Obstacles 5

Obstacle: My supervisor is an idiot; why should I listen to him?

Uh oh. What makes you so sure it’s your supervisor who’s the idiot?

Students sometimes stop hearing their supervisors, usually when the ‘going gets tough’. Before any student concludes that his or her supervisor is a write-off, the student needs to step back, assess the evidence, and consider alternative accounts.  

Tips

1.  Take a deep breath. Pause and consider. Is there a sub-text that you might have missed? Try to articulate exactly what it is that spurs this judgment.

2.  Consult your third-party monitor or postgraduate tutor. Sometimes talking it through with someone experienced can expose information the student has missed. Sometimes an intervention is required, and the third-party monitor can help arrange that. Sometimes (rarely) a change of supervisor is called for, in which case the third-party monitor can help you through the procedures.

Obstacle: Writing

“things are in mind but presentation…how?”

“lack of clarity … finding a clear structure”

“use too much words/sentences to write something that my supervisor does in 1/5 words (probably lack of vocabulary or bad presentation skills)”

“writing style:  need to develop an academic style”

“when describing results in graphs, it’s easy to grasp from a table, but difficult to explain the same in words”

Writing is not a single activity. It is not just ‘writing down’, not just a simple transcription from mind to page.  Rather, it is many activities: analysing, elaborating, remembering, synthesising, mapping, ordering, articulating, clarifying, editing, criticising, structuring, sense making – as well as transcribing. With so many cognitive activities interacting, of course it’s complex and demanding. Having the right expectations about it helps to make it less daunting. Having a few disciplines helps to make it manageable.

For many people, writing is associated with fear. Educators talk about ‘fear of failure’ (anxiety about the consequences of getting it wrong or ‘not being good enough’ becomes an obstacle to engagement and progress) and ‘fear of success’ (anxiety about the consequences – the increased expectations – associated with success becomes an obstacle). It’s important to recognise and face your fears. OK, so it’s scary. But it’s not impossible. The key realisation is that any writing is better than no writing.  

Tips

1.  Separate the activities.

Once you’ve written something down, you’ve reduced the number of activities you have to do. Separating the activities is one of the disciplines that can help in writing. Writing can be approached as a series of ‘passes’:  dumping ideas, prioritising ideas, putting ideas in order, elaborating an initial structure, generating sentences from notes, editing for structure, editing for language, checking for redundancy, editing for ‘voice’, and so on.  One of the most important aspects to isolate is ‘dumping ideas’. Once you’ve got something on paper, you can shift from generating to responding, and turn ‘writing’ into ‘editing’ for a while. One of Marian’s personal rules is:  no editing until everything is written once.

2.  KISS (keep it simple, stupid).

KISS is a principle that applies to most design activities. The simplest language that does the job – the simplest vocabulary, sentence structure, and rhetorical structure – is often the best. Keeping it simple is different from ‘schematic writing’. Whereas schematic writing reduces expression to the barest essentials (leaving out much of the detail and often realism), good ‘simple’ writing provides all the necessary information and detail in the most direct way possible. Think of the difference between the London Underground map and an Ordnance Survey map. Both represent the key paths, but one does so realistically, maintaining the relationships of the paths to the surrounding context and indicating the nature of the terrain.

3.  Practice, practice, practice.

Writing is a skill, and like most skills it improves and becomes easier with practice. Make a commitment to write something every day, and to produce a finished piece of writing – a couple of pages – every week. Try to present material in writing at every supervision session.  

4.  Reflect.

When someone critiques your writing, take the time to analyse the critique:  why did the critic make those comments or suggest those changes?

If someone copyedits or re-drafts your writing, take the time to analyse the changes:  why those changes, what do they change, and how do they improve the prose?

Obstacle: Writer’s block

Writing is hard. Academic writing, requiring precision of thought and expression, is hard. Everyone gets blocked sometime (even if some don’t recall or admit it). So it’s a good idea to have some coping strategies. There are lots of books on writing that offer lots of tips and tricks. 

