Reading like a writer

It seems I am the third person in the School of Graduate Research to be struck down by a flu like thing in less than 24 hours. At least I think so. I complained about feeling a bit poorly and the boss was more than happy to hurry me out the door.

Which is why I find myself at home, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, highly medicated. What’s that I hear you say? Perfect time to write a Whisperer post? Why not – but I don’t feel up to delving into my reader request pile, so I will do a book review.

Part of our mission at the whisperer is to take some of the PhD reading burden off your shoulders, specifically by reviewing books on writing and doing your thesis. The other day in the library I noticed just how many books there are on this topic. Here is a snapshot of just two of the shelves in the 800′s section in RMIT’s library – and these are books just on editing for goodness sake. What’s a PhD student to do?

Anyway, the other day a paperback in the creative writing section by Francine Prose called “Reading like a writer” caught my eye. I vaguely recalled hearing her interviewed on the radio a few years ago, so I borrowed it even though it wasn’t strictly on topic.

Well – what a gem this book is.

As I have said before - if a book on writing doesn’t make you want to sit up and read it all night you should probably just throw it out (with the possible exception of Joseph Williams “Elements of style”). Francine Prose has a lovely understated writing style which must have taken decades to perfect. She starts each chapter with a story from her life as an avid book reader with such gentle humour that the book just grabs hold of you and wont let go.

Before I tell you what Ms Prose has to say I have to make a confession of sorts. When I was doing my PhD I found it almost impossible to read fiction – at least fiction that forced me to think in any way. During this three year period I tended to read popular science for fun. But for true brain downtime – you know, the type which sends you to sleep at night – I turned to trashy books. Deeply trashy books.

I have never quite recovered from this aspect of the Permanent head Damage experience and I am sure my husband is mildly appalled by the kinds of things he sees on my TBR pile beside the bed. “Reading like a writer” seemed dedicated to the topic of learning to read better quality fiction, so I thought it might help me with my little trashy books issue. Turns out there is much in this book that is useful to any kind of writing. Part of the reason is that the approach taken by Ms Prose is deeply informed by her experience as both a writer and teacher. As she explains:

“One essential and telling difference between learning from a style manual and learning from literature is that any how-to book will, almost by definition, tell you how not to write. In that way, manuals of style are a little like writing workshops, and have the same disadvantage – a pedagogy that involves warnings about what might be broken and directions on how to fix it – as opposed to learning from literature, which teachers by a positive model” (pg 44)

To prove her point, she uses examples from great fiction to highlight good writing techniques and to trouble aphorisms like “always write short sentences”. Rules like this will be discussed and then followed with examples of great writers breaking them with gay abandon.

You see, Ms Prose claims that, past a certain point of competence, you need to learn to pay proper attention to other writers’ prose in order to become a great writer. Now that’s advice that you hear a lot, but what’s great about Proses’s book is she tells you how to do it. For example she begins her chapter on words with a story about her English teacher asking the class to circle every variation of ‘eye’, ‘sight’ or ‘looking’ in King Lear. She recalls her sense of shock discovering the levels of meaning this simple exercise squeezed out of the Shakespeare play.

I think this simple exercise can be easily adopted by research students to learn how to write with more authority and confidence. Following the advice of Kamler and Thomson in their great book “Helping doctoral students to write”, I often tell research students to look through papers of writers that they like and circle all the verbs, especially the verbs which the writer uses when they comment on the work of other researchers. Consciously re-using these verbs gives your writing an immediate boost.

Ms Prose then turns her attention to sentences; claiming that good writers take apart sentences like mechanics take apart engines – to learn how they work. It’s impossible to include all the insights in this chapter, but one piece of advice she offers is to read your work aloud. It’s a remarkably effective technique to find clunky sentences, especially ones which run on too long. If nothing else you are likely to run out of breath if the sentence doesn’t have the right number of commas in it.

While the chapters on narration, character, dialogue and gesture are fascinating, they might be safely skipped if you are  reading for non fiction purposes. I recommend you read the chapter on details and on paragraphs however.  I particularly like the way she describes paragraphs as ‘breaths’ and the breaks between them as ‘flashes of lightening’. Not only do these metaphors elegantly capture the purpose of paragraphs, but they are easy to remember as you write.

Well that’s my self imposed 1000 word limit approaching, so I will go off and medicate myself again. Happy writing!

