How to use ‘theory of mind’ to write a thesis that will pass
gap between what you know, what your supervisors know, and what the people who are actually going to approve your work, your examiners, know.
gap between what you know, what your supervisors know, and what the people who are actually going to approve your work, your examiners, know.
I don’t know that I think you should make your writing sacred. But I do think that you could and you might like to. In any case, this thought-experiment about ‘what would it mean to make your writing sacred’ may help you to think through what you do think about your writing, how you define its meaning and place in your life, and what habits and environments you put around it to help you get that thesis written.
Not all groups of people working together are teams. And when your supervisor is not on your team, then you are definitely going to have a significant problem and you’ll need to think about how to tackle that.
This post encourages us to think deeply about how authorship debates are part of broader questions of what authorship is for, who it is for, and who benefits from it. The examples in this post help us to see that there are established of ways of attributing authorship that can acknowledge these collectives, and perhaps encourage us to be innovative or accurate in our authorship practices.
Each revision, taking on board questions and concerns and advice and changes, takes my work a little bit away from me. For me, this is a good thing! Unlike this blog post, which I wrote, editing and published myself (hence the fact that there are often typos!), academic writing for publication has been read and commented on and changed by multiple people over multiple stages. The article or book goes from being ‘my’ work, to being, in some way, ‘our’ work.
If you feel overwhelmed by your inbox and meeting demands, you are likely to be dealing with the challenge of reactive communication. That is, every day, you open your inbox and find tens or even hundreds of requests for information and tasks. Like many people, you may start the day with a sense of dread.
Everyone has a path to expertise, and sometimes it’s helpful to loop back to an earlier time, when I was trying to work out how these book-length things even were possible, long before I accidentally wrote three books in a year. It’s a story involving a typewriter and a very long poem.
Often, we feel we should wait to feel ‘inspired’ to start writing. We want to wait until we feel we are filled up with ideas and certainty and energy to write. And yet, as Boice found in his research, turning up regularly and ‘just writing’, whether or not you felt inspired or had time or were ready, could make someone nine times more productive.
Just popping into the blog to say that Level Up your Essays, the new book with Inger and Shaun, is now out in the world.
I started this blog (under another name) about nine years and over 200 posts ago… that’s a long time on the internet. In the first