If you have trouble writing something, it probably means you haven’t got it clear in your mind yet. Write whatever you can, and then consider why it’s so uncomfortable, or seems incomplete. Gnarled sentences often signal tangled thoughts – so look again at the dense bits.

Tips

1.  Anything is better than nothing.  Don’t worry if it’s ‘good enough’.  It probably won’t be until you finish writing it – writing it is part of the process of making it ‘good enough’. Remember: until you put marks on paper and let people scrutinise them, you won’t be able to get feedback about how well you’ve managed to convey your ideas, or on how interesting your ideas are, or on what insights they inspire in others.

Lots of writing tricks are to do with just getting the process started, regardless of the product. Marian’s brother (a successful, professional journalist) makes a ‘contract’ with himself to throw away the first 15 minutes of his writing. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t, but thinking of the starting material as expendable frees him to release the words. A similar trick is the ‘writing burst’ (called different things by different people), in which you set a timer for 5 minutes and just write whatever comes to mind in that time. The point is to get the words out of your mind and through your fingers onto paper or screen.

2.  Exploit the relationship between talking and writing. If you can’t write your ideas, can you explain them to a friend? Go for coffee with a buddy and a tape recorder. Speaking your ideas requires you to put them in order and prioritise them for communication, possibly without binding you into anxieties about correct language.

Get your friend to tell it back to you – they’ll probably only remember what struck them as the important bits, and they just might help simplify, clarify, or structure your thinking.

3.  Play ‘Eliza’. Eliza was a computer program that simulated a therapeutic dialogue. Actually, the programme only had a limited number of conversational gambits, none of which added any new information, but those few could be effectively elicitative. So to play the Eliza game, you simply start with an initial remark and then build on that through some simple-minded questioning. For example: ‘I want to write about purple elephants.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because purple elephants are more interesting than grey ones.’ ‘What makes them more interesting?’ ‘Because most elephants are grey, and purple ones are unusual.’  ‘Are all purple ones unusual?’ Every so often you can throw in a non sequitur (Although it doesn’t have to be ‘What do purple elephants have to do with your mother?’). What you’re doing is asking yourself repeatedly: what do I think, why do I think it, and why should anyone else care?

3.  Write before you edit. Sometimes people get locked into editing cycles in their minds even before the first draft reaches the paper. Such people can produce exquisitely-formed paragraphs – but only very slowly, possibly so slowly that they never get all the way through a draft. Discipline yourself to ‘dump’ the whole story before you let yourself go back over any part of it.

4.  Calibrate: make sure everyone is ‘on the same page’, expecting work of the same scale, scope, and precision. I watched an excellent student/supervisor team in conflict once in which the supervisor was frustrated with the student, who for weeks had failed to produce a progress report. Finally, the supervisor went to the student and said ‘Let’s do it together’. He sat at the computer and directed her through the informal 2-3 pages he wanted from her. At the end, she said: ‘Oh, is that all you wanted?’ – she’d been trying to produce a publication-quality, comprehensive, 20-page report.

5.  Get help. Sometimes a simple ‘third-party intervention’ can unblock a writer. Sometimes a conversation over a soothing cup of tea accompanied by chocolate biscuits is enough. Your helper can take notes or map your ideas as you discuss them. Alternatively, someone can act as an amanuensis, transcribing or interpreting what you speak into written form. This has the effect of getting you past the first draft stage – sometimes by capturing something that’s so distorted that you just have to fix it. Alternatively, someone can take you through a critical question-and-answer session that exposes and ultimately prioritises the key ideas, and sorts them into a story.  Some people have a talent for elicitation; identify them and use their help.

6.  Identify action points and objectives. This is a ‘divide and conquer’ approach that breaks the apparently monolithic task of writing into smaller, potentially less threatening tasks. It provides a mechanism for recognising progress.

7.  Seek instrumental feedback.  Vague feedback from supervisors such as ‘You need to say more about this’ can incite student panic. Students need to seek – and supervisors need to give– specific, informative feedback that helps the student see what actions to take.

