If you are doing a PhD it’s a good idea to buy, or find online, a good reliable dictionary.  Not only doctoral researchers a good dictionary. Most of us use a dictionary rather more than we let on. Just yesterday I reached for my dictionary – it’s rather a hefty tome – to check the spelling of a word. And as I opened it up, I realised that I no longer have to continually look words up when I’m reading. I do still regularly use it as a synonym finder, largely to disrupt writing patterns where I just use the same word over and over. But I used a dictionary a lot – and I mean a lot – when I ..read more

No-one arrives at a doctorate as a blank slate. Everyone brings with them particular histories – we have life experiences and personal pathways which are classed, raced, gendered; work experiences and sometimes long professional careers; as well as educational histories. Formal educational histories of new PhDers are generally strongly disciplinary and focused on academic success in lower degrees. These histories do not always seamlessly morph into the doctorate. It is as well to understand the potential for uneasiness between what you have experienced and understood before the PhD, and how i ..read more

It’s that time of year. Across the world potential new Doctors have rejoiced. They’ve been accepted by the university of their choice. They are now getting their heads and lives geared up for a new intellectual adventure. I usually write a few posts for new doctoral researchers right about now – you can find them if you search starting the PhD. Or just click the link here. I’m not the only one who writes about beginning a doctorate of course. There is a lot of stuff out here in blog-land that is very helpful for those just embarking on the doctoral “journey”. And I’m afraid there is ..read more

When you begin the PhD you will be told to read, and read a lot. But you’ll find not any old approach to reading will do. It’s a particular kind of reading that’s expected. So it’s important to get a grip on the complex task that you are being asked to do. In the first instance your reading helps you to: Scope the field or fields that you are in, so that you understand what is relevant to your topic, and what is not. You also need to get clear on the “core” of your discipline(s) and its threshold concepts – the ideas that anybody doing any topic in the discipline, including you, need to take ..read more

Writing is a crucial aspect of doctoral work – indeed all the scholarly work you will undertake from now on. Writing is integral to scholarship. Whether you are in or out of higher education, if you are researching, you are writing. Writing and its associated activities reading and talking, are the major ways in which we make sense of what we are doing. Writing is how we communicate results, ideas and interpretations to others. But there is “stuff’ that can get in the way of writing.  It’s very easy to compare yourself as a writer to your peers. Perhaps they write more than you do. They ..read more

Are you just starting a PhD? Worried? Excited? Nervous? Fear not.:There’s lots of support and help available to you. Your institution is likely to provide an induction programme where you’ll find out about all the internal procedures and timelines you have to follow. But there’ll also be more. You’ll also get details of what training is available to you. Your institution will encourage you to make connections with your peers, and to engage with what’s on offer outside your faculty. There’s also veritable truckloads of advice available to you from other sources – facebook and what’s app suppor ..read more

if you have just started your doctorate, then your supervisor has no doubt asked you to read, and read a lot. By now, you probably have quite a few texts entered in your bibliographic software. You can start to write about these already. You don’t have to wait until you are asked. #AcWriMo2020, held every year in November, is a good time to begin to experiment with ways to write with your literatures. Try out different approaches. See what it means to use the literatures to help you think and plan. Here are a few prompts which you can use to write a chunk – for yourself or your supervisor – ab ..read more

Writing, and its alter ego, reading, are the backbone of academic work. The practices that make scholarship what it is.  In the PhD there are multiple places and purposes for writing.  We often focus on the final text, the thesis, the writing that communicates what we claim to know, that explains the research we have done. We may of course also write other texts that deal with our research – conference papers, journal articles, and perhaps articles for professional publications, blog posts and tweets. We may write about our research in audit reports to the university or a funder, or ..read more

If you are starting out on a PhD you are probably expecting it to be hard work. That’s not wrong. A doctorate isn’t easy – it’s an extended piece of work over a long period of time. It takes energy and effort to stay focused and working on working on.  Stamina.   But you can’t expect to maintain the same pace and intensity throughout. There’s inevitably be some ups and downs.  And some of these can be anticipated. There are some predictable points in the PhD which are challenging –  getting the research question or the hypothesis sorted out,  reining in the ..read more

Before I came into higher education I had a brief stint as a civil service strategic planner. I got pretty interested in the process of scenario planning – that’s where you develop a narrative about something that could happen in the future. Or better still multiple narratives. The point of scenario planning is to identify ways in which you might maximise the chance of your preferred scenario happening. But scenarios can also help you think about less welcome scenarios and how they might be dealt with if they actually occur. The poster child for scenario planning is the Dutch Shell oil c ..read more