Review of Joli Jensen’s “Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics”

I recently read this book, published by the University of Chicago Press, in their Writing, Editing and Publishing series. It’s a compact paperback, 166 pages long.

The book is divided into 28 main chapters, split across the following core sections:

• Writing in Academe
• Using Tools that Work
• Challenging Writing Myths
• Maintaining Momentum
• Building Writing Support

Of these I found the sections on tools, challenging writing myths and maintaining momentum most effective. The book’s author is nicely to the point, doesn’t mess about, but gives straightforward, honest advice. There’s much that many academics could benefit from, including making time for writing in a busy academic life, dealing with imposter syndrome, and coping with perfectionism. I also found the book had great advice for handling multiple projects at once, and the generally less often discussed challenge of keeping writing fun, in a context in which it might often seem to become a chore.

On the downside I did personally have big issues with the depiction of humanities scholars, presented as people with only one writing task to focus on, and a relatively easier task as a result than scientists. As an academic scientist turned historian this didn’t fit with my experience. Humanities scholars often juggle multiple writing projects at once too. And, perhaps even more crucially, are often single authors, so must handle all the tasks of academic writing, not shared among a group i.e. all of research, planning, writing, revising, editing, submitting, dealing with peer review, and hopefully proofreading and final publication processes. The challenge can be immense. I don’t think the author of the book grasped that at all. Perhaps she was looking back to more halcyon days.

I also found that it was a shame the book avoided commonly used writing terms like procrastination, which can often be such a problem for many doctoral students. The book does have some good writing tips for postgraduates, but is aimed squarely at later stage academics, who have more challenges fitting writing in alongside their other academic workload. Though the book could be of more benefit to part-time postgraduates than full-timers, who must fit vital writing time in around other commitments, including in some cases full-time jobs. I just think that with a few relatively small tweaks and refocusing the book could have been adjusted to help more postgraduate students as well.

So yes I do have critiques. But generally I came away from it feeling very positive. I don’t think that any academic would use every tip and idea in there. But there are lots of good ones presented. And many ideas challenge oft-held unproductive mindsets. It’s also an easy read, well written, that you can dip in and out of. So yes, thumbs up.

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Thoughts on self-funding PhDs, sciences vs humanities etc.

I read a blog post today about self-funded PhDs, which was really interesting. It was written by someone who is working part-time to support their PhD, which I think, if I’ve read it correctly, is studied full-time. That takes a lot of guts. Much more common, certainly in the humanities, is self-funding for part-time PhD students.

I was a PhD student twice. Initially I was a full-time science PhD student when I fell ill in 1994, with what would turn out later – once eventually diagnosed – to be a very aggressive progressive neurological disease. I had to drop out, and although I considered self-funding it was not financially an option. There were other reasons that would have stopped me completing that PhD anyway.

Seven years later I started a self-funded humanities PhD, having picked up, in the meantime, a bachelors and masters degrees in history, both studied part-time. I expected to self-fund throughout. My husband was working, so I did not need to support myself financially. And I was studying the second PhD part-time, which made a big difference to the fees due, and the workload.

Much to my surprise I won funding from the second year onwards from AHRC who were willing – unlike my previous funding council EPSRC – to support part-time study. This was a particular surprise because I’d had to declare my past research council funding, but that was not counted against me. And, most significantly of all, when I applied, only 1 in 5 applicants to AHRC for PhD funding were successful. I was very very lucky.

There’s a perception among some in the sciences that self-funded PhD students are failures. It’s certainly true that – at least for full-timers – PhD funding is much easier to get in the sciences. There’s much more science money out there, people with lower quality earlier degrees can get funding for their PhDs. In humanities there is virtually no funding available for PhD students. Even what there is is only available for the very very best, and out of those only the very luckiest. This has led to a different economic situation among humanities PhD students, where it’s particularly common for people to self-fund part-time study alongside a full-time job. Or, more typically, a slightly less than full-time job, so they have the time available to put in the study required. Indeed in some humanities departments there are more part-time self-funded students like this than full-time funded ones.

What I’m less sure about is what the prospects for employment in academia are for people who self-funded throughout their PhDs. I could easily see some academics not being so impressed that the student, unsurprisingly, could not get some of the very limited funding. On the other side though I suspect that many academics would consider the bigger picture, and would assess for example the student’s publication record and teaching experience. For the latter part-timers can be at a disadvantage, with some departments more likely to offer teaching opportunities to full-time funded students, not least because they can be more visible on-campus. But if a part-time student is determined, and makes the right enquiries, they can get the good opportunities too.

