Your facilitator:
Professor Inger Mewburn (better known as @thesiswhisperer) was born on Nuenonne country, which is now known as Tasmania, Australia (always was, always will be, Aboriginal land). She has a background as a designer and a researcher, which was nurtured at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University.
Since 2006, she has worked exclusively with PhD students and early career academics, helping them finish complex research projects with (very) demanding stakeholders. She’s passionate about people reaching their potential as researchers and helping create a kinder, more inclusive academy.
Inger is currently the Director of Researcher Development at The Australian National University where she oversees professional development workshops and programs for all ANU researchers. Aside from creating new posts on the Thesis Whisperer blog, she writes scholarly papers, books and book chapters about research education, with a special interest in post-PhD employability.
You find out more via her Linkedin profile, Amazon author page, or on Wikipedia. You can view her publications and books on the Thesis Whisperer About page. A full list of her scholarly work is available via her Google Scholar page or OrcidID. She is a co-creator of the PostAc app and co-hosts a regular podcast called ‘On the Reg’ with Dr Jason Downs.
Didactic for this workshop
There is a lot of confusion about the role of paragraphs in writing. In this workshop we will look at one technique - semantic gravity - for ordering the progression of ideas and arguments in a paragraph. This technique is useful for the writing and editing phase and helps you make decisions about the sequencing of ideas. If you want to be in charge of your paragraphs, this session is for you!
How to write:
A powerful paragraph using semantic gravity.
Read the Thesiswhisperer post that accompanies this slide deck
Material prepared by Professor Inger Mewburn
This slide deck is released under a creative commons, share alike, non-commercial attribution license.
The explanations, examples and activities in this webinar are from our book, published through Open University Press:
How to Fix your academic writing trouble: a practical guide
Link to the ANU library copy of the book:
‘Writing Trouble’ was so successful, we wrote another book!
Level up your essays: how to get better grades at University
Available via NewSouth Press or in all good bookstores.
Conventional advice about paragraphs
When we are learning to write, we are given some useful heuristics for paragraphs:
TEXAS: Topic sentence, example, explanation, analysis, ‘so what’
TEEL: Topic sentence, Explanation, Evidence, and Link.
They are handy devices, but as the level of complexity increases, they can become harder to operationalise.
Each paragraph should be trying to make one point in your overall argument. Try this:
1) Pick a paragraph of your own writing.
2) Examine the text sentence by sentence and ask yourself: Where did I place the key idea in this paragraph? Highlight it.
3) Try moving the key idea around – to the first sentence, or the last. See what effect it has on your paragraph.�
Can’t find the key idea in the paragraph? Two or more ideas going on in the paragraph? Reconsider. Are you overloading your reader?
Each paragraph is an information ‘nugget’ that focuses on one part of your overall argument: here’s a diagram for what an argumentative paragraph looks like from The Craft of Research.
"... if you plan your argument only around claims, reasons, and evidence, your readers may think your argument is not only thin but, worse, ignorant or dismissive of their views. You must respond to their predictable questions and objections." Wayne C. Booth et. al. The Craft of Research, Third Edition.
In practice, academic writers tend to put the focus on the conversation with their reader:
Here’s everything under the subheading Experienced Examiners Expect the Thesis to Pass on page 376 of ‘It’s a PhD, not a Nobel Prize: how experienced examiners assess research theses’ by Gerry Mullins and Margaret Kiley
Of even more comfort to postgraduate students is the reluctance of examiners to fail a thesis (knowledge claim). From our 30 experienced examiners (who had examined more than 300 theses over the last 10–15 years), there were only 10 reports of a failed thesis (evidence). There are several reasons given for this reluctance (anticipating and addressing the reader’s implicit question: why so few failed theses?). Primarily, it is the examiners’ realisation that the thesis represents three to four years of effort by a talented student, and that its production has been an expensive process in terms of resources and other people’s time (answer to the implicit question): ‘If the student is any good and the supervisor any good then you shouldn’t fail a PhD. There should be enough “nous” around to guide the student in a way that he/she wouldn’t fail’ (Sc/Male/10). (evidence supporting the answer).
Another reason examiners will do everything they possibly can to avoid failing a thesis, or asking for a substantial rewrite (anticipating and addressing the reader’s implicit question: are there other reasons for the low failure rate?), is that they realise that this will require a substantial amount of work for the examiner, the student and often the supervisor (answer to the implicit question): ‘A poor thesis causes me sleepless nights as I know how much work and effort is involved’ (Hum/Female/6). (evidence)
Warrants are ‘the reason for the reason’ and can be a statement about:
Warrant
Do you always need a warrant?
Rule of behaviour warrant:
“Doctoral orphans are often better students than academics think they are because most academics do not have direct experience of working with them. Hearsay is not a good way to find out about a student cohort because it’s not backed up by evidence.”
Cause and effect warrant:
Doctoral orphans are often better students than academics think they are because most academics do not have direct experience of working with them. Without direct experience are forced to rely on rumour and ‘what everyone knows’ – which might be wrong.
In expert to expert writing, a warrant can easily look condescending and unnecessary.
General rule: save them for unusual or complex circumstances.