The goldilocks dilemma

When I was hunting through my reader request pile I found this email from @thetokenlefty asking about writing for different  audiences:

I had a quick question for you about this 5,000 word literature review I have to write for my methods course.  It is going to be read and marked by people like yourself — not engineers, much less engineers in the narrow area I will be writing in.

The simple question I have is: should I write this lit review for the audience marking it, or write it as if it were a real part of my thesis?  That is,  assuming a very high level of understanding by the reader.

This question really pertains to writing my thesis as well.  I’m finding it hard to strike a balance .. I am used to my academic writing being used to demonstrate my understanding, which runs the risk of insulting/boring a thesis examiner!

@thetokenlefty is right to worry about his examiner as he or she will be the most important reader of his thesis.

In their excellent book “Helping Doctoral Students to write” Kamler and Thomson explain how talking down to your reader (boring them witless with basic information they already know) or assuming they know more than they do (loading your thesis with obscure ideas and language) are two basic mistakes that many thesis writers make. Kamler and Thompson claim that thesis writers face the ‘Goldilocks dilemma’. The content and style of the thesis should be not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

Mullins and Kiley argue a similar line in their seminal paper: “It’s a PhD, not a Nobel prize” where they explore how examiners examine theses, specifically how they decide whether it is good or not. One of the things the examiners Mullins and Kiley interviewed said was that they want to learn something new from reading your thesis. This tells us that a thesis is more than a show of erudition; it must inform and explain at the same time as showing off your scholarly abilities.

The work of the thesis writer is therefore twofold: finding out what you need to say and working out how do you need to say it. However this twofold task is complicated by the fact that many students will have @thetokenlefty’s problem: how do you do this for multiple audiences in one document?

I would suggest that you start by doing a basic audience analysis. During an excellent talk on writing for exhibitions I attended the other week, some people from Melbourne Museum explained how they researched their audiences and represented them as a matrix:

The idea was that every museum patron sits somewhere in this Cartesian grid.

The ‘easy riders’ are parents out to amuse the kids on a Saturday afternoon. Easy riders are less ‘engaged’ (ie: not as into finding out information) as the ‘duty bound’ parents, who were taking their kids to the museum as an educational activity. However both sets of parents were ‘other motivated’, ie: visiting for their kids rather than themselves.

The ‘self motivated’ museum visitors occupy the left hand side of the matrix. The ‘inspirers’ come to openings, but are less engaged in the museum content than the ‘informers’ who were there for the purposes of educating themselves. Of course, some Easy riders will be more engaged than others and some informers not as interested in learning, but I think this diagram is a useful simplification nonetheless.

The exhibition designers told us that they target their shows at one or two audience types only, but they make sure there is a mix of different exhibitions so there is always something at the museum for everyone. Clever.

I am going to use this idea of identifying, targeting and accommodating specific audiences for @tokenleftys thesis in a diagram, which hopefully can be applied to yours as well.

I have identified 4 potential audiences for @thetokenlefty’s work:

You (@thetokenlefty), your examiner, practitioners (professional solar energy engineers) and other researchers in the area of engineering and solar power generation.

Now @thetokenlefty and his examiner are probably more concerned with the form of the thesis: is it coherent? Do all the chapters follow on from each other? Have all the questions been answered?

Other researchers might be reading for specific content. They probably wont read the whole thing from start to finish but will dip in and out to find the things they need. Practicing engineers will be similar to researchers, but they may need more background as they will not be as immersed in the literature.

Hopefully practitioners will be looking to action @thetokenlefty’s work (@thetokenlefty wants to action it too – to get a job!). I have put ‘research’ on the opposing axis to ‘action’ because I think examiners and other researchers will be interested in generating research based on things they find in the thesis.

What advice can we give @thetokenlefty based on this analysis? Like all thesis writers he needs to think about the needs of each different audience: what does each audience know already? & What do they want to learn about?

An examiner will know different things to a practitioner, who in turn will be looking for different things to a post doc. The challenge for @thetokenlefty is how to make the ideas and content which is relevant to each audience accessible.

For example, @thetokenlefty may want to have more ‘simple’ information which is necessary to a practitioner alongside, but not in, the main text so it doesn’t bore the examiner and other researchers. He might put this basic information in footnotes or an appendix, but there are other ways: a common magazine trick is to use easy to read panels alongside the text.

There are many other potentials to explore, but no more room! So I will leave you with this thought: who are your audiences and how might you re-purpose -  or redraw -  this diagram for them?

