07/03/2012 by lizit.

The past three months have been the most difficult of my doctoral journey so far. I did start to write a blog post a few weeks back, but was not really able to express what I wanted or needed to say. I am now in a better place and able to reflect on the experience and look ahead.

In the draft post written at the end of January/beginning of February, I said:

I’ve been pondering whether or not to blog the ups and downs of the last few weeks and have decided that now is as good a time as any to do so. If I had been writing just before Christmas, what I would have written would have been very different. I was at a very low point and seriously questioning whether it was worth continuing with my DPhil. I have turned a corner, but am still feeling very fragile and doubting whether I can actually complete the journey, but I am able to look at things more rationally.

Anybody following this blog would know that up until the end of November, I was in a good place with my work. I felt that I knew what I was trying to do and I was doing it. I had set myself some fairly demanding writing targets and was achieving them. I had restructured the way I was presenting my work in a way that made sense to me and I was generally pretty happy with the way things were progressing. So what went wrong? And why is it coming together now?

What went wrong?

Around the end of November, beginning of December, three things happened, each of which contributed to me becoming very depressed about my work - and very angry that I might not be able to do what I had set out to do.

Firstly, my supervisors cast doubts on the way I had re-organised my work. I was not following a conventional thesis format and this was likely to cause problems when it came to the thesis being examined. I considered I had strong reasons for wanting to structure my work in the way I was doing and that my theoretical stance was not understood. I had a sense of being required to write something that was not going to be ‘my thesis’ in order to comply with convention, whether or not convention made sense in the context of what I wanted to say.

Secondly, I got ill. OK, it was only flu-like cold, but as I am asthmatic, it went to my chest and I spent a couple of weeks feeling really grotty and took about a month to begin to feel well again. Truth is, I was probably mildly depressed as a result of being definitely under the weather and feeling totally stressed out about my thesis.

Thirdly, I got comments on the writing I had been doing during the previous weeks. Although I could see the rationale behind some of the comments, others I felt much less happy about as they were encouraging me to put more weight on some parts of my work than others in a way that made no sense to me.

What happened to resolve the dilemma and put me back on track?

Firstly, I realised that I was not powerless but had choices. I could choose to walk away completely, or to present my work other than in a thesis. I have learned a great deal over the past three and a half years and I could choose whether to complete my planned journey or head off in a different direction.

Secondly, I had supportive friends. Not friends that tried to comfort me, but friends who listened to my tale of woe, accepted my account and gave me space to be angry, frustrated and depressed, only offering advice once I was in a place to hear. Those folk know who they are, but they are found in #phdchat on Twitter and amongst colleagues at University of Sussex.

Thirdly, although my supervisors were not happy with what I wanted to do, they had confidence that I could complete my DPhil and one in particular took the time to explore why things had gone so radically wrong. This gave me a sense of being understood and provided a platform for negotiation and agreement on a way forward based on an honest appraisal of the potential risks.

What are the outcomes of this process?

Perhaps the most important thing to come out of the past three months is a very real sense that I own my work. I owned it back in November, but now I simultaneously have both more invested in it and less. That may seem odd, but I have accepted that what I am doing does not follow conventions and that may not meet the approval of examiners. That is OK and my decision and if it means I do not get to wear a floppy hat at the end of the process, that is fine. At the same time, I do believe in what I am doing, and do regard not only the content but the approach I have taken as valuable. If it is not valued by formal academic measures, that does not make it less worthwhile, but it places more responsibility on me to find ways of disseminating my work.

Secondly, there is a change in my relationship with my supervisors. From my perspective, there is a new honesty in our exchanges, perhaps because we have locked horns, and found a way forward. When I get to the end of the journey, I will be interested on getting their thoughts on this perception.

Thirdly, I think my writing is improving. I am more self-critical, in a positive sense, and more aware of the need to ensure the rationale for my approach and argument is transparent, even if it sometimes means labouring the point. Because my approach has been challenged, I have read more, understood more and am more confident.

Where now?

Get the thesis written!

Posted in personal rant, peer support, thesis, writing, experience, ownership, reflections, empowerment, learning | Print | 4 Comments »

26/11/2011 by lizit.