Obstacle: Structuring an argument

“The student does not grasp how to structure and defend an argument, despite direct tuition and example.”

The obstacle supervisors and examiners cite most frequently is this one, reflected primarily in the student’s writing, but also in the student’s discussion. Some students have this crucial skill when they start; others must learn it. Learning a subtle and advanced skill requires analysis of exemplars, deliberate practice, and reflection over time.  

Going from ideas to notes is usually reasonably easy. So what’s the difference between notes and prose?  Usually: structure, order, and complete sentences. The key is finding the right structure – first the structure of the ideas, and then the linear structure of the argument or story you want to make about the ideas.

Tips

1.  The master class.  Get someone who knows how it’s done to work through your paper line-by-line while talking about what they’re doing. Watch what they do, consider how they think, note the process. Your supervisor might do this, or you might call in a third party, possibly someone you haven’t worked with before.  

2.  Third-party intervention, on both technical content and presentation. Get someone who writes will and who is not your supervisor – preferably after consultation with your supervisor – to talk through your writing.  Sometimes hearing the same critique in different words can help.

3.  Study examples.  Gather a collection of papers that present arguments well and analyse what it is that they do. Extract outlines of key points and consider how one idea leads to the next. Ask your supervisor and other students for exemplars.

4.  Learn by exchanging critiques with other students.  Students can teach each other a great deal through their criticism, example, and stories. Exchange writing: critique each other’s papers, looking specifically at how the argument is structured and conveyed.

5.  Mind maps.  Once you’ve got all the ideas mapped out, then you can try to arrange them into a linear order.

6.  Put ideas on index cards – one to a card – and then ‘sort’ or arrange them in different collections or structures. Again, you can do this in a series of ‘passes’:  grouping by relatedness of concepts, grouping in terms of dependency, grouping thematically, prioritising, ordering… Trying to sort the idea cards in different ways can help reveal ideas that don’t fit (so that you consider why they don’t and why you want to include them) and also highlight the ideas that are focal.

7.  Outlining.  Experienced writers often advise writing a very detailed outline as a first step.  Different sorts of outlines can help:

• content outline:  just a detailed hierarchical structure for the content (headings and sub-headings)
• headings with small abstracts for each, indicating the story line
• headings with ‘roles’:  what the section is and why it’s there, how it serves the overall argument.

Obstacle: Lack of a critical voice and academic style

Again, this is a matter of practice and experience.

Tips

1.  Collect exemplars of papers that have a good writing style and an appropriate voice. Analyse the collection:  What do the examples have in common? What makes them appeal to you? How do they handle tough aspects of writing? How do they highlight and present key ideas? How do they introduce vocabulary? When you’re writing, consider how one of those authors might have structured or phrased your material. See if there’s an analogous passage in one of them that you can use as a model.

2.  Work reflectively with other students.  Voice and style (how a writer addresses the implied reader) operate at a number of levels through the writing: the structure of the argument, the way evidence is presented, the ‘signposting’ in the document through headings and other typography, the use of tables, illustrations and examples, the use of literature, the way key terms are introduced and defined, the phrasing, the precision of details like citations and referencing. Some of this is at the word level, some at the sentence level, some at the paragraph level, and so on – up to the ‘story’ level. It’s worth taking multiple passes through a paper, just concentrating on one thing at a time.  

Discuss exemplar papers with other students. Read and critique each other’s writing – especially, consider exactly how to make improvements that are needed. Consider issues such as ‘voice’, use of rhetorical devices, use of tables and illustrations, and so on.

We use a number of ‘highlighter’ tests to draw attention to voice and writing, e.g.:

• Get someone else to highlight what they see as the key ideas in the paper. Where to they occur (good writing will put them at the beginning of sections, distributed reasonably evenly).
• Get someone else to highlight the ‘difficult’ sentences, ones that are hard to understand, unwieldy or otherwise problematic. Difficult sentences often indicate something that isn’t fully thought out yet.
• Get someone else to highlight the sentences that could only have been written by someone with specialist knowledge of your field.

