academic writing

Academic Writing Tips that work for commencing RHD and PhD students

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Yesterday I reviewed a doctoral consortium paper for a fellow phd student here at UQ.  I thought I might as well put some of the comments I made up as a blog post.  I want to be sure I just document up some tips or advice for students writing their first doctoral consortium paper.  For some people the below will be old hat – for others, not so much.  As an early phd student you need to develop these skills.

Firstly be clear as to what your paper does and what the introduction needs to do:

I believe an introduction does the following:

– Attention grabbing statement of the problem.

– Mini-literature review

– Identify the next steps in the research area (motivation), and identify the scope of the research question

– Quick overview of research method

– What are your contributions?

– Roadmap to the rest of the document. I feel your introduction is too long (1page out of 7 and 591 words, which then cuts into the rest of your research proposal.

Caveat – your discipline may differ.

Don’t over-cite:

If a long list of papers that are only cited once are in the introduction without explanation, I think you need to cut them down for the introduction.  Unnecessarily blows out your reference list.

Which vs that:

Which should only follow a comma (kind of a golden rule).  P88 Strunk & White – go which-hunting ☺.  That refers to a specific item, which is for a class or non-restrictive group.

Have transition paragraphs at the beginning of sections – a style thing:

I think the role of this transition paragraph is to identify what is coming (“we will talk about this, then that, then this, and finally we can move to the next section to discuss X”). I feel this may be a bit long for this role – I think you should flag what is coming, but not describe how it works.

Another writing tip is to avoid long sentences.  And one-sentence paragraphs.

Don’t over-rely on the words of others:

Is the long quotation from this paper really required?  Takes space away from your own work.

Don’t use ‘it’ as it creates needless ambiguity.  Like one-sentence paragraphs, it’s a no-no.

Be careful with ‘because’:

Never start a sentence with ‘because’ – did Mrs Sandilands not teach you in Grade 2 ☺.  Maybe try ‘As’.

If you have a research model you have developed with labels, be sure that your discussion is consistent with the labels (i.e. section headings).  Also try to follow the same order throughout the paper.

Also be careful with word use:

Unless you are very clear on its meaning, a phrase like ‘unit of analysis’ is inviting trouble.  Use ‘focus’ e.g. “user experience is the unit of analysis” is better off as ‘user experience is the focus’.

Similarly confirm vs validate vs explore

An exploratory study explores your research model.  A confirmatory study confirms it.  Don’t’ have an an exploratory study validate your model, and don’t have a confirmatory study validate.  And don’t have a confirmatory study further validate the validatory study.  Does it ‘validate’ or ‘confirm’ ☺. I’d lose ‘further’ as it sounds like you validated it once, and you’re now validating it again, and it makes no sense to validate what is already valid. However, you can confirm a valid model.

It’s a bad idea to finish a writing section on a dot point:

You need a concluding paragraph here so you don’t finish on a bullet point.

In the conclusion:

I think you need to state earlier and more clearly, what are the practical and theoretical contributions? Theory first, practice second. I don’t see any contributions to practice identified?  Have a strong final concluding sentence – hopefully that reflects the theme of your strong opening sentences.

See I can blog occasionally.  The above tips are not everything, they are just the comments that I made and this is just a grab-bag of points.  As some readers may know I have written a template in Scrivener for academic writing (see http://michealaxelsen.com/blog/?p=839) that formalises some of these comments into a structure.  Although I’ve had struggles with Scrivener (http://michealaxelsen.com/blog/?p=2930) and I have to say I still haven’t come completely to grips with tables, I have found Scrivener to be a really useful writing tool.  I’ll probably change my mind again by morning tea as I battle tables.  

Post-Script:

Having just submitted a doctoral consortium research-in-progress paper, my supervisor was at pain to give me some solicited feedback on my own work :).

Don’t use words like innovative research design, significant contribution, or novel approach – such value-laden judgments are best left to the reader.  Leave these adjectives at home :).  

Thanks:  Micheal Axelsen

AMCIS 2012: “Continued use of intelligent decision aids and auditor knowledge: qualitative evidence”

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So, I submitted a paper to AMCIS 2012, an academic conference to be held in Seattle this year (http://amcis2012.aisnet.org/).  The paper was accepted (“I also think that this should generate some interesting discussion and hopefully receive further guidance to help the authors publish their work in a journal”) and so I am off to Seattle in August.

This paper was written solely by myself, without revision by supervisors, so I am quite happy about that.  It is also based on my phd, which is very helpful, and of course reviewer comments are very good to help with this process.