In September, I had a first, very rough draft of my thesis. One of the issues was the number of words in the drafts (approaching 100,000), which somewhat exceeded the permitted word limit of 80,000. My task was to try to edit and organise my material more concisely without losing the most relevant content. In an earlier post, “Getting excited about my thesis,” I described how I came to see the draft as a number of containers, or buckets, each with mixture of content.

The first thing I did was to think again about what the underlying argument of my thesis is. What is it I am actually addressing. Over the past three years, I have read and gathered a lot of information and learned a lot. Although much of it is interesting, by no means all of it is relevant to my thesis. In order to decide what is and is not relevant, I had to know what it is I am trying to say and what contributes to that argument.

Having sorted out what I am saying, I then looked at the material again and how I had structured the first draft. I had followed a fairly standard model of introduction, lit review, methodology, findings… but I realised that this might not be the best structure to support my methodology and argument. I was using three distinctly different approaches to the problem I was addressing, which meant I was looking at different bodies of theory and different methodologies. I decided to divide the thesis into three sections, which would enable me to address each approach separately, and draw connections between them.

During October, I focused on the first two sections, which were the best developed of the original drafts. By the end of October, I had my revised drafts (currently awaiting supervisor comments), but the original word count had swelled to 110k.

Radical measures were needed. I first focused on the essential content - the literature and methodology - and the word count increased a little more! I needed to do something more drastic. I printed out the remainder of the content, reminded myself again what the focus of my thesis is, and started working through the material with a blue pencil, putting lines through everything not directly relevant to my argument.  I still have a way to go, but over the past fortnight, I have reduced the word count by about 25k and I am beginning to see how I can bring ideas together which were previously hidden in the undergrowth. The material being removed is not uninteresting, in fact some is very interesting and may well form the basis of articles or conference papers, but it is not part of the argument I am making in my thesis and therefore has no place there - much the same as some garden weeds may look quite pretty in meadowland, but in a garden may hide or choke the plants that are meant to be there.

Hopefully, having cleared the weeds, I can begin to construct a more coherent argument, and lose more words in the process. Who knows, I might even reduce the word count enough to include the still missing discussion chapter.

No doubt careful editing can deal with small numbers of excess words, but dense undergrowth needs a chainsaw and flamethrower!

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03/11/2011 by lizit.

This morning I read a blogpost from Martin Eve labelled a dissenting voice on#AcBoMoWri. As I understand it, AcBoMoWri has been initiated as a response to #NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Whereas, Martin suggests that the aim of AcBoMoWri is to “bash out words to get as close as possible to writing a book”, I see it more as one of a number of recent initiatives to encourage academics to get writing. Others include pomodoras, #shutupandwrite, creative writing workshops and 750 words. Lying behind each of these initiatives seems to be a search for ways of breaking through procrastination and writing avoidance and getting our research findings down on paper and out into the public domain. Given that one of the reasons we engage in research is to share our findings and out thoughts, what are we to make of these initiatives?

Martin quite rightly raises concerns about the risks of churning out material without the necessary thinking and evaluation that makes our writing meaningful. The debate that has emerged on Twitter also recognises the very real problems of short-termism and the need to produce and be counted. A culture of short term grants and a requirement for outputs, can lead to a multitude of books and articles that say very little and which fail to consider the bigger picture. This is something we all need to be concerned about. Research, whatever the field, is about so much more than inputs and outputs.

At the same time, we can be resistant to put pen to paper. Discussions in #phdchat week after week reveal the anxieties of graduate researchers as we seek to find ways to express our ideas, always questioning whether we have any kind of conceptual or theoretical framework, whether what we are wanting to say has any real meaning, and, in any case, is what we want to say good enough, not only for sharing but to gain the accolade of a doctorate.

It seems to me that incentives to write are positive. Not all will resonate. I have not been able to see the point of 750 words and writing every day - some days, I have nothing to write, apart from a short note to myself about what to think about and read next, or a shopping list. On the other hand, shutupandwrite can work for me, as long as I plan what I will focus on in the writing session. There is something energising about writing when others are too - but then I get the same from knowing that colleagues in the #phdchat network are working alongside me, albeit each in our own space, at times when most sane people are engaged in leisure activities or doing stuff with the family.