Obstacle: Staying within the word limit

“The first draft ran out at 330,000 words.”

Some students worry about writing enough – after all, most have never written anything longer than an undergraduate essay or possibly a Masters dissertation. But some are burdened with writing too much. Both concerns focus on the same imponderable: how big is a Ph.D.? Unfortunately, one learns to answer that question implicitly, through experience. And so most students must rely on their supervisors to advise them about choosing a problem of the right scope.  

It’s worth reminding students that authority is often conveyed through selection: making a good selection (say, identifying key literature) suggests a much broader knowledge and informed choice (e.g., in order to select only the most pertinent references, one must be conversant with the literature and understand clearly what is pertinent and what is not. Insightful coverage in the selection of references suggests much more substantial reading). Conversely, writing that ‘includes too much’ is often a sign of a novice, of someone without the insight or confidence to prune.

Tips

1.  Read ‘passed’ dissertations.

Find out what ‘enough’ has meant for other students in your field.

2.  Start writing early, and often.

Problems with writing – including prolixity – are best diagnosed early and are almost always evident in smaller writing samples. It’s good discipline to produce written documents throughout your studies, so that your supervisors can be helping you with presentation as well as content from the beginning. If you write continually as you progress, then ‘writing up’ is not something that comes as a shock, but the culmination of a cumulative process providing substantial existing material.

3.  Start thinking about dissertation structure and content early.

One supervisor advises his students during their first supervision meeting to set up a document called ‘dissertation’ which has a title page featuring the student’s current research title, a table of contents, chapters, and bibliography in a classic initial thesis structure (introduction, literature review, methodology, studies, conclusions and future work). He recommends that students begin to populate this document as their work progresses. For example, their first-year literature review is written as a dissertation chapter. The effect is to reinforce that all of the work students undertake during their studies is leading to this document. Students start their research by thinking about the outcome, about the ‘big picture’, and about telling one coherent story at the end.

If you know yourself to be a wordy writer, then assign word counts to the dissertation sections in advance (if nothing else, you can divide the 100,000-word limit by the number of chapters), and monitor yourself while you write.  If you start running over, then take remedial action.

4.  Write a new 250-word abstract every 3 months and consider where the focus is and whether it has diverged from your previous focus.

It may not be necessary to take the ‘chapters’ approach, but keeping an eye on what Thomas Green (a venerable academic famous for helping students through their Ph.D.s) calls the ‘great overall scheme of things’ is crucial to effective research, even if the GOST may change.  The key to keeping writing focused is to know what the focus is.  Once you have the GOST clearly in mind, it is easier to be ruthless in pruning away material that does not contribute directly to the focal thesis.

5.  The shoebox

Students often over-write because they can’t bear to throw anything away; they worked too hard for it. Well, they don’t have to. It’s much easier to be ruthless in pruning away any material not directly relevant to your thesis if you have a home for the ‘clippings’. Keep a notional ‘shoebox under the bed’, one safe place where you collect the prunings and out-takes, so that you can revisit them and develop them later. The ‘shoebox’ may be a notebook, or a collection of computer files, whatever works for you as a safe collection. Most students do more work than they report in their dissertations.

6.  KISS:  Keep it simple, stupid.

Arguments don’t have to be fancy to be effective. Say it straight.  If it doesn’t stand up as a bald statement, then embellishment won’t help. But also understand that ‘simplicity’ is not just a matter of word count – sometimes a few more words can make the writing simpler and more accessible.

Enormous writing that needs to be pruned (i.e., what to do when prevention fails):

1.  Identify the ‘red thread’.

Focussed writing requires a focus:  what is the thesis, the focal argument, the ‘narrative spine’?  In Sweden, the narrative spine is sometimes referred to as ‘the red thread’, like a single coloured thread running through a fabric.  Hence the first step in cutting material significantly is to undertake a ‘red thread analysis:

•             what’s the focal argument?
•             how does each piece contribute to it?
•             articulate the role of each section.