Find the argumentative ‘kit of parts’ and the conversation with your reader in your own writing
In a paragraph of your own writing, highlight:
Do you use all the parts of the argument kit in every paragraph?
Different paragraphs for different purposes… here’s the main components of an introduction:
And for a conclusion:
Summarising the Chapter's Main Points:
Significance of Findings/Analysis in the Context of the Chapter:
Link to the Broader Dissertation:
Transition to the Next Chapter:
To break it down even further:
Literature Review Chapter
Methodology Chapter
Or - use the Manchester phrase bank
Let’s get heavy.
Eric Hayot suggests paragraphs should move from general/abstract ideas to specific/concrete examples and back to general/abstract conclusions.
‘Concrete writing’ contains: numbers, percentages, quotes or descriptions.
Abstract.
Semantic gravity: low
Summary statements.
A drone shot of the forest
Specific/concrete.
Semantic gravity: High
Examples, numbers, places
A single tree in the forest
Highly abstract.
Semantic gravity: super low!
Concepts, frameworks, theories
The forest represented on a map
End with a much more abstract sentence that links into your overall argument.
Start with a specific knowledge claim
Move on to more concrete examples, summaries, analysis sentences.
Hayot argues that engaging writing tends to show a ‘u’ shape moving through different levels of abstraction (it’s a judgment call really).
Level five: Abstract / theoretical / conceptual.
Level Four: A specific, limited knowledge claim
Level Three: Summary sentence: draws together two or more pieces of evidence, or introduces a broad example.
Level Two: Description; plain or interpretive summary of evidence or data.
Level One: Concrete facts; evidentiary; raw; unmediated data or information (eg: statistics / quotes)
A piece of my published text… which doesn’t do a great job.
The PhD was initially designed to train the next generation of academics, but this career outcome is looking less likely for today’s graduates (level 5). There have been claims that there is an over-supply of graduates for academic positions over the last decade at least (Coates and Goedegebuure, 2010; Edwards, 2010; Group of Eight, 2013) (level 4). The latest Australian data, showcased in the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) report (McGagh et al., 2016), suggest that 60% of Australia’s PhD graduates will not end up in academia, a finding consistent with other advanced economies (level 3). For example, a recent survey by the Vitae organisation (2013) in the UK showed that although the overall unemployment rate for PhD graduates was low (around 2%), only 38% of PhD graduates are now employed in academia after graduation. (level 1)
Rearranged to follow an uneven U shape
For more than a decade, scholars of higher education have claimed that there is an over-supply of graduates for academic positions (Coates and Goedegebuure, 2010; Edwards, 2010; Group of Eight, 2013) (level 4). If this oversupply problem is real, we should see more PhD graduates making a rational decision to leave academia at the end of their degree and statistics seem to be bearing out this trend (level 3). The latest Australian data suggest that 60% of Australia’s PhD graduates will not end up in academia, a finding consistent with other advanced economies (McGagh et al., 2016) (level 2). For example, a recent survey by the Vitae organisation (2013) in the UK showed that although the overall unemployment rate for PhD graduates was low (around 2%), only 38% of PhD graduates are now employed in academia after graduation. (level 1). If more PhD graduates are looking to leave academia, we must ask: does the PhD need to change? (level 4). Since the PhD was initially designed to train the next generation of academics, this change may be dramatic, with far-reaching consequences for candidates, supervisors and institutions (level 5).
Moving up and down + finishing more abstractly than you start
Sentiment analysis is one of the fastest growing research areas in computer science, making it challenging to keep track of all the activities in the area. (Level 4) We present a computer-assisted literature review, where we utilize both text mining and qualitative coding, and analyze 6996 papers from Scopus (Level 2). We find that the roots of sentiment analysis are in the studies on public opinion analysis at the beginning of 20th century and in the text subjectivity analysis performed by the computational linguistics community in 1990’s (Level 2). However, the outbreak of computer-based sentiment analysis only occurred with the availability of subjective texts on the Web (Level 3). Consequently, 99% of the papers have been published after 2004. Sentiment analysis papers are scattered to multiple publication venues, and the combined number of papers in the top-15 venues only represent ca. 30% of the papers in total (Level 1). We present the top-20 cited papers from Google Scholar and Scopus and a taxonomy of research topics (Level 3). In recent years, sentiment analysis has shifted from analyzing online product reviews to social media texts from Twitter and Facebook (Level 4). Many topics beyond product reviews like stock markets, elections, disasters, medicine, software engineering and cyberbullying extend the utilization of sentiment analysis (Level 5).
Mantyla, M. V., Graziotin, D., & Kuutila, M. (2018). The evolution of sentiment analysis”, review of research topics, venues, and top cited papers, Computer Science Review, 27, 16-32:
Have a look at this worksheet for more guidance.
On a piece of paper, try mapping a paragraph of your text as shown in this picture.
Try to ‘smooth’ your paragraph by moving sentences around what did you notice?
Thanks for coming along! It takes years to be a good writer - we’ve only spent an hour together. There’s more in our book:
How to Fix your academic writing trouble: a practical guide
Here’s some other recommended reading:
The elements of academic Style