Bad Writing and Bad Thinking: useful article!

Thanks to Amy who pointed us towards this article about (how to avoid) bad writing. A useful reminder how not to fall into these habits. Interestingly, Rachel Toor, an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, refers to George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. I remember one PhD seminar about writing, where we were also advised to read this piece by Orwell. Thanks to Amy I am now reminded and will go read it!

Cambridge Space-Time

This time not just a comic about PhD life, but some work by my always creative housemate Gillean Denny. Gill is also studying for a Phd, not in Criminology, but in Architecture, and currently writing up and I wanted to share her project for today with you!

Tip to stop procrastination: Freedom

'Freedom frees you from distractions, allowing you time to write, analyze, code, or create.'

How often do you check your email a day? Go on facebook? Check the news? Is that really necessary or is it merely an enormous and unwelcome distraction from your work? If the answer is yes, try this: Freedom, a program that disconnects your computer from the internet for the amount of time you want to. You cannot fool the program, the only way to get connected to internet again, is to either wait or restart your computer.

It works for me!

The only thing is that you need to specify a certain amount of minutes. If you go away from your computer, the clock stops counting. I would personally prefer a program that would enable me to set a certain time (e.g. I want to be offline until 1pm). If you know of any other program that can do this, let me know!

Organizing your Ph.D life

For those of you struggling to make sense of, and best use of, your time, a scholar at MIT has put together a useful blog about organizational strategies, study tips, and efficiency in doing your Ph.D. He is a computer science scholar who recently received his Ph.D. and also managed to publish a book at the same time. His blog, Study Hacks, details specific time organization strategies, such as his post on how to accomplish a large amount of work in a small number of hours, organizational tips and tricks, dealing with stress, and so on, offers some helpful bits of advice. While the blog might suggest living the life of an overly disciplined student, it has some helpful advice that may be good in setting priorities, making the dissertation more manageable, and eliminating distractions.

How not to write a PhD thesis - Tara Brabazon

Here is were you can find the whole of Tara Brabazon's top ten tips for doctoral failure. Summarised, don't do this if you want to successfully finish your Ph.D.:

1. Submit an incomplete, poorly formatted bibliography

2. Use phrases such as “some academics” or “all the literature” without mitigating statements or references

3. Write an abstract without a sentence starting “my original contribution to knowledge is…”

4. Fill the bibliography with references to blogs, online journalism and textbooks

5. Use discourse, ideology, signifier, signified, interpellation, postmodernism, structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstruction without reading the complete works of Foucault, Althusser, Saussure, Baudrillard or Derrida

6. Assume something you are doing is new because you have not read enough to know that an academic wrote a book on it 20 years ago

7. Leave spelling mistakes in the script

8. Make the topic of the thesis too large

9. Write a short, rushed, basic exegesis

10. Submit a PhD with a short introduction or conclusion

How to pass your PhD

Tara Brabazon: Road map to doctoral failure

In this ten-step guide, Tara Brabazon presents the don’ts and don’ts of the PhD process.

Part one: bibliographies

The canary in the mine

Doctoral students need to be told that most examiners start marking from the back of the script. Just as cooks are judged by their ingredients and implements, we judge doctoral students by the calibre of their sources.

The moment examiners see incomplete references or find that key theorists in the topic are absent, they worry. This concern intensifies when in-text citations with no match in the bibliography are located.

If examiners find ten errors, then students are required to perform minor corrections. If there are 20 anomalies, the doctorate will need major corrections. Any referencing issues over that number and examiners question the students’ academic abilities.

If the most basic academic protocols are not in place, the credibility of a script wavers. A bibliography is not just a bibliography: it is a canary in the doctoral mine.

UPDATE the link to the article appears to have stopped working and I can't find it anywhere on THES website but it was there! A search in google does find the page but clicking on it doesn't work either. If it comes back I'll put the link up again. Here is a link to the cached version which might disappear soon: http://tiny.cc/LaKfs

Do you need help with writing a Ph.D?

This website, recommended by Elizabeth Gurian, may be just what you were looking for:

The Fussy Professor Starbuck's Cookbook of Handy-Dandy Prescriptions for Ambitious Academic Authors or Why I Hate Passive Verbs and Love My Word Processor.