Monthly Archives: August 2021

Aug26

Re-imagining Doctoral Writing

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I am thrilled, along with my co-editors Brittany Amell and James Burford, to share Re-Imagining Doctoral Writing with you. The best news is that it is open access and available in PDF and ePub formats.

It is published by WAC Clearinghouse, under the care of publisher, Mike Palmquist, and appears in the International Exchanges on the Study of Writing book series, which is edited by Joan Mullin, Magnus Gustafsson, Terry Myers Zawacki, and Federico Navarro.

Cover

Re-imagining Doctoral Writing

Edited by Cecile Badenhorst, Brittany Amell, and James Burford

What imaginings of the doctoral writer circulate in the talk of doctoral researchers and their supervisors? How do institutional policies and the conventions of particular disciplines shape the ways in which doctoral writing is imagined? Why, and in what ways, has doctoral writing been re-imagined in the twenty-first century? What future imaginings of doctoral writing may be hovering on the horizon? This edited collection has gathered a diverse group of authors—from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Japan, South Africa, the UK, Denmark, Canada, and the US—to consider these challenging questions during a time in which doctoral education is undergoing enormous transformation. Together, the contributors to this collection explore how the practice of doctoral writing is entangled with broader concerns within doctoral education, including attrition, timeliness, the quality of supervision, the transferability of knowledge and skills to industry settings, research impact, research integrity, and the decolonization of the doctorate.

You can find the book at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/international/doctoral/. This book will be available in a print edition from University Press of Colorado in the coming months.

Aug25

The link between research conceptualization and writing

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For some time I was an academic contract worker and I existed on short-term contracts and free-lance work. One of my free-lance jobs was as a language editor of master’s and doctoral theses. I read many theses and dissertations and soon realised the link between research conceptualization and “good” writing. If the research hadn’t been well-conceptualized, then no amount of editing made the writing clearer.

That’s when I began to focus on research conceptualization as the starting point of thesis/dissertation writing. When I began to teach classes and workshops on publishing or thesis writing, the very first session was always devoted to research conceptualization and Sharan Merriam’s technique – the Problem Purpose Statement and Questions (PPS&Q). Even though I cover many aspects of academic and research writing, this technique and this focus on research conceptualization has always resulted in break-throughs for students and participants in my workshops. From feedback, it is the most useful technique they learned and the most helpful in terms of getting a thesis written.

Recently, I published a paper in Writing & Pedagogy explaining why the link between research conceptualization and successful thesis writing is so important. To give you the short story: Research conceptualization doesn’t just happen at the beginning of a project. It needs to be tweaked and refined all the way through a project and then written into the thesis. Research conceptualization is written into problem statements, research proposals and introduction sections of papers/theses. (It also appears in Abstracts – which I don’t discuss in the paper.) The point I’m trying to make is that the way we conceptualize a project influences how we end up writing about the project. So it is worth spending time at the beginning to develop a PPS&Q that reflects exactly what you want to do.

If you want to learn more about developing a PPS&Q, watch:

As always, if you need to access my research or want a full list of videos on YouTube, send me an email at [email protected].

Aug24

Writing the literature review

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For many years now I’ve focused my research and reading around the literature reivew section/chapter/paper. It’s such a complex paper to write and I’ve been trying to find ways of explaining the complexity that are do-able and understandable and not overwhelming.

I published three papers where I analysed Master’s student’s literature review papers:

Badenhorst, C.M. (2018). Citation practices of postgraduate students writing literature reviews. London Review of Education, 16(1), 121-135. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18546/LRE.16.1.11

Badenhorst, C.M. (2018). Graduate student writing: Complexity in literature reviews. Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education, 9(1), 58-74. https://doi.org/10.1108/SGPED-17-00031

Badenhorst, C.M. (2017) Literature reviews, citations and intertextuality in graduate student writing. Journal of Further and Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2017.1359504

I don’t think I succeeded in unpacking the complexity of literature reviews in these papers but they really helped me understand the stress student writers are under when they write Literature Reviews.

Eventually I decided to try and unravel the different layers and tasks involved in writing a Literature Review, through videos. I starting with reading and general citation use, then I develop a series on writing the Literature Review itself. I’ve now created a number of videos that I think will really help writers who struggle with this genre:

If you have any further ideas for videos on literature reviews (or anything else), let me know. And if you want to access my research or if you want a full list of videos on YouTube, send me an email: [email protected]