Tag Archives: masters

Thesis writing: tell a story not a statistic

Self-portrait of Joseph Ducreux yawning and stretching. Photo: wikipedia.org

Self-portrait of Joseph Ducreux yawning and stretching. Photo: wikipedia.org

Worrying about how to analyze your data can get you so focussed on statistics that by the time you come to write up you results you might forget that writing a good thesis is all about telling a good story. No journalist has ever been persuaded to pay attention to a new discovery because the scientist started shouting about the size of their F statistic or the smallness of their p values. Rather, it is by telling a good story that you will capture the curiosity and imagination of your intended audience.

So when you come to write up your results, remember to start with your ideas and only thereafter turn your attention to your analyses. A good approach is something like the following. First, the basic idea or hypothesis phrased in an informal but interesting way (e.g., I think that A is probably the underlying cause of B because of C). Second, the formal test or measure of the idea (e.g., I don’t have powerful approach to being able to test the idea so I am going to use the weaker measure of correlation to see whether there is at least some sort of association between A and B). Third, the results of the formal measure (e.g., I found a correlation between A and B of 0.94). And finally, the conclusion about the idea based on the results of the formal measure (e.g., the surprisingly high correlation shows that there is a strong linear relationship between A and B but the possibility of a causal link will need further investigation).

That particular formula is neither the only one you could use nor necessarily the best one … but it is far from the worst approach and many many times better than simply reporting in succession, the fact that you calculated the correlation coefficient between A and B, did a regression analysis of C, D and E against F, and so forth. Remember, a weak study that is told in an interesting way will almost always get a better examination result than a stronger study that bores your reader to death.

Contributorss: Mark R. Diamond

Choosing a supervisor

Leather bound books, 1887. Photo: en.wikipedia.org

Leather bound books, 1887. Photo: en.wikipedia.org

‘How do I choose who to supervise me?’ This is a question which most research students face very early in the course of their degrees. For honours students, the supervisor might need to be decided within a few weeks of commencing the honours year; for PhD students, universities occasionally allow a grace period of up to a year during which time one can consider the matter of one’s supervisor. But how to decide?

The following is an incomplete list, in no particular order, of some of the factors which, in my view, should weigh into your decision. For simplicity, call the potential supervisor S.

Personal relationships

  • Do you know S? Have you spoken to them, or only heard them lecture?
  • Do you like S?
  • Does S appear to like you?
  • Do you have any knowledge, from other students supervised by S, of how well they got on together?

Academic standing

  • How well regarded is S by other staff in the department?
  • Have you looked at any of S’s publications? Are they in good journals?
  • If you go to another university, either to work or to do further research, will the fact of having been supervised by S be something to highlight?

Research supervision

  • How many students has S previously supervised?
  • Did all of S’s previous students pass, and if so, what kind of grades did they get?
  • Grit. When the going gets tough, what does S do? Does S approach problems and impediments as a fact of research life, and and try to discover ways of overcoming them, or is S disheartened and defeated by problems that surface during their research?
  • Courage. If you get a bad examination report, will S support you when it comes to presenting your case to the university body that has responsibility for deciding whether or not you will get your degree? Or is S more likely to cast you adrift because they themselves do not like conflict?

Research area

  • Does S have a history of research in the area in which you are interested?
  • Is S a specialist or a generalist, and do you know which kind you need?

The list above is by no means complete but it nonetheless provides a good starting point for thinking about what to look for in a supervisor. Many of the topics mentioned are worthy of more attention. I propose to cover some of them in more detail in future posts.

Contributors: Mark R. Diamond

Blogging, thesis writing, and limerence

I hadn’t realised until I sat down to write a posting today, just how much writing a blog is like writing a thesis. The beginning of either is not unlike the early stages of a love affair; a stage that marital therapists sometimes refer to as “limerance”. Just as in a relationship, you begin your dissertation (or blog) with an enormous sense of enthusiasm and desire, and want to spend as much time as possible with it. Getting on with your research, planning it, and thinking about when you’ll next be able to spend time with it, are constant preoccupations. You have thoughts about how important a PhD is to you, what sorts of goals and dreams and plans the PhD will help you achieve, and you allow it to overflow into other areas of your life, maybe even pushing other important commitments into the background. In the same way, I discovered that planning the layout of the blog, the content, designing the style sheets, and trying to work on an appropriate writing style occupied a great deal of my own thinking. And despite the amount of time that it occupies (or occupied), the process seemed quite effortless at first since the intensity of one’s enthusiasm makes all the associated demands seem minor.

