Tag Archives: writing

Stick to your timetable, not your plan.

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Yesterday's supervision

The end of January saw a supervision session for the second of three (planned) data chapters, which went pretty well. Even though I wrote 3-4,000w less than intended for both chapters, I’ve submitted both on time. It was very tempting to try and postpone the deadline and subsequent supervision by a week, but I am coming to believe that time is a more important variable in the writing-up process than word count. Three reasons for this:

  1. It’s important to get timely advice on draft chapters – no point postponing to write more words only to find that your supervisors think you’ve gone off track. It’s much easier (both practically and psychologically) to add a few thousand words to an academically sound draft than rewriting the bulk of a longer draft that has run into the sand.
  2. Sticking to deadlines lends you the air of competence – professionalism, even! Slipping deadlines are all too common in doctoral studies – why not surprise your supervisors by sticking to yours? Apart from avoiding the time-suck of rearranging supervision meetings,  your supervisors will be providing you with a reference (or maybe even interviewing you) for a job somewhere down the line. Proving to them you can carry off a big project on time can only be good news.
  3. You are not only proving yourself to others, you are proving to you that you can stick to your timetable. The days leading up to the deadline are hard hard hard. For me, it doesn’t seem to matter when I start writing, I always have ’000s of words to get done in the last week. The temptation to postpone is immense. But my strong advice is to hand in on time, even if your submission is not quite what you were planning, for imposing some mastery over time during the writing up will give you some much needed self-confidence on the rock road to your doctorate.

Time is a pretty malleable concept within the PhD. Traditionally, students seem to take well over the idealised three year duration. The PhD is certainly a project that requires more work than any other in a student’s academic career. Naturally, you want to get it right, but I strongly believe it needs to get done on time. Practically speaking, I know too many people who have gone into their fourth year and suddenly hit ‘the wall’ just when they thought they were on the home straight. Often, they’ve needed to take new jobs after the PhD funding has run out. Sometimes, the sheer length of time working on one topic has taken its toll, intellectual fatigue setting in.

But the big one for me is: how long do I really want to spend doing one thing? There’s a lot of stuff in this world that needs fixing. Maybe my PhD will help with a very small part of that, maybe it won’t. Whichever it is, I’m unconvinced that spending an extra 6 months, 12 months, 18 months writing and re-writing will improve it enough to make the extra time worthwhile. Even if you could *guarantee* that such an extension would improve your thesis, you may well gain in the long run by instilling some temporal self-discipline.

Excellent writing tips by James Hayton, incorporating a bit of #dataviz #Pomodoro and #GTD

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Top 10 tips for a trouble-free thesis

  1. Never just sit down and try to type. It’s common to hear advice in the vein of “just get words down”, but it doesn’t work that way. Get your brain and content in order first.
  2. Use pen and paper before pixels. Get the disordered ideas out of your brain and onto physical paper first, then try to put them in order before you start typing. It’ll save you huge amounts of time.
  3. Don’t turn on the computer until you know what you’re going to work on, otherwise you’ll end up stuck in a default loop of e-mail and Internet until guilt catches up with you.
  4. Get your mind into the right state to work before you sit down at the desk. I decide what to work on, then do a five minute physical warm-up to get the blood flowing before I type. A walk around the block can work too.
  5. Give yourself time away from the computer to think. Archimedes had his bathtub, Newton had his apple tree and Feynman had his wobbling plate. Your brain can do great things when you relax.
  6. Not all content is of equal value. Spend more time and effort on the best results and references. Making the thesis longer with sub-standard work only reduces the overall quality. Less is more!
  7. See your progress: I use a 4 × 10 grid on a sheet of A4 above my desk. Each block in the grid equals 500 words, which I filled in as I went. Small habit, huge difference in morale and productivity.
  8. Work in 25 minute bursts of high energy and focus, with five minute breaks in-between. Use a timer, work on one thing and stop when the timer goes off. Take a longer break after four rounds.
  9. Get into the habit of finishing sections, rather than leaving them for later. This means setting small tasks that you can complete quickly.
  10. You won’t follow all of the advice all of the time. That’s fine, but if it’s not going right, take a step back, look at your habits and start again.
via blog.nopkoguo.net

Click on the link above, the whole article is well worth a read (thx to @jennifermjones for the tip).

The literature review; what is it for?

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Seminar28oct09

 

This post reflects on a literature review seminar led by Christian Karner (CK)

While there is much time and space available to analyse the literature within a PhD thesis, the literature review still needs to have an objective at its heart. There must be an argument running through it; the expanded space available does not give licence to a ‘kitchen sink’ approach. While aiming to read extensively, the review is not a platform for showing that off. Everything that is included within the scope of the review should contribute to its overall argument. In my project, this argument will be focused on justifying my theoretical approach.

This raises the question of what ‘should’ be included in the review. Potential pressure to include the ‘big name’ writers in certain areas could conflict with the approach outlined above. (I included a short section on Giddens in a structure/agency paper last year, not because I felt it added anything to the argument but because he is the writer most associated with that debate in recent years.)

CK highlighted the common positioning of the literature review straight after the introduction as somewhat stereotypical. Going into detailed analysis of the existing literature may only be appropriate in conjunction with data analysis. Concentrating on the review in isolation at the start of the project runs the risk of leaving it disconnected from the rest of the project. As each part of the review must contribute to that section’s objective, so the review as a whole must feed into the overall argument of the thesis in its entirety.

So, there needs to be a clear objective to the literature review: what is the scope of the argument being made and how does that feed into the overall thesis. I’ll consider the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how I should structure that argument in a future post.