Of course even funding can vary in how full it is. When I won my funding from AHRC part-time award holders just had their fees paid, and no allowance for living expenses. We also didn’t receive the same support for attending conferences and other things as full-timers. Over the following years the situation improved. I know, for example, that my original PhD supervisor, who later moved from Dundee to Oxford, was pushing for part-time PhD-ers to get the same support as full-timers from AHRC. And we eventually got it, including a living expenses allowance, which is only fair, given how often even part-time students have to reduce their working hours, and thus earning potential, to fit in a PhD.

What I’m sure about is that if I hadn’t won funding I would have carried on with my humanities PhD, part-time, self-funding, and I’m confident that I would have finished, and would have been doing exactly what I’m doing now, as an independent academic researcher, publishing my research in academic journals and doing new fun research. And I have the utmost respect for others doing their PhDs by self-funding, whether they are full-time students, or part-time ones. It can be difficult, but also rewarding.

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Writing from day one or not in a PhD, and science vs humanities differences

A blog post yesterday on the Thesis Whisperer website argued strongly against PhD students writing from day one, as is advocated by at least some lecturers and supervisors. This proved to be quite a contentious post, and the comments after it showed a split pretty much down the middle. But some people, like me, appreciated the viewpoint, and were largely in favour of it.

When I started my second go at a PhD, having had to leave a full-time science one after falling seriously ill, I was determined to make the best possible use of my second chance. And that included being as efficient a student as possible, and making the most of my productivity. I wrote my history PhD literature review in the first three months, and then went straight on to start historical research in the archives. This was despite me being a part-time PhD student the second time around, and increasingly severely disabled as time went on. When I’d been a full-time science student it was normal to spend the first year reading and writing a literature review. That meant that when I fell ill in that first year, and deteriorated rapidly, I had made little concrete progress early on. Wasn’t going to let that happen the second time! But beyond the quick literature review I wrote very little in my history PhD before the halfway stage. Most of my creative processes went on in my head, as I focused on doing the archival research.

One of the history lecturers advocated the write every day from day one approach, and I strongly disagreed with him. Partly that was from my own personal circumstances, being so severely ill and disabled that I just didn’t have the time or energy to devote to that activity. But also it was that I needed to be doing other things for my PhD, and they had to take priority at that stage. And I think in productivity terms that can apply to more people than just me.

One point I definitely agreed with in the Thesis Whisperer post is that writing can be best done after ideas have had a chance to germinate, and that takes time. When I look back at my writing in the first year of the history PhD much of it – though not that literature review, which survived largely unscathed – is naive not because it was badly written but because it was written too early, before I’d had a chance to think things through properly. This is a lesson that I’ve applied in my post-PhD research and writings. I might scribble notes or create mind-maps on my iPad as I start each new piece of research. But I don’t do any more formal writing until I’m well advanced working through the primary sources, and my brain has had a good chance to think about things.

A counter-argument to that is that writing is a creative process, and I agree that you can come out with ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise when you start to write. But there’s a limit to how effective this can be early on in the thinking/ideas stage, and I would argue strongly that writing is more effective creatively later on than at the start. Some people will be different in this respect, for example finding brain-dump style writing very helpful in their early thought processes. But I’m not one of them. If I try brain-dumping before I’m far enough through the research and thinking stages I just produce gibberish of no worth.

One point I made in my comment on the Thesis Whisperer blog post is that I found writing my humanities PhD thesis very hard. I started writing up about halfway through the six years I was allowed as a part-time student, and the time that I ended up taking in the end. But I don’t think my writing difficulties then were due to my delaying starting the thesis writing, but rather that I was still struggling to work out my ideas and find my best voice. I was working through a process that took time, and starting writing early wouldn’t have helped significantly, because ultimately I needed to figure out the ideas in my head, and that took a while.

The Thesis Whisperer post was not so sure about how different – or not – the writing process in a science PhD was from a humanities PhD. I have an unusual perspective on this, having been both a science and a humanities PhD student. There are differences in the approach to the thesis, particularly structural, which meant that a university training course I went on which advocated the science model of writing the thesis, even for humanities students, really exasperated me and didn’t help me at all with my humanities thesis writing. A science PhD thesis is much more in the style of a traditional formal report, whereas a humanities PhD tends to be more abstract and layered, at least in my experience. But there are also similarities. Both sets of students work through the literature review stage, then generally do research and/or experiments, before writing up. Some write up sooner, but for me as a history PhD student the second-time around there was very much a three-stage process to the PhD: literature review, archival research with primary sources, and writing up the thesis. And it wasn’t so hugely different from my experiences as a science student.

Would I have done things differently if I hadn’t been ill and so restricted? I don’t think so. I was lucky that my first PhD supervisor, for the science PhD I had to leave, wasn’t a write-every-day type, and gave me more freedom to choose how best to work for me. I like to think that if I’d have been able to continue with that full-time PhD I would have discovered a way of working for me that’s not so dissimilar from how I tackled my part-time history PhD, and how I’m now doing things as a post-doc / honorary research fellow turning my research into more academic papers.

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