Later on, just as with a relationship, a thesis (or blog) enters a so-called “mature phase”, although, in the case of this particular blog is, I think it still a long way off! But in between the early phase of limerance and the mature stage, there is a long intermediate period which lacks some of the early shine of the beginning. The change away from a phase of limerance is obvious. Working on your thesis becomes harder. The demands of daily life, like doing the grocery shopping, going out, seeing friends, and earning money, all compete to take your attention away from work on your thesis. Consequently, the research and writing process become ever harder.

You might also begin to have doubts that never crossed your mind in the early stages. When you started, it was “obvious” that a dissertation, PhD, blog, or whatever, was the right thing to do. You might not even have thought much about why it was so important. In the middle period, you begin seriously to doubt your sanity about having taken on the project, and might deliberately avoid thinking about it, in just the same way that you initially thought so much.

So, what to do?

Some of the feelings that I have described might be mitigated by early planning. Before you even enrol, let alone decide on a specific research topic, talk to others whom you know about their experience of the research and dissertation process. Ask them how they dealt with changing feelings over the course of their enrolment. Think about the kind of research you want to do, and particularly about the topic of your research. What made you choose that particular topic? Were you hoping to change the world, just get a degree, or something in between? If you are wanting to change the world, then you should ask yourself what the effect on your motivation will be if you discover during the course of enrolment that your research is not as earth-shattering, or mould-breaking as you had hoped. What do you imagine the course of your research to be? Will you be completing as little as possible in order to satisfy the requirements of the degree, or are you hoping for a broader education. By way of example, I asked my own thesis supervisor, about two and a half years into my enrolment, what he thought about when I might finish. His reply was “Well, you could clearly write up your thesis and hand it in now,” but then he added, “but you don’t know enough about vision yet.” Whether he would agree with my assessment or not, it appeared (and still appears) to me that his view about PhD research was that it was a period of apprenticeship as much as it was about writing and completing a thesis. He seemed to me to be saying that whilst it would be possible to complete and submit my thesis if I wanted to, in his view there was a great deal more that I could learn during the period of my enrolment if I were willing to learn.

If you are reading this blog two years into your dissertation research, you might think that you have missed the boat as far as the early planning stage is concerned … but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Even if you did not consider the questions that I have posed when you began your thesis, you can still ask and answer them now.

Be willing to adjust your expectations as your research proceeds. Most research projects at PhD level, as opposed to Honours or Masters, do not go according to plan. Most of the reason for this is that a plan for a PhD is almost an oxymoron. If you knew how your research was going to go, it would imply that you already knew the outcome of the initial stages of the research, in which case they would be unnecessary. What usually happens is that after your initial framing of a topic, and early explorations or experiments in the area, new and unforseen experiments or avenues of exploration present themselves, and your research tacks in a direction that is different from the one you initially anticipated. So you need to be open to new ideas, and be prepared to be flexible.

And on that note, I shall end. If you have read this far in one sitting, thank you. But I am about to take my own, next piece of advice. Namely, be prepared to take breaks. I shall write more next time.

Contributors: Mark R. Diamond

More unblocking

Unlike writer’s block, unblocking a drain can be done easily. Photo: Mark Diamond

Unlike writer’s block, unblocking a drain can be done easily. Photo: Mark Diamond

Last time, I commented that there are a multitude of ways to overcome writer’s block, and having describe one method in the previous blog, I propose to focus on a few more over the coming weeks.

Today, I have decided to focus on what might be termed “investment free” writing. Far too many people, and especially, though not exclusively, those who are early in their writing career, confuse evaluations of their writing with evaluations of themselves. For example, you struggle hard to produce a piece of writing with which you are not entirely satisfied, and then reach conclusions like “I’m hopeless”, “I knew I was no good”, and so on. Or your supervisor criticizes your punctuation and you think, “I’m not smart enough to get a PhD”. Not only are conclusions like this self-defeating, in that they lead you to feel miserable and demotivated (instead of more energized as you would want), but they are focussed on you as a person, rather than on your writing.

