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.
Subjectively, the final stages of a writing project often feel the most ‘stuck’, boring and slow. Why is that, when objectively they are often the opposite?
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.
It’s a typical piece of advice to give authors of articles and theses, that you need to explain the ‘so what?’ of your contribution. But in English you can use this phrase in two very distinct ways depending on how you say it.
Paragraphs are parts of sections, and a section is like a flight of stairs, taking you efficiently where your thesis needs to go. A new way to think about paragraphs as a ‘step in your argument’.
Perhaps you feel like your year swings into productivity and then out again. Perhaps you are aware of all the wobbles and adjustments you are constantly having to make. Perhaps sometimes you need to reach out for support. Maybe sometimes you fall off balance and have to quickly get back up again. These are ways that people talk to me about balance–and they suggest that they are therefore ‘bad at balance’, ‘unbalanced’. But actually, this is exactly how bodies and minds should balance.
Sometimes you have a task that is essential, but will only need to be done once. It can’t be done with your multi-use tools or even some of the more niche tools you have in your writing tool box. Nope. It needs a specialist, with a specialist tool, to intervene once.
You don’t need to include everything you have read into your article or thesis. In fact, you almost certainly can’t. So you’ll need criteria for citation.
Look, the true answer is ‘probably not’. I’m not being discouraging here, I’m talking about cold hard maths. Here are 10 reasons why 2021 is unlikely
Join me for an event on 21 June on Writing Well / Being Well in Academia, with my series editor Narelle Lemon (Swinburne University) as
