxiety is that we make the project too big in our heads. We make it everything about ourselves and our work as students at that particular level. We try to write ALL the PhDs and MAs and Honours mini-theses in our one small project. Part of this urge to do ALL the research may stem from a fear that if we just make one small, but clear, argument we won’t be doing enough to prove we are worthy of the degree being awarded, or what comes after. Part of it may stem from an unwillingness to choose, because it means closing doors on other ideas and projects that also interest us.

decisions

What I had to learn, and what all postgraduate students and researchers need to learn, is to manage one project at a time, and to resist turning the PhD (or MA or Honours project) into everything. Especially at PhD level, which often leads to a career based on academic research, writing and possibly also teaching, the PhD is the door-opener to that career, not the career itself. It is the stepping stone to other and further research and writing, not the best and brightest piece of research you will ever do. As lovely husband kept telling me: ‘It’s a project. You have to manage it well and move on’.

What this means for finding and defining your research problem is that you need to firstly, trust your supervisor when they caution you about aiming too high and going too big. They’ve done this before you, they have learned some of the lessons already, and their advice comes from their desire for you to succeed and not spend months and years floundering on a project you cannot realistically manage or complete. Secondly, you need to be brave enough to close doors to other shiny and interesting ideas and projects and keep them closed until your PhD or MA is finished. They’re not barred forever – there are many problems to solve, and many ways to solve them and if you’re signing up for academia, you’ll have time to reopen doors and revisit ideas you’ve had to put on hold while working on the PhD or MA.

revolving doorhotel-corridor

Continuing to read, look for theory, change methodologies, look for new and more data, and so on will likely pull you in too many different directions, and will slow your progress on the project in front of you. Moreover, it may actually lead you to feeling that the project you are actually working on is holding you back from and making you give up on other cool projects and possibilities, creating a potentially negative and fractious relationship with it. It is worth remembering that this project – PhD, MA or Honours – is actually going to open doors for you to many other exciting opportunities for work and research, but it can only do that if you finish it, and get your degree, and have the skills, knowledge and abilities to move on to whatever comes next.

A first step is finding one small, defined and focused research problem that you can actually follow up on in the timeframe you have, and with the resources at your disposal. Focusing on one thing, while this does mean at least temporarily pushing other things into the background, will give you the space and time to do what a postgraduate degree is really trying to do: help you develop your capacity for more independent thinking, reading, writing and argumentation.

 

Slogging away, slouching and sailing: developing a research work ethic

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Recently I read a post on one of my favourite blogs written by Susan Carter on managing emotion in doctoral supervision, and in doctoral writing. What stood out for me were her comments on managing emotions around producing written work for comment and feedback. She comments that she no longer gets emotional about her writing; as an experienced academic she knows it is part of her job, and something she just has to do (and likes doing). She comments that students and academics would be helped by having a ‘workerly’ approach to writing, and also by learning to manage emotions that can lead to writing blocks or paralysis.

This notion of a ‘workerly’ approach to academic writing has been floating around in my head since I read her post a few months ago. I think I have developed a more workerly approach to writing in the last two years especially; I have chosen an academic career and I do know that producing publishable writing is something I need to do as part of this career. I like writing, and while I don’t enjoy all the kinds of writing and reading I have to do, on the whole I derive pleasure from these scholarly activities.

But I still get emotional about my own writing; I still get stuck, and down, and worry about whether and how I will get up again. I do, however, get up. This being down and getting up and carrying on has to do with being resilient, and part of this is developing and maintaining a work ethic about research and writing. By this, I specifically mean working more consciously on what Susan Carter speaks about in her post: learning to manage emotions so that they do not block your progress, and being a little more ‘workerly’ about your writing.

Waiting for the mojo (can leave you waiting a long time)

I, like many writers, have what I think of as my ‘writing mojo’. I am sure many of you have experienced the mojo when it is strong – the ideas flow and the words come and the sentences hang together, and you sail through a morning’s writing that leaves you with a pretty brilliant piece of work to send to a supervisor, or build on tomorrow. These mornings are what keep me going, sometimes – knowing that on the days when the mojo seems weaker, days of sunny sailing through writing are still possible, and will come again.

The reality is that most mornings or days of writing are not necessarily like this. They see me slogging away at a measly 100 words, slouched over my computer, getting up every ten minutes because I can’t concentrate for longer, or find the right word, or figure out what I want to say. I agonise over synonyms, and wonder if I have used ‘like’ too many times. I edit, more than I create. It is hard, painful work. It makes me feel frustrated, and inadequate, and slow.

This is me when I am working on my writing, metaphorical quill in hand, completely idealistic task list mocking me gently

These emotions are difficult to manage. But manage them I must, otherwise the mojo may not return. I am learning that all that slogging is necessary for the brief bright mornings of sailing through my writing to be possible. If I spent all my writing time waiting for the mojo to be strong, and the ideas to flow, I might be waiting a very long time, and I’m not sure I’d get much writing done at all. This, then, is when I need to be workerly in my approach to my writing.

Planning and pragmatism

Being workerly, to me, means being pragmatic, and planning my time as carefully and realistically as I can. It means instead of messing around on email, I need to make myself sit down for two or three pomodoros to read two or three relevant papers and make notes. It means setting myself one task for a morning or a day: writing an introduction, or coding a small set of data, and holding myself to that task until it is done. This, for me, is slogging. It is the work of being an academic writer that is often boring, and tedious (especially coding and transcribing data), and it feels like trudging through treacle because I’m not actually producing something tangible to show for my time spent at my desk (yet).

Yet, in the midst of this slogging is where my work ethic is formed and strengthened. The ability to push through the tedium, boredom, frustration and anxiety and continue to do the small tasks that make the mojo stronger and make sailing through the writing possible is part of what it is to be an academic writer. It requires fortitude; sometimes it probably feels like you are being unkind to yourself when you have to make yourself work on part of your paper or PhD on a Saturday morning when the week has been long, and you are tired. But all those little tasks, especially the difficult ones, build your work ethic and your researcher resilience, and they move you forward.

mojo giftThere are no easy answers to building and strengthening a work ethic, especially when you are a part-time student with many other demands on your time and headspace. But it helps me to remember that the mojo isn’t magic: it’s created over time through many small, seemingly unconnected tasks that all add up to a finished project if I sit up straight and slog away.