Be ruthless in setting aside material that does not contribute to the ‘red thread’

2.  Highlighter test.  This is a good way to review the structure of the argument. Redundancy often results when you’re not sure where something fits, and so you distribute bits of it all over the place. Get a friend to highlight just the core concepts in the dissertation. Tell your friend to be selective. Then just read through the highlighted sentences. Do they make a clear and coherent story? Is what’s highlighted what you expected? If not, then you’ve failed to communicate effectively to your reader. Where do the highlighted sentences occur? Are the evenly distributed across the document, and do they appear in prominent, accessible locations?

2.  Eliminate redundancy.

Most writing that’s well over the word limit is also overblown, typically containing massive redundancy. Identify all the repetitions of an idea, decide where that idea really needs to be introduced, and then cut the repetition.

3.  Cut the flab.

Prolix writing also often contains overblown language, verbose statements, and ‘flab’ – words that fatten sentences without improving their effectiveness. As we say of some students: ‘Why use one word when ten will do?’ Edit for unnecessary adjectives, unsubstantiated assertions, baroque sentence structures. For some writers, just a simple search for words like ‘very’ can cut the word count by hundreds.

Obstacle: Criticism and correction

“How should a student be corrected when progress is not sufficient?”

A supervisor says to a student: “This latest work isn’t good enough.” Contrast two student responses:  “Why do you hate me?” versus “OK, how can I fix it?” The former creates a barrier between supervisor and student. The latter gets the work done. Don’t take criticism personally. If anything, feel gratified that someone is taking your work seriously enough to give it consideration. ‘Giving it to you straight’ is a form of respect: your supervisor is treating you as someone of character and strength whose goal is to do good work.

Remember that your supervisor does you no favours by withholding criticism. Pointing out deficiencies early gives you a chance to correct them and to learn from them. It is reasonable for you to expect support in correcting deficiencies. The more specific you can be in your requests for help, the easier it will be for your supervisor to help you.

Tips

1.  Take a deep breath.  

Set your emotions aside and engage your intellect. Try to understand the nature and scope of the criticism.  Assume that your supervisor is speaking to you in good faith. You may find it useful to vent your emotions separately in a good ‘rant’ to a friend, but it’s best not to abuse your supervisor.

2.  Seek reassurance about issues of concern, e.g.:

• Enough data?
• Clear expression of ideas?
• Is it OK to make the transition from plan to execution?
• Is the writing good enough (grammar, argument, conventions, content…)?
• Is the scope of the research appropriate:  is it enough?
• Is the research related appropriately to existing literature/research?
• Is planned dissertation structure OK?
• What is important?
• Am I meeting objectives well? satisfactorily? marginally?
• Am I achieving an appropriate critical voice?
• Is my analysis at doctoral standard?
• Is my focus clear and appropriate? 

3.  If the work is not up to Ph.D. standard, then strive for clarification about its deficiencies and how to correct them.  

• Ask for exemplars and analyse how they differ from your work.
• Ask for a ‘master class’ – to be shown how to do the activity that’s causing trouble.
• Iterate and ask for specific guidance about whether the revisions are sufficient improvement.
• Ask for external input – sometimes hearing the same thing in different words or from someone else can help.

3.  Take notes of your supervision meetings, and send a precis to your supervisors, noting especially any actions and objectives. This gives them a chance to detect misunderstandings early.

4.  Remember: the only stupid question is the one you didn’t ask.

Very often the simplest, most basic, or most fundamental questions are the ones the give insight into the misunderstanding.

5.  Write a new 250-word abstract every 3 months and consider where the focus is and whether it has diverged from your previous focus.

6.  Ask your supervisor what’s good about your work.

Too often we focus on what needs to be fixed, at the expense of recognising what’s working just fine.  OU tutors specialise in something called ‘the OU sandwich’:  point out something credit-worthy, deliver the necessary criticism, then remind the student about the good bits. Unfortunately, not all supervisors remember the sandwich – and not all students listen when compliments are delivered.  So, if you’re feeling gutted and miserable, ask your supervisor to articulate what you did well, after you’ve taken in the criticism.