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Detox Your Writing: Strategies for doctoral researchers PDF

227 Pages·2016·1.475 MB·English
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Detox Your Writing There are a number of books which aim to help doctoral researchers write the PhD. This book offers something different – the scholarly detox. This is not a faddish alternative, it’s not extreme. It’s a moderate approach intended to gently interrupt old ways of doing things and establish new habits and orientations to writing the PhD. The book addresses the problems that most doctoral researchers experience at some time during their candidature – being unclear about their contribution, feeling lost in the literature, feeling like an imposter, not knowing how to write with authority, wanting to edit rather than revise. Each chapter addresses a problem, suggests an alternative framing, and then offers strategies designed to address the real issue. Detox Your Writingis intended to be a companionable workbook – something doctoral researchers can use throughout their doctorate to ask questions about taken-for-granted ways of writing and reading, and to develop new and effective approaches. The authors’ distinctive approach to doctoral writing mobilises the rich traditions of linguistic scholarship, as well as the literature on scholarly identity formation. Building on years of expertise they place their emphasis both on tools and techniques as well as the discursive practices of becoming a scholar. The authors provide a wide repertoire of strategies that doctoral researchers can select from. The book is a toolkit but a far from a prescriptive one. It shows that there are many routes to developing a personal academic voice and identity and a well-crafted text. With points for reflection alongside examples from a broad range of disciplines, the book offers tools for thinking, writing and reading that are relevant to all stages of doctoral research. This practical text can be used in all university doctoral training and composition and writing courses. However, it is not a dry how-to-do-it manual that ignores debates or focuses solely on the mechanical at the expense of the lived experience of doctoral research. It provides a practical, theorised, real-world guide to postgraduate writing. Pat Thomson is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies, at The University of Nottingham, a Visiting Professor at Deakin University, the University of Iceland, and The University of the Free State, South Africa. Barbara Kamler is Emeritus Professor at Deakin University. This page intentionally left blank Detox Your Writing Strategies for doctoral researchers Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler First published 2016 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 © 2016 P. Thomson & B. Kamler The right of P. Thomson & B. Kamler 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. 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 Names: Thomson, Pat, 1948– author. | Kamler, Barbara, author. Title: Detox your writing : strategies for doctoral researchers/authored by Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler. Description: 1st edition. | New York, NY : Routlege, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2015031879| ISBN 9780415820837 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780415820844 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315642604 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Dissertations, Academic – Authorship. | Research – Methodology – Study and teaching (Graduate) Classification: LCC LB2369 .T466 2016 | DDC 808.02–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015031879 ISBN: 978-0-415-82083-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-82084-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64260-4 (ebk) Typeset in Giovanni by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK Contents Acknowledgements and permissions vi 1 Introduction 1 2 Understanding the doctoral game 15 3 Beginning literature work 34 4 Finding your place 59 5 Learning to argue 83 6 Performing your research 107 7 Structuring the thesis 129 8 Writing the researcher into the text 149 9 Revising the first draft 169 10 Writing as the expert scholar 191 Coda 211 References 213 Index 217 Acknowledgements and permissions Some of this book originally appeared as posts in Pat’s blog, Patter (patthomson. net). We have also drawn extensively on the work of other bloggers who generously share their expertise and experiences with the scholarly community – Claire Aitchison, Rebecca Coles, Adam Crymble, Sophie Coulombeau, Athene Donald, Paul Cairney, Rachael Cayley, Cally Guerin, Nick Hopwood and Ian Robson. We have used pictures that we first saw on Twitter, and we thank Simon Carter, John Goodwin, and Dave McKenna for permission to reproduce them here. As always, our publisher, Philip Mudd, has been a source of encouragement and helpful suggestions. We always benefit from his extensive knowledge of the interactions between the academy and the publishing industry. We appreciate the ongoing support from our Routledge team and the promotion of our books at conferences around the world. Our partners, Greg and Randy, provide continuing TLC, meals and perspective. Their tolerance of our intensive first draft writing retreats and bizarre early morning/late night international skyping habits are legend. We really couldn’t have done any of this without them. And finally, we want to thank each other. This is our third book, the fourth if you count a second edition, and it marks a 15-year collaboration. It is also our last book together and we’ve signed it off with very mixed feelings. Writing together has been an important part of our lives for a long time, and we’ll both miss it, and each other. Love ya B. Love ya P. 1 C H A P T E Introduction R You have begun your doctoral studies. You’re fired up about the area of study you are pursuing. You know you have to hone your research skills and you know you have to write a thesis. Exciting? Yes, but also terrifying at the same time. Writing – this may be where the problem begins. The idea of writing. Everyone brings to the doctorate a wide array of experiences as a writer; some positive, some less so. From all your previous experience of writing essays, assignments or minor theses you have developed what we might call a disposition to writing: strategies for and habits of writing. You may have developed metaphors for how to think about working with research data or with research literatures – some productive, some not. These habits and metaphors are often developed unconsciously and you may not be aware of how they influence your actual text production. But they do. Most doctoral researchers worry about writing. When Pat and Barbara meet with groups of doctoral or early career researchers we often ask, ‘Who feels confident about writing?’ No hands go up. Perhaps one. ‘Who feels competent as a writer?’ A few more hands. ‘How many of you feel that you write adequately?’ Maybe half. ‘And poorly?’ The other half. Despite having reached the highest level of study in the university, many doctoral researchers approach writing with some anxiety and high emotion. Can I do it? Am I up to it? How do I ever get hold of all this new stuff and make sense of it in writing? How can I write 250+ pages? There is certainly a lot of advice about how to approach writing. Writing advice is here, there and everywhere – it’s in books, on the web, in social media, at the pub. How to tell what is good and bad advice? ‘Always do this. Never do that. You must, you should, what works for me is . . .’ Making sense of all of the well- intentioned advice can be tricky. There are lots of urban myths out there too; the researcher who wrote for 2 hours a day and finished their thesis in record time, the researcher who never wrote anything until the last minute and passed with flying colours. Dealing with well-established textual habits, bad metaphors and writing myths can be a problem for the researcher new to doctoral writing. Clearly these need to be addressed. 2 INTRODUCTION What is the way forward? Our answer is the detox. The detox, as you know, is not about giving up all the things we like – but pausing to examine the over- processed, mass-produced, genetically modified things we take into our bodies and take for granted. The detox involves a period of healthy eating and drinking: crisp carrots, crunchy celery, watermelon juice. It’s a time to try out some new strategies for living. Once we take a break from our usual consumption patterns, we can decide what to reintroduce and what to leave behind, what to eat sparingly and what new habits we might establish. This book offers a scholarly detox. It is written specifically for you, the doctoral researcher and for those times when you’re likely to feel out of sorts, bloated and out of shape.It asks you to stop doing things you usually do, just for a little while, and reflect. It’s not that all your writing and reading is dysfunctional or incorrect. Rather, now might be a good time to take a look at the textual habits you have developed. You’ve probably been taught to approach reading and writing in particular ways and have developed your own coping mechanisms and your own strategies. But it’s likely that none of these have been for a task as sustained, intense and demanding as the doctorate. You might think the idea of a detox is a bit peculiar in an academic book. After all, the detox gets a lot of bad press. It’s commonly associated with snake-oil salespeople peddling the latest recipe for lifelong health and happiness. And a steady diet of kale juice or spirulina wheatgrass cocktails followed by colonic irrigation can leave you feeling hungry, irritable and uncomfortable. You might even experience low energy, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness and nausea. Feeling ravenous and deprived makes most people rebellious and resentful. It’s no wonder so many people start these culinary assault courses only to stop them in very quick time. Fortunately there are many different kinds of detoxes and they don’t all offer the extreme lean mean green diet. The scholarly detox we propose is not a faddish alternative, it’s not extreme. It’s a moderate approach intended to gently interrupt old ways of doing things. We hope it will help you establish new habits and orientations. We intend this book to be a companionable workbook – something you can use throughout the doctorate when you feel the need to stop and examine what you’re doing. We want you to ask questions about your taken-for-granted ways of writing and reading, about your disposition to writing and its effects, about the ways you structure language and the action it supports. We’ll offer a range of tools to think with and practical strategies to try out. These are our detox essentials. In Pat’s blog, Patter, she often reflects on the critical issues and obstacles doctoral researchers face. Recently she discussed the dangers of self-diagnosing writing habits. Not a bad thing to do, as we suggest. But the risk of getting it wrong is ever present (see Commentary: Pat Thomson). The complex and sometimes terrifying aspects of academic writing are too often mistaken as individual pathology INTRODUCTION 3 COMMENTARY Pat Thomson The perils of self-diagnosis I reckon it’s very good to know about your or as crippling as popular media headlines own writing habits. It’s especially good for and online discussions might suggest. people just starting out on an academic Let’s face it. Not all writing goes career. There’s a bunch of pretty helpful smoothly. Some academic writing takes a information out there about good writing long time and is hard. But the problem habits and writing problems enabling might not be writer’s block. It might just you to match what you see yourself doing/ be that you haven’t yet sorted out what you not doing with helpful general writing want to say. It might be that you need to strategies and insights. Reading about talk the writing over with someone, or do academic writing, as well as reading about some more reading, or go back to the data the nature of the difficulties that you might or the texts. be having with your writing, can lead you Let’s be honest. Having a mountain of to some very helpful advice, new resources data is really terrifying. There is no right and productive #acwri avenues. answer to how you analyse data, even But observation and reading about though there are often recommended #acwri can also make you unnecessarily analytic procedures. It’s very normal at anxious. And maybe you’ll leap to a pre - the start of dealing with a pantechnicon mature diagnosis. Stuck on writing a of material to feel a considerable degree of paper? It must be writer’s block. Having trepidation. We all do. It’s not unusual. difficulty sorting through the mountain of It’s not because you’re dim-witted that it data? It must be that you’re not capable. feels overwhelming. Feeling really nervous about giving that The risk of self-diagnosis lies in the paper? Must be a crippling case of im - tension between knowing yourself and poster syndrome. Finding yourself pausing getting it wrong. It’s clearly good to while writing? Must have a hyperactive understand your own writing habits, just inner editor. as it’s good to watch out for changes in Now, I don’t want to suggest that any your body. But a rush to self-diagnose of these things – writer’s block, being in- an #acwri condition isn’t always helpful. capable, imposter syndrome, hyper active You may well get your diagnosis wrong. inner editors and so on – aren’t real. They You may think you have an unusual are, very. I don’t want to suggest that these problem and feel dreadful, when in reality things don’t debilitate and prevent some what’s going on is a widely shared people from getting on with their PhD or experience. with a writing project. They do. They really Academic writing is hard for most do. But these things aren’t as widespread people. But, if you exercise your writing

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.