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Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering’
A person with an intelligence problem may never think their work is good enough and will resist finishing under the mistaken assumption that more and more work will make for better results.
So how do we conquer the dark side? I’m with Yoda on this one: remember that your reactions to the stresses of scholarly life, while natural, are not inevitable and should be examined carefully.
Understanding that your work, particularly your writing, can never be flawless is strangely liberating.
Repeat after me: perfect is the enemy of done.
pragmatic
Helping Doctoral Students Write,
It’s a PhD, not a Nobel Prize: how experienced examiners assess research theses1 by Gerry Mullins and Margaret Kiley.
The next interesting finding is examiners tend to look in the references for their own work! Yes, of course, this
behaviour is all about ego – but tune in to what I am saying anyway. It is vital that you have cited the people who examine you if at all possible.
The literature review shows a knowledgeable reader how well you know your field, which makes this section a high stakes part of your overall dissertation.
In dissertation-land, the LBD is a simple, but competent run through of the significant authors with the thread of an argument apparent through the whole; connected to why you are bothering to do the study.
Your academic writing trouble and how to fix it,
One of my favourite whiteboard tricks is the ‘clustering’ or ‘spider’ diagram:
In the diagram above I started with a central bubble called ‘Research Student Experience’. The next step is to try literally draw out sub-themes or related ideas in new bubbles connected with ‘legs’ to the original bubble. The next set of ‘legs’ contains references to papers that talk about each of these aspects of the research experience. This
diagramming method enables me to find relations between the ideas and the authors that I am reading; a great technique for working out the structure of literature reviews. Start writing by simply translating each bubble into a subheading within your dissertation or paper. By keeping one idea in the centre and forcing yourself to stick to only three other ideas you impose a hierarchy on your thoughts. You can work through ideas for structure quickly in this way, perhaps taking a photo of each one before you rub it out.
Generally, the more citations, the bigger the impact – but bear in mind you can be highly cited because everyone hates your work too!
A brilliant literature review is important in a dissertation because it ‘sells’ your academic competence to examiners and other readers.
Helping doctoral students to write
5 ways to organise information, which he calls LATCH: Location, Alphabetical, Time, Category and Hierarchy.
Some scholars will be ‘fringe’ and others will be ‘main actors’; some people will be ‘theoretical’, and others will be ‘practical’; some people will care about history, others will not – and so on.
Make a table in your word processing software of choice and arrange the authors according to different ‘locations’.
The idea of using time to organise your literature is genius. Take all the references and lay them out on the floor, or in a database, in order of their
publishing date. Skim read all the papers again, in order this time – what do you notice? Fashions will have come and gone; ideas will have grown and died. Using time is an excellent way of interrogating your underlying assumptions about a body of literature and how it has developed.
Humanities scholars tend to search a more extended time bracket, but setting limits can help with information overload: do only a cursory survey of literature that is more than 20 years old and pay closer attention to more recent additions.
develop a list of categories about almost any idea or theme you read about in the literature.
This organisational principle is really a meta-device – a way of criticising information you have already sorted using one of the other methods, particularly the category method.
epistemological
Becker suggests you pretend your results are produced by a machine then just describe the machine: how does it work? how big is it? what might make the machine break?
write down why the results mean nothing. Sometimes forcing yourself to argue the reverse position can highlight the relationships or ideas worth exploring.
Alternatively, write your ideas in an email to someone. An email forces you to think about the audience explicitly, which makes your writing more coherent.
Or just write about the limitations of the work: what is left out or yet to do? Sometimes, like the null hypothesis, talking about the limitations can help you better define the contribution your study has actually made.
Try the old ‘compare and contrast’ technique. Draw up a table describing where your work is similar to others and where it differs. Use each of these points as a prompt to write a short paragraph.
Becker suggests you pretend your results are produced by a machine then just describe the machine: how does it work? how big is it? what might make the machine break?
write down why the results mean nothing. Sometimes forcing yourself to argue the reverse position can highlight the relationships or ideas worth exploring.
Alternatively, write your ideas in an email to someone. An email forces you to think about the audience explicitly, which makes your writing more coherent.
Or just write about the limitations of the work: what is left out or yet to do? Sometimes, like the null hypothesis, talking about the limitations can help you better define the contribution your study has actually made.
Restate Results (don’t repeat them!). Comment on the results. Evaluate the Results. Make suggestions based on the results.
‘The current study found that …’
‘These results further support the idea of
‘These results confirm the association between
‘These findings are in agreement with those obtained by
‘There are several possible explanations for this result…’
‘The present results are significant in at least two major respects.’
‘There are still many unanswered questions about …’ ‘There is abundant room for further progress in determining.’
the Manchester Academic Phrase Bank
TEXAS: Topic sentence, Explanation, Example, Analysis and Summary.
TEEL: Topic, Evidence, Explain, Link. I’ve been teaching the TEXAS/TEEL method for years to great effect.
Level five: Abstract; general, oriented toward a solution or conclusion.
Level Four: Less general; orientated toward a problem; pulls ideas together. Level Three: Conceptual summary; draws together two or more pieces of evidence, or introduces a broad example. Level Two: Description; plain or interpretive summary; establishing shot. Level One: Concrete; evidentiary; raw; unmediated data or information.