The ‘It’s Time’ talk

I’m back after a refreshing, but short vacation Of course I am enough of a research nerd that I spent three of those vacation days doing an excellent workshop on writing for the general public at my Alma Mater, which I will share in the coming weeks.

But first I have to get to my backlog of requests! This one is about a complex supervisor / student relationship issue: what happens if you think your thesis is ready to submit but your supervisor doesn’t?

If you read my university homepage you will see that part of my job involves consulting with PhD students about ‘administrative matters’. This is a broad brief; basically it means that I see PhD students who are in distress for various reasons.

Usually I am able to direct them to another university service area better equipped to help. But PhD students are very resourceful people – often I can give them a bit of a pep talk and they end up solving the problem themselves.

One of the pep talks in my repertoire is the “It’s Time” talk. By this I mean – it’s time to have that difficult conversation with your supervisor about scholarly independence. Let me explain.

Over the last six months I have had consults with quite a few students who were arguing with their supervisors about whether or not the PhD was ready for examination. All these students, I might add, were physically and emotionally exhausted. Some were in tears as they me they just couldn’t carry on.

These students have extreme reactions to a problem which confronts all research students: how to become a fully independent scholar.

Now when I started this blog I promised myself I would be careful about how I approach the issues around student / supervisor relationships.  it’s a particularly fraught area. If you don’t believe me scan this archive of papers from the Quality in Post graduate Research conferences and see how many there are about supervision problems.

Loads.

One of the reasons that the relationships can be so fraught is that there’s a paradox at the heart of research supervision. The stated intent of the PhD process is to train novices to become ‘independent scholars’. Further, these are novice scholars are supposed to be engaged in making ‘new knowledge’. This puts all supervisors in a difficult position.

There should come a point, sooner or later in this process, where you know more than your supervisor about your topic. If you think about it – this is in the finest tradition of teaching.  The great privilege of research supervision is that a teacher gets to step back knowing that the student has surpassed them and will go on to do Great Things.

If the process has worked you will be in the best position to judge the quality of your work and be able to tell your supervisor it is ready – and they will agree. The supervisor has helped you to develop what they already have – an internal critic. This internal critic you have formed while doing a PhD will be your friend for life – it is the essence of scholarly independence and will enable you to do the job of an academic.

Great Tshirt from zazzle.com.au

A caveat. Your thesis being ‘ready’ does not mean that it is perfect. Perfect is, as my dear husband says, the enemy of Good. Perfect is also the enemy of done. I think perfectionism is rife in the PhD scholar community because, well – we are high achievers.

But that’s a post for another time.

Of course, if your supervisor’s internal critic and your internal critic disagree everything should come to a screaming halt. The supervisors I meet take their responsibility for overseeing student welfare extremely seriously. Heck – they may even be your friend by this point.

Although the supervisor may give many reasons for withholding their permission to submit, it usually boils down to one:  they don’t want you to fail or have a horrible year of making substantial revisions. They see flaws in your work which make them think this will happen.

This is why I advise students to swallow their pride and make the revisions that are being asked for. However some of the tearful students reject this advice. Some have already accepted the possibility of revisions or failure and tell me they would rather take a chance on examination. Other students violently disagreed with the changes being suggested by the supervisor, arguing the thesis would be worse if they made them.

Part of my ‘It’s Time’ pep talk is to point out the paradoxical nature of research supervision and the complex issue of scholarly independence.

Developing empathy with the supervisor, rather than seeing them as the problem, enables you to go back and have an honest conversation about the risks you are prepared to take. Supervisors can be relieved to hear that you are willing take responsibility for the work and its flaws. Often this is enough for the examination process to begin.

In rare cases however the It’s Time talk doesn’t work. If you profoundly disagree with your supervisor about the final changes, perhaps a second opinion is called for. It surprises me how often students think they can’t ask for another person to read the thesis when they are in this situation. Hopefully you have a second supervisor or another person in the department who can act as a circuit breaker.

It’s best to try to negotiate with your supervisor about who this third reader will be so that you can both be comfortable with their advice. You will need to be prepared for this person to tell you to put your ego back on the shelf and make the changes, because, I’m sorry to tell you – this is what usually happens. Remember: you might be stubborn rather than right.

So – in the end there are no easy answers. I can only highlight the complexity of the issue and encourage honest communication. Perhaps others will have experiences to share?