One way that some people have found of disengaging themselves from their writing product, is to practice writing something that is deliberately “wrong”. It might be wrong in any number of ways, and the particular way is entirely up to you, but you might consider the following —

Write as if English (if that is the language of your thesis) is not your first language. Of course, it might actually be true that English isn’t your first language, but that is not the point. The purpose is to write in a way that makes it show in an exaggerated way that writing in English doesn’t come easily to you. That much will be true, otherwise you wouldn’t have writer’s block. Here is example. I copy from Tom Lehrer song called “Lobachevsky”. If you not hear this song before, you must listen. Tom Lehrer he is very good. I am remember the time I first hear him. He make big impression to me. I am thinking, “If this man, he can make money with voice like that, then I can be millionaire.” But first, I am giving supervisor new song draft!

Another approach is to take a viewpoint with which you disagree entirely, and write a spoof or a parody. Put in jokes. Sure, whatever you write might not end up in the final version of your thesis, but (a) it might just succeed in unblocking the writing flow, (b) I’d be surprised if writing a spoof did not help you clarify what you really do think, and (c) there might be parts that you can use just as you have written them.

A third, related way, is just to write badly. Deliberately badly, like, you know, with no punctuation and ummm no kind of structure thing (Gee this sounds really bad doesn’t it) where you kinda dont even check your speling of stick in your own stuff about what it all sounds like. You might even start … You could try starting your sentence … You can just experiments with different beginnings and false starts and finally discover that in doing so you have managed to get on a roll and express, at least to some degree, the concepts that you are trying to convey. Get it? Sentences that go nowhere. False starts to a paragraph written one after the other, no back editing. Oh yes, I almost forgot. Lots of critical comments in the text like, “This is really crap”, “I really haven’t a clue about this stuff”, “I guess it must be pretty obvious that I can’t even write two sentences together.”

The critical thing about all these suggestions is that they are aimed at separating your evaluation of yourself from your evaluation of your writing. If you are trying to write like a non-native speaker, then when your writing looks as if you can’t write English, that’s good! And if you accidentally make it look as if you can write English, then you will be able to use a part of it in your thesis. If you write a viewpoint with which you disagree, sounds like you haven’t a clue about your thesis topic, or looks as if you are poking fun at the material, again, that’s good.

The main thing is to produce words. When you feel as if you can’t write, then writing anything at all is great. Later on, you can focus on producing some writing that says what you want to say in the way that you want to say it. But first off, just write.

Contributors: Mark R. Diamond

Annual report time

Photograph of Helen Keller: Radcliffe College. Copyright expired.

Photograph of Helen Keller: Radcliffe College. Copyright expired.

Annual report time is perilously close for many Australian post-graduate students. If you are one of them, I hope that you are well-prepared and have not been delaying submitting your report. If you have been proceeding well, and are not behind schedule with your research and write-up, you have probably submitted your report well ahead of the deadline.

The reports are usually only daunting when you have not been forthright in discussing your progress with your supervisor(s), and procrastination is unlikely to provide much relief because (unlike the actual thesis submission date), progress reports tend to have a firm, fixed deadline. If you do not submit your progress report you will certainly not be allowed to re-enroll next year.

If you have been trying to put the report out of your mind, my advice is simple. Don’t. If you rarely discuss your progress with your supervisor, you might be apprehensive about broaching the topic of your annual report. However, it is worth remembering that your supervisor is almost certainly your best ally in the event that you have had problems and are behind schedule. Talking to your supervisor about things that might have slowed your progress might seem a little like being sent to see the principal at school, but there is little to be lost, and everything to gain by being open with them. The bottom line is, “Do you think your supervisor wants you to continue?” If the answer is “yes”, then even if you get chewed-out for being tardy and behind schedule, they are likely to help you draft your report so that it puts such progress as you have made in the best possible light. Furthermore, if you think your supervisor is of the belief that you should not continue your studies, then it is better that you know early than discover the unpleasant news on the deadline for submission of the report.

Contributors: Mark R. Diamond