Strategies to support writing to PhD Student

Begin as you mean to continue

Start with a discussion about writing in an early meeting, and follow this up by setting a goal with your student – e.g. summarise five useful sources for the literature review for the next meeting in 1000 words. Do something similar for subsequent meetings, setting up a regular writing-feedback cycle.

It doesn’t have to be perfect

It takes all of us, no matter how talented or experienced, years of practice and many drafts before we arrive at a polished piece of work. Many students will delay writing until they feel they have perfectly formed results, ideas, and even sentences prepped and ready to go. 

Explain to your students that good writing starts off as rough drafts, and that you can edit rough drafts, but you can’t edit nothing. Writing is iterative. Encourage them to submit imperfect writing to you, particularly if the alternative is no writing. Clarity, readiness, confidence, and quality often come in later drafts, so don’t let your student wait for these to fall out of the sky.

Kick-start writing with publication

Nothing helps writing along like a deadline. When a student commits to publishing or presenting work at a conference, there’s immediate impetus to produce a finished piece of writing. Get them started by helping them plan out some sections of their paper or poster, then set deadlines for these components so that you can offer feedback over a series of meetings.

Keep moving forward

Each section of thesis writing your student sends will ideally be subjected to a round or two of feedback. If a piece of writing has been to and fro a few times, but isn’t quite where you’d like it to be, discuss leaving it with your student and moving on – for now. It will keep the momentum up, and a student can often break through a difficult section after giving it some space. Remember too that your first goal is to arrive at a draft chapter/thesis. Stylistic and grammatical clumsiness can be dealt with once the basics of a thesis or a chapter have been written.

Identify difficulties and seek help early

About 58 per cent of QUT HDR students are from non-English-speaking backgrounds (this includes domestic and international students). Some of these students will need extra support for writing.

Sometimes problems that look like language difficulty might actually be due to other factors, such as undeveloped critical thinking skills or poor time and project management. Try to understand your student’s needs and connect them with the appropriate training and advice, such as additional language support from GRE+D, which they can access on the HiQ website.

Provide regular feedback

Nothing will sap a research student’s writing motivation more than a backlog of work that has not been read or commented on. Effective supervisors take control of workflow by providing timely feedback and following this up in meetings and one-on-one discussions.

Summary

These tips should help you support your students’ writing. Remember that a supervisor is not a copyeditor – refer your students to GRE+D resources and support if they are struggling with academic writing and you are unable to make good progress using these strategies.