Back soon…

The thesis whisperer is on a short vacation: returning on the 15th of July. Any topic suggestions can be left in comments or direct message on twitter @thesiswhisperer.

how to sell your thesis in 3 minutes (or less)

Like so many, many things related to doing a PhD, people talk a lot about how important a good ‘elevator pitch’ is – but tend to be silent on the subject of  how to actually do it. As you may have worked out by now, that sort of empty advice tends to frustrate me. So I thought I would write today about how to craft a good, short research sales pitch.

The idea of the elevator pitch is to compress your research topic, interests and even findings into a short speech you could tell another researcher (preferably a senior one) while standing in a queue at the conference tea table, or waiting for a lift.

The elevator pitch is not meant to explain your whole thesis, but tell people enough to  pique their interest and get them to want to know more. It is often trotted out as a must-have research skill; important professors at conferences are busy people and unlikely to listen to a rambling account of your research thoughts and troubles (that’s the job of your supervisors).

I call the elevator pitch the “BBQ speech” in my workshops, partly because I am Australian, but mostly because I think the best pitches are in plain language. At least plain enough that so that any person with a college level education can understand it.

Many PhD students don’t realise that, even if a professor is an expert in your field, they are unlikely to be into the minutiae of the problems in the way a PhD student is. Therefore plain, but intelligent language is likely to be appreciated by everyone.

A lot of attention has been focused on the skill of the elevator pitch lately because of the 3 minute thesis competition. Each of the 42 universities who hand out research degrees in Australia are currently in the process of choosing finalists to send to University of Queensland, where they will compete to see who is the grand champion. Have a look at the previous winners at the University of Otago and the University of Queensland (bottom of the page)

As part of this process at RMIT university, I offered a series of workshops in our On Track Program. Being a fan of the ‘import – export” model of creativity, I looked to marketing literature for ideas on making a good research pitch.

In the business library I came across a book called “Made to Stick: why some ideas survive and others die…” by the brothers Heath. The book explores the extraordinary stickiness of urban myths and  is a good fun read.

But since you are probably too busy with those papers on global terrorism or particle physics, here are the main points re-purposed for the task at hand:

1) Start by thinking about why the research needs to be done: 3 minutes is not a long time – just enough to get across the core ideas of your thesis. The Heath brothers point out that there is an awful lot of information out there; certainly the attention economy of academia means there is less and less time available to make yourself heard. By side stepping your thesis statement and thinking about why it needs to be done, you start to explain why you would bother spending three or more years of your life exploring the topic. These reasons will probably interest others too.

2) Tell a story related to your research: Humans love a good story – probably because we spent millions of years of sitting around campfires with no TV. A well chosen story can warm up the driest topic. One student studying quantum mechanics and cryptography at RMIT did a pitch which started with a story about what happens when someone steals your credit card. Instantly the audience hung on every word! Which leads me to …

3) Make us care. If you can get your audience emotionally involved in the topic you are halfway to winning. The two easiest ways to get people to care is to a) hitch your thesis topic onto an ongoing community concern (there are heaps of these – climate change, crime, health care, education etc) or b) appeal to their self interest. Self interest is easier… If your topic is related to pain management, money saving, identity issues etc you can easily work these self interest reasons into your pitch.

4) Try to make the abstract concrete: Talking about statistics can be difficult, but numbers come alive when you give real world comparisons. I could say “The human gut ranges between 7.5 and 8.5 meters long” or I could say “Stretched out, the human gut is taller than a two storey building”. I know which sentence would make me want to hear more.

5) Use the power of the unexpected. Since we are not toddlers we cannot scream for attention, we need to seduce it. A good way is through surprise. The Heath brothers explain that humans are ‘guessing machines’ and that the easiest way to get attention is to unsettle expectations. I studied gesture for my PhD and my favourite unexpected fact is that blind people gesture – even when they are on the phone to other blind people. Instantly you have to wonder -why would blind people do it? When I asked research students in the workshop what they knew that I might not, I learnt many strange things – like if you eat silver your skin turns blue and that more men than women are sex workers. I’m sure you have these fun facts buried somewhere in your research – use them.

So I hope this post helps you with one of the most annoying questions at social events: “Are you still doing that PhD?”. Rather than just saying yes and heading for another serve of potato salad, try telling Aunt Betty what you are actually doing next time. If nothing else it wards off those moments of awkward family silence!