So what of AcBoWriMo? My initial response was one of how crazy - why put pressure on myself to deliver a given product in a specific time? Then I looked at it again and realised it resonated with where I currently am with my own thesis writing. I know what I want to write and I know what the structure will look like. The chapters are sketched out, but the writing task needs to be done. I have been working to a fairly loose aim of completing the next draft by the end of term, but actually, with a bit of effort, there is no real reason why it shouldn’t be done by the end of this month, and if adopting the hashtag #AcBoMoWri will keep me focused and remind me I have a commitment not only to myself but to others, well and good. What I write will not be polished or fit for publication, or even submission as thesis, but will be the next step on that journey.

For me AcBoWriMo has come at an opportune time. At a different time, it would be no incentive or value whatsoever. It is not about writing a given number of words in a day, but writing what is already well-digested material and doing so in a timely manner.

But the concerns raised by Martin about the more general nature of academic writing remain.

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09/10/2011 by lizit.

I’ve woken up this morning feeling quite excited about my thesis and wanting to get on with writing it!

During the summer, I did a lot of work on pulling together the content of my thesis and putting ideas into what I have thought of as buckets or containers. These buckets have had fairly standard titles like lit review, methodology, findings, discussion, etc, but I have been aware that in most cases the contents were ill-formed and often disconnected. While knowing what my thesis was about, I was very unclear what I was actually saying, and more importantly how I was going to say it. It was like having a jigsaw where I had sorted out the pieces into piles, the sky, some of the bigger objects, the corner pieces and some of the side pieces, but I had no idea what the final picture might be, or how I might join the pieces together to create that picture.

The picture is still not created - doing that is almost certainly some months away. What has changed is I have a clear sense in my own mind of how that picture might look and I can begin to take action to move some of the jigsaw pieces around and begin the task of creating the picture. Instead of wondering how to present my argument without really being clear what the argument was, I now have a sense of both what my argument is and how it can be presented.

Today’s task is to make a rough sketch of the outline of the picture and begin moving some of the pieces into place. Over the coming weeks, the task will be to join the pieces together, first in sections and then in a whole, in order to create a thesis which says what I want to say clearly and cogently and which links together the various different perspectives contained within it.

This morning I am feeling excited, and a little scared, because I sense I actually do know what I need to do, and I do know how to begin to do it. I am standing on a viewpoint, looking at the landscape laid out before me. No doubt as I move into that landscape and get caught up in some of the detail, I will find myself confused and wondering in what direction to go, but for the moment at least, I am feeling excited and have a road map in my hands.

Posted in thesis, voice, writing, ownership | Print | 2 Comments »

01/09/2011 by lizit.

No, I’m not being rude, but drawing attention to a strategy that is helping many researchers overcome writing block. You know how it is. You sit down at your desk, switch computer on and have loads of good intentions about what you are going to write. But first, check the email, Facebook, Twitter, Yammer, Google+ and whatever other social networks are an essential part of life. Then recheck, just in case anything essential has appeared while you were checking all the others. Time for a coffee, perhaps re-check the social media, and half the morning has gone.

Or alternatively, you start off well. Actually write a couple of paragraphs, and then the thought occurs that you need an essential reference, so a happy hour or two is spent in the digital library, by which time you have forgotten both why you needed the reference and what you were writing about in the first place.

“Shut up and write” is an antidote to procrastination. @thesiswhisperer and @researchwhisper have both blogged their experience of the process. Essentially you arrange to meet up with a few colleagues, preferably where there is some decent coffee available, chat briefly and then end conversation and write for a predetermined period of time. It sounds weird, but those who have used it, advocate the approach and continue to do it, so there probably is something in it.

Sarah R-H and I were bemoaning the difficulty of writing during an exchange of tweets, when we wondered whether it would be possible to adapt this to the online world. We agreed that one of us would take responsibility for initiating and timing a 30 minute writing session and that we would both switch off all online contact for that period of time. A text message signalled the end. You can read Sarah’s experience below, but suffice it to say, it worked well enough for us to do it again.

To start with, I wasn’t sure about ‘Shut up and Write’ – I had doubts that I could keep my bum in the chair and my mouth shut for any sensible length of time. And the idea of turning off social networks left me feeling nervous, but I was ready to try anything. I’d had a couple of not-so-good days, was slipping on my deadline, and the anxiety was leading me into bad habits: checking #phdchat on Twitter, tinkering with the TOC, searching for the ‘perfect’ reading app for my phone… procrastination hell. And as all procrastinators know, it’s a self-perpetuating situation: anxiety feeds procrastination, feeds anxiety.

