Emotion and the PhD: a blog #followfriday

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what in the ANCIL research we’ve called the affective dimension of information – also known as the emotional impact of doing research, or (in ThesisWhisperer’s words) “the valley of shit“. The affective dimension is That Thing We Don’t Talk About, particularly in academic circles. We know anecdotally that crises of self-belief occur during the research process – as ScholasticRat‘s supervisor told her, you cannot achieve a PhD without undergoing a long dark night of the soul – and yet this particular threshold concept never seems to form part of a research methods course. It’s a dirty secret, passed along verbally by supervisors, postdocs or peers.

It seems to me that often this crisis is linked to the writing process. By the time we hit the PhD, we’re generally pretty good at sourcing and assimilating stuff (or we think we are: there can be quite a few surprises awaiting us there, too). We can read, we can notetake, we can store references, we can cite them. But that moment in which you gaze at a blank page – fingers poised over keyboard or unfamiliar-feeling pen already slipping in fist – that moment is the culmination of all the pressure we’ve ever been under to express, to present, to articulate: to make ourselves visible, vulnerable and potentially risible.

So what do we do? … We read one more article. Because if we know that bit more, we’ll be that much less vulnerable, right? Uh, no. I’ve blogged previously about why this approach doesn’t work. The doctoral learning journey is enough of an epic quest that you really don’t need to add extra anguish. Yet while there is some excellent academic research on this topic, notably by learning developers and information literacy specialists, emotion remains an unspoken factor in academia.

So in traditional Twitter ‘Follow-Friday’ style, here are some great blogs that can help with the emotional impact of writing, reflecting, and surviving the doctoral experience:

The Thesis Whisperer – “dedicated to helping research students everywhere”

Explorations of Style – “The ability to formulate and clarify our thoughts is central to the academic enterprise; this blog discusses strategies to improve the process of expressing our research in writing.”

Literature Review HQ – advice from one who’s been there: “I realised that I had spent none of my time during my PhD reviewing the literature! … I was in for a very steep learning curve…”

Kevin Morrell’s PhD tips – some fantastic myth-busting: “You need to finish a time-bound project, not win a Nobel prize.”

Lastly, check out the #phdchat hashtag on Twitter. You’ll find the bloggers above on there along with many others who are dealing with the impact of the doctoral journey by sharing tips and resources that work for them. I can vouch for this: a community is the most effective way to combat a crisis.

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“Don’t get it right, just get it written”

I recently stumbled across an academic writing group set up and run by PhD students here in the University, and went along to see how it works.

We began with a 5-minute warm-up exercise, getting into pairs and swapping plans verbally of what we wanted to write about. It’s a gentle, non-threatening way of getting into your topic by explaining it to someone else. In my session we were put into pairs consisting of one more experienced participant (in terms of writing group attendance) and one less so, which was thoughtful.

After the 5-minute exchange of plans – and two and a half minutes is really not a lot of time to say what you want to do! – we had 8 minutes of free writing. The rules for this section are:

• you must use complete sentences, but not necessarily “academic” language
• you can’t go back over anything you’ve written: no edits, and no spellchecking
• you can’t stop writing until the timer goes!

What you write in this segment is for your own eyes only – not for supervisors, colleagues or anyone else to see and criticize (unless you decide otherwise afterwards). And what you write can vary tremendously. Some participants use the 8 minutes to outline what they’ll work on in the main section of the time; some use it to reflect on how they feel about their research that day. But what happens when you get stuck, or are blank to start off with, and yet you must write and keep writing? That’s what’s so interesting about this approach. The session leader described a participant who, in utter frustration, wrote “I hate this, I hate this” repeatedly for 8 minutes. Yet the action of writing, even the writing of negative or emotional sentences, brings its own release – that’s the point of the free writing.

This is very reminiscent of how Maya Angelou describes the writing process:

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’

After the 8 minutes’ sandbox time, the final section is 45 minutes of ‘real’ writing, intended for consumption by a real audience. By this time everyone in the group was physically settled, writing materials arranged comfortably, and grounded by our earlier discussion and by the fact that we were no longer face to face with a blank page. I found it remarkably easy to focus: ideas flowed as my writing flowed, and yet – because I was writing in full sentences and with one eye on future readers – I was forced to fit the ideas into the rhythm of the writing and develop them in an orderly way. And the astonishing thing was that I was able to do this. I didn’t lose track of anything, and I ended up with a piece of coherent, well-developed writing that I could type up* and (with minor amendments) present to colleagues. Magically, I was getting it written and getting it right – pretty much; and that’s a first for me.

Rowena Murray, whose work on academic writing techniques was the inspiration for this choice of format, describes how writing can become “part of the researcher’s thinking process” (‘What can I write about?: The rhetorical question for PhD students and their supervisors‘). Yet, as she also points out, in most UK universities writing is not perceived in this way, and a dislocation between the thinking and writing processes results.

This idea of “dislocation” encapsulates my PhD experience perfectly. I was the student who couldn’t write. It seemed to me that until I had something definitive and irreproachable to say, I couldn’t go near a pen. The sight of blank pages in my research diary gave me hysterics. I read and took notes compulsively and wrote nothing – until my final year, when breaking through the barrier that I’d so painstakingly constructed was a slow and anguished business. The Muse did come, of course – in the end. But incorporating writing/thinking time on a weekly basis from the start seems a much saner way of summoning her.

* Yes, my writing is an analogue affair. Interestingly, the majority of the participants present also used pen and paper.

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Writing group structure

In the writing group I attended sessions take place weekly and last an hour and a quarter. Have one person who can explain how each part of the session works and act as timekeeper (setting the timer on your phone is the easiest way).

• 5 minutes’ discussion in pairs of what you plan to write about in the session
• 8 minutes of free writing – complete sentences, no stopping, no editing
• 45 minutes’ writing for an audience

The time in between is used for taking breath, stretching, and thinking about how to approach the next section.

The session finished with tea and biscuits (brought by participants) and an informal debrief where each participant described to the rest how the session went for him/her.

Title quotation: James Thurber