Research Masterclass - Towards Confident Doctoral Writing

In this session we will work to identify and consider ways of developing writing which enables complex, conceptual, critical, clever and confident research writing at doctoral research level.  

We will look at the characteristics of writing which enable you to construct, articulate and express your theorising, complex, conceptual thinking and the argument and worth of your work, exploring the signs of this in research writing in a doctoral thesis, and sharing strategies which can encourage such writing such as:  

Modelling, using critical friends, breaking writing blocks and managing the writing energy  

We will home in on two parts of the thesis in particular,  

• the abstract, that short focused piece of writing which captures and articulates research thinking and argument, and expresses the contribution to knowledge and  

• then consider the challenges of the literature review where confident, theorized, critical writing in an argument begins.  

Working together, we will share insights and good practice in doctoral research writing and also share strategies for refining our writing to ensure it is conceptual, informative, well argued, fluent and rightly confident.  

Biography:

Professor Gina Wisker : My current role is at University of Bath supervising doctoral students in the International Centre for HE Management, and Professor 11 at the University of the Arctic in Tromso Norway where I co-run the postgraduate supervision course. Previously Professor of Higher Education & Contemporary Literature at Anglia Ruskin University then University of Brighton (now Emeritus), Head of the Centre for Learning & Teaching in both universities . Published 27 books (some edited) 140 + articles: The Postgraduate Research Handbook (2001; 2nd ed. 2007); The Good Supervisor (2005, 2012); Getting Published (2015); The Undergraduate Research Handbook (2nd ed, 2018). Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature (2007); HorrorFiction: An Introduction (2005); Margaret Atwood, an Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012); Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction (2016); Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories: Spectres, Revenants, Ghostly Returns (2022). I have chaired the Heads of Education Development Group, SEDA Scholarship & Research committee and am a Senior Fellow of SEDA. I am on Council and publications committee for the SRHE and am chief editor of SEDA journal Innovations in Education and Teaching International. National Teaching Fellow, Principal fellow of the HEA, FRSA. I have worked with colleagues in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Ruanda, Ghana, Mozambique, The West Indies, Gibraltar and in South Africa (since my first visit in 1994,) mainly delivering writing and supervision courses and recently on the ESRC/NRF funded SARiHE project (2017- 20) (S African rurality in HE).  

For more information, please contact the Graduate Research School.