Liz suggested Shut up and Write, and the thought of having to leave the house stirred up a rising panic. So we went digital. It worked. Firstly, it meant I was making a commitment to 30 minutes of purposefully distraction-free work. Secondly, and I think more importantly, I was making a pact with someone else, and a friend at that. Thirty minutes was long enough for me to get focussed on one piece of writing, yet short enough that I felt I could mentally put aside faffing / Twitter / digital library tasks – postpone them whilst I got it done. We did two sessions, and after the second I felt unblocked and a great deal more relaxed. And I have learned that I can live perfectly adequately without having social media minimised and at-the-ready. Who knew? This tactic is definitely a keeper.

So next time you find yourself procrastinating, team up with a colleague or two. If you can meet, all the better, you get the incentive of seeing somebody else working to encourage you, but if you can’t meet, find a willing online friend and support each other in getting past the writer’s block and procrastination hurdle. It worked for us!

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31/03/2011 by lizit.

Last evening’s #phdchat session on Twitter focused on academic writing. As always, it was a wide ranging discussion, but one aspect that got me thinking a bit more was my writing voice.

When I started my DPhil journey, I remember saying to my supervisor that one of the things I needed to do was to find my voice. At the time, I had just co-authored an article with her on a project we had been involved with and it was the first serious writing I had done for several years, and my first venture into academic writing as such, in the sense that this was something that might be read by other than my teachers and supervisors. I was used to presenting stuff in all manner of contexts, but writing and a writing voice was somehow different.

A further, personal complication was my longstanding reaction to much academic writing and language. As an undergraduate, way back when, I had found myself virtually struck dumb in seminars and other discussions because I just did not understand half of what was being said, and there was no way I could actually write such impenetrable stuff.  I more or less made a promise to myself that anything I said or wrote should be in accessible English.

It is now about two and a half years since that conversation with my supervisor, and I realise I have found a voice - in fact I have found three different voices, all of which I will be expressing in my writing and my thesis.

First, there is the impersonal, authoritative voice. This is the voice most present in the theoretically based parts of my writing. It is the one that reports on what I have read, provides a context, discusses methodological frameworks and the like. From time to time it may use formal, academic language, but it aims to be accessible and clear. It is also the voice that identifies some of the issues and conflicts between theoretical perspectives and enters into debate with them.

Secondly, there is another voice which also discusses ideas and concepts, but not as impersonal researcher, but as ‘I’. This is the voice that makes observations on what the impersonal has written and brings a ‘real world’ perspective. When the impersonal talks about the number of different specialists a child with a disability might have seen, the ‘I’ voice talks from experience. This voice has a different type of authority from the impersonal voice. The impersonal is speaking from the body of research and professional experience which has been subjected to peer review and the like, but the personal voice is sometimes saying, that is the theory, but this is how it was for me in reality.

The third voice, which is a function of the type of work I am doing, and which in other circumstances might be part of that second voice, is me as participant in my research. Although, I am not taking an autoethnographic approach, my story and experiences are part of my research.  Last summer I blogged on some of the ethical dilemmas I was confronting. I have now found a resolution to these in writing and analysing my own story in such a way that I can use it as data, the same as the stories others are sharing with me. This voice is not recognisable to the reader as being my voice, but nevertheless, it is allowing me more directly to introduce perspectives on my research topic which are not readily available through any other source and is reflective of the very different experiences of different participants in my research domain.

Somewhere along the line, I probably need to do more work on this, and even to find some theoretical framework to hang this approach on, but for the moment, I do know that my voice is very present and real in my writing, and that voice is not a whisper trying to be heard, but is vibrant, strong, objective and authoritative - and it has a story to tell.

Thanks #phdchat for helping me to articulate this.

Posted in voice, writing, empowerment | Print | 1 Comment »

08/12/2010 by lizit.

At about the same time as posting yesterday’s blog, I put a status update on Facebook which read:

I think I am getting my head around a couple of ‘ologies’ and understanding how they are relevant to my research - eeeek! am I turning into some kind of academic - help!!!

As sometimes happens with status updates, but somewhat to my surprise, this update has opened up an interesting dialogue and has helped me understand something of my resistance to using some forms of language. It has also had the effect of clarifying that there are contexts where it is right and proper to use more complex language if one is to be properly understood.

