5 strategies to help your research student to write

This guest post is written by Dr Geof Hill, the managing editor of “The research supervisor’s friend” blog. In this post Geof tells supervisors some good strategies for helping research students to write. But of course, you don’t need your supervisor to try some of these out! I recommend having a longer look at the Research Supervisors’s Friend if you have a moment – it has a lot of useful advice for all of us.

Learning research skills is usually the easy part of doing a research degree; learning to write about your research is the hard part. Many research supervisors repeat the advice of their own supervisor - ‘just write!’ - and may not be aware of the range of strategies that can be used to help a student do just that… Here are some suggestions:

Answer specific questions then add together the answers to all the questions.

In his chapter “The ‘big picture’ about managing writing” , Robert Brown (1994) details a scaffolded approach for getting students started with their writing. He suggests that you have students write short answers to the following questions:

What did you do?
Why did you do it?
What happened?
What do the results mean in theory?
What do the results mean in practice?
What is the key benefit for the readers?
What remains unsolved?

The first five questions add up to a working abstract. The sixth question is one which evolves with the research document and helps the writer to keep in mind the potential readership. The seventh question is a contrast to the others in that, while the others deal with what is known, it deals with what is unknown – this is the site of the greatest learning in the research project. Brown suggests word limits for the first six questions, but no word limit for the final question.

Understand why academic writing uses some of the devices it does.

Having taught Grade four students how to write a ballad, I am very aware that the research proposal and the dissertation are genres of writing. Both are filled with a range of writing devices that are at the heart of what it is to do research.

For example, the preference of some research writers to use the third person is a device to give the appearance of distance from the subject or objectivity. For some researchers they see this as a crucial element of their research practice and therefore in their writing about their research.

When you explain these devices you are teaching students the philosophies that underpin research practice, and also guiding them about how to argue against these devices – especially if they are trying to write their research differently.

Stop writing and start talking 

Not everyone works well in the written medium. Some people are better at talking than thinking through the writing of their ideas. This can be a strategy for capturing the knowledge that a student already holds in their head and transferring it to the written word. I find this a helpful strategy when I am working with a research student for the first time. I ask them to tell me about what it is that they thought they would investigate and how they thought they might investigate it. Once they have heard themselves speak this, it is often easier to then write down what they have remembered from the conversation, or better still, transcribe the conversation that they have recorded while we have been talking.

This also works well when students are well underway with their research and you ask them how it is going. As they answer this question you can then check whether the dilemmas they tell you about are recorded somewhere in what they have written. Capturing these sorts of dilemmas in your methodology section adds to the authenticity of your account of the research.

Start a Writing Group

Research can be a lonely journey. Alison Lee and David Boud (“Writing groups, change and academic Identity: research development as local practice Studies in Higher Education”, 2003) talk about writing groups, and how these can be beneficial for developing academic writing skills. As the group learns to critique each other’s writing they also develop the skills to improve their own writing. There is a camaraderie of working together which provides a necessary contrast to the oft quoted claim that the research journey is a solo one.

If you have a number of students then you might want to organise a writing group and you all develop the writing and critiquing skills together. Or you can encourage your student to form a writing group with fellow research students.

Get pertinent and specific feedback 

There is no more pertinent way to help a research student develop their writing skills than by providing feedback on their writing. This feedback needs to be specific and, if possible, help the student to understand where you have faced problems in reading their work, rather than simply editing the work and suggesting how it should be rewritten. Editing and rewriting your research student’s writing begins to tamper with the research student’s authorship and may prevent them from developing their own academic voice.

I find the comment function in word documents a useful tool as it allows you to locate the feedback in the writing and is legible (I have atrocious handwriting!). I read a student’s writing ahead of a scheduled meeting with them so that they can have read my comments before we meet. This helps them make choices about what they require in elaboration or discussion. This I find transfers the responsibility for the meeting to the student and makes my role as a supervisor more a help rather than a controller.

What other strategies have people found helpful? We’d love to hear about them.

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This is a guest post by Geof Hill, who trains supervisors and coaches research students. Here Geof offers advice for supervisors and students in the last stages of candidature.

It’s exciting when the individual parts of the dissertation start to come together to produce a coherent argument. But seeing the argument in its fullness also sets the groundwork for self doubt in the student. They ask themselves ‘Is this really worthy? Is the work making a sufficient contribution?’

Recently I was really taken aback by one of my student’s feelings of  ‘impostorhood‘[1] as he approached the finish line. This is his way of describing the doubts about his dissertation and whether it was worthy of being a PhD. What would the examiners think when they read his work? Would they think it was good enough?!

I don’t remember this feeling from my own doctoral candidature; I think I was overcome with the frustration of continually finding more and more spelling and citation errors. It was hard for me to relate to the fears being expressed by my student.

First I tried to encourage him with what I thought were consoling thoughts: examiners don’t set out to fail a dissertation. On the contrary, many examiners believe that the fact that a dissertation has got as far as completion is a demonstration of determination and ability. Next I tried to bolster his confidence by identifying what I saw as the hallmarks of his investigation; what I thought others would recognise as his contributions to knowledge.

I had read the dissertation from start to finish and pointed out the areas that needed correction. Sometimes I had highlighted places where he needed to add more explicit statements - to explain to the reader what the particular sections of the dissertation were trying to do. I did not intend reading and re reading it over and over again. I was worried that each time I reread it, I was becoming less and less objective. My familiarity with the work helped it to make sense for me.

Despite my reassurance it was not all plain sailing!  I may have even said: “Which part of ‘this is ready’ don’t you understand?” I guess what we settled on was a form of mutual patience. I realised what we needed was an outsider to read it – to see what they made of it as a ‘critical friend’.

So we hunted around and found an obliging colleague who agreed to be that objective reader. I had been a reader for my colleague’s doctoral student some months earlier, so this was a form of payback. This reinforced for my student the value of building up a network of interested colleagues. This network is an important part of the research process: you will always need to have colleagues read your work. The  new reader gave us both the assurance that we had not been lulled into a false sense of reason. He reassured us that not only was the quality of the dissertation there, but that it was easily recognised by an independent third party.

As a supervisor, you can build up quite a deep relationship with your student. You see them in their highs and lows. Despite this I think you can still be taken by surprise with some of the strong mood changes that are associated with the final months of candidature.

I tried to maintain a more positive buoyancy rather than impatient curtness – however many times I heard my student’s doubts. In hindsight I guess I was falling back on my effective parenting skills. There are certain parallels between parenting and supervising which some supervisors may not have thought about. One of these is the ability to listen without judgment. I developed this special kind of listening skill when my five year old went through a stage of continually wanted reassurance from me[2]. Regardless of how many times he expressed his fears, I heard them as if it were a first time.

The approach taken with a student falls short of unconditional love, because there are clearly signs of a good dissertation, but the level of patient listening and repetition of positive messages, necessary to put their fears to rest, are perhaps the same.

Eventually the dissertation was printed and packaged off to the examiners and this gave way to a whole new horizon of emotional roller coasting of wishing, and waiting, and hoping and praying! (apologies to Burt Baccarach)

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[1] Yates and Chandler (1998) have suggested that the idea of impostorhood  began with he work of American clinical psychologist Dr Pauline Clance (Clance & Imes, 1978)

[2] Effective Parenting suggests that when a young child expresses uncertainty or anxiety about a situation, rather than tell them not to worry you reflect what you are hearing from them and this acknowledges that you have recognised that they are anxious.

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