My starting position is that the language which we speak and write is primarily a communication tool. If what we speak and write cannot be understood by the intended audience, then we might as well not have spoken or written. This could imply that the only form of communication which I find acceptable is using the simplest language possible and avoiding all technical or specialist terms. Just counting up the number of 5-syllable words I use shows this is not the case. However, I do have a tendency to prefer not to use specialist language as far as possible. This is partly because I am not particularly interested in language as such. It is also because I have found myself in situations where I have felt excluded from discussion because of my lack of affinity with the language being used. Even if I understood some of what had been said, I was completely unable to respond in any meaningful way. Rather than making me want to understand and use the language, my response was to accept that I was not bright enough for such exchanges and to make no attempt to engage in them. Fortunately, in another setting, I did learn I was not as dim as I thought and achieved a fulfilling career, but I never really came to terms with the language issue and have at times set myself up as anti-intellectual.

The Facebook discussion has opened up the reality that whereas my tendency is to use plain English whenever possible, there are others who relish acquiring and using more complex language:

I love the way that we can express complex ideas concisely - and then stepping stone from one complex idea to another with relative ease.

When I express the view:

I agree reading academic papers should require some work on the part of the reader, but most of that work should be in understanding and applying the ideas being presented and discussed rather than in understanding the language used to present those ideas.

Others would say:

when we are talking to peers in a research community surely we need to agree that we can throw ologies around and assume that we will be understood, or that people have the nouce to find out what we mean. We are invested in educating ourselves surely, so doesn’t understanding require some effort on the part of the reader here?

There is a sense of agreeing to disagree, but there is also an awareness that when we speak or write, we are not only communicating to others, but we are meeting our own needs in many and varied ways. I will no doubt be taking more risks with language in safe situations, but I would be fascinated to know how comfortable, or otherwise, others feel with academic ‘jargon’.

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15/04/2010 by lizit.

Looking at my blog posts, they are becoming less frequent but the content seems to often have more substance to it than a year ago. As part of preparing for the writing workshop I will be attending over the next couple of days, I have found I am reflecting a bit on what I am currently writing and how I am writing it. I am actually writing a lot less in general now than I was a year ago - and yet I am playing around with more ideas.

So, if I am not lacking in motivation or ideas, why is less finding its way on to paper?

I think there are a number of things going on.

Firstly, in a sense I am reconfiguring myself again.  I had just about managed to persuade myself I was a techie and had begun to take a serious look at virtual worlds, when I found that I was being drawn in other directions. Although I am very happy and comfortable with where I have found myself, it also is a challenging place to be - and is actually a more difficult place intellectually than where I was. Rather than being a social scientist masquerading as a techie, I am now straddling the two worlds but with an increasing leaning towards the social scientist. Although my roots might be in the social sciences, that doesn’t mean that my past experiences were comfortable. I am a different person now than the undergraduate who never opened her mouth in a seminar because she hadn’t mastered the language others seemed adept with, and from the 30 something year old who found the same veil of silence as a masters student, but that doesn’t mean that the sense of inadequacy isn’t still there.

Secondly, I don’t want to pin my ideas down too much at the moment. I have got a good grasp of the landscape my research is set against and I have been reading relevant articles and books. There is perhaps an anxiety that if I start writing, I may be stuck with what I have written (even though I know that isn’t the case) and that may influence the outcomes of my research rather than allowing ideas and themes to emerge from my data gathering and analysis.

Thirdly, and this perhaps relates to my observations about my blog posts. I am finding that I am less satisfied with soundbites and I am wanting to explore ideas in more depth. When I start trying to write, I lose track of where I am going. Instead of doing a mind dump, which I have been able to get away with in the past, I need to find some way of developing a road map of what I want to write about before starting writing so that I can tackle manageable chunks rather than somehow trying to tackle a whole. This means trying different approaches.

On the positive side, although there are very few pieces of writing emerging, I have been doing a lot more concept mapping and it may well be that I can develop that a stage further into mapping out the ideas around some of the themes I want to address. It may be that if I given myself enough hooks, I might find I need to start creating the textual threads to link the hooks together.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the next couple of days - will it give me the confidence boost I need, or will I end up a jibbering wreck, more convinced than ever that I’m a phoney!

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