Anyway as I haven’t blogged in a while – here is the abstract of my paper “Continued use of intelligent decision aids and auditor knowledge:  qualitative evidence”:

The Theory of Technology Dominance proposes that continued use of intelligent decision aids (IDAs) relates to a decrease in auditors’ decision making skills, or deskilling. Prior research has considered deskilling in terms of auditor declarative knowledge. This research considers deskilling in relation to auditor declarative and procedural knowledge through an extended research model. A novel, rigorous and repeatable qualitative research method using automated text analysis (Leximancer) is developed for the analysis of significant bodies of text. Nineteen senior auditors in three audit offices were interviewed, and the transcripts analyzed. The findings indicate strong support for the hypothesized negative relationships between three constructs (the extent an IDA performs routine and time-intensive tasks, the dependence of an auditor on the IDA, and the auditor’s time with an IDA), and an auditor’s declarative and procedural knowledge. The results indicate avenues for future research, and provide guidance to practitioners in the use of IDAs. 

Once it is published I will put a link to the paper on this blog entry. 

Mac OSX, Scrivener and Word for Academic writing

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Well, about 18 months ago I bought a new Macbook Pro.  I had sworn that Mr Gates’ hegemony had to deliver on Windows 7, and, although it was OK, it was not quite to the standard I wanted.  So I thought that, as I am currently doing my phd full time, it would be a good idea to try out this Mac thing full time. On account of how my need for my computers to play well with others on a corporate network is less.

And, speaking as a Windows user of long standing,  generally it’s been a Good Thing.  Sure, the Macbook was expensive compared to the Windows equivalents, but then the software is generally cheaper and OSX just feels more bulletproof.  Of course, software development is a bit harder to get into (but then AppleScript is very good), but at least when Office 2011 came out they brought back VBA for Mac Office.  Thank goodness!

And there are two items of software on the Mac that I have coveted and used a lot since converting to the Mac side. Devonthink Pro is one that I have just not managed to find an equivalent for – which should be the subject of a future post – and Scrivener is the other.  In fact, I made a video on YouTube and a post here on my blog, and since it’s consistently my most popular blog post and video by a mile, there’s a lot of love for it.

So, I have adopted Scrivener for writing.  And it’s a great all-round writing package.  The structure, the mechanism behind it, and the ability to compile to many formats (including ebook) and slice-and-dice your writing is wonderful.  I of course also have Office 2011 for ‘other writing’ and for final formatting.

The default for most phd candidates is of course Word, and on the Mac that’s periodically been a beast competent at short writing but not so good at long writing.  However, I have recently been using it to write a large report for a client (55 pages, 20,000 words)  and in the space of 24 hours it lost me 6 hours’ (yes, even with auto recovery files being saved every 10 minutes).  I would be editing and moving text around in Microsoft Word and then I’d get the spinning wheel of death (see – I have turned into a Mac user). Word would just end up not responding.  And when you’re consulting for a client that is paying hourly, losing that many hours is not much fun for your hip pocket. Nothing like the market’s invisible hand to make you think about your software choice.

Turns out there is a bug with the ‘Smart Cut-and-Paste’ function – go to /Word /Preferences /Editing Options and turn off Smart Cut-and-Paste and that problem with Word in Office 2011 crashing should go away.  After I found that tip I proceed to write for a week without a single crash.  I had been blaming it for EndNote incompatibility but this document wasn’t using that and I’d disabled that functionality.

So.  Word on the Mac can be made to work.  Although you can still lose work, and it is dependent upon you regularly saving your document if you want to avoid wholesale problems (and saving is slow on Word).

And so to Scrivener.  I love Scrivener.  Mostly.  The structured approach is good and the ability to move your text around is fantastic.

However – there are several issues for academic writing.  Graphics were a problem for a while but I worked out you need to draw your diagram in another package (e.g. Powerpoint), save to PNG, import the image, and then scale the image to consistently be the width of the page (411 pixels, incidentally).

Firstly – and insurmountably – you do have to play with the world of others if you are a co-author with people.  If you are the primary author, then you can compile, send it to your co-authors, and have them mark it up with changes for you replicate in your document.  But it’s a bear if your supervisor says, ‘Just give me the electronic copy and I’ll finish the report for you’.  Particularly since styles and text tags (such as the <$n:table:demographics> table you have on page 6) don’t translate to tags in Word – when they are expecting these things.

Secondly – and I suspect uniquely to academic writing – Scrivener’s tables, well, there’s no better phrase to describe it:  Scrivener’s tables suck.  Mostly because if it’s anything other than a straight vanilla table with no merged cells and so on, aligning tables is pedantic.  And I know that that’s because it’s really OSX’s tables.  And I know that Microsoft Word’s tables are proprietary and thus evil.  But, the tables just cannot be made to work.  I had gotten to the stage where I would do the tables up specifically in Word, and then import the RTF document (putting all the tables in their own sub-directory, with the same name as the $n:table reference in Scrivener) into Scrivener.  And that sort of worked when it was compiled out.  But sort of not.

Thirdly, a lot of academic papers come with arbitrary word limits and requiring submission in Word.  I have just had a paper accepted at AMCIS that was ‘5000 words including tables and references’.  Great – so I have to compile with EndNote every time I want to know how many words this thing is (noting, I suppose, this is really a function of EndNote’s sulkiness and thus you have to do this with Word too).  But you end up compiling from Scrivener to RTF, formatting EndNote tokens, saving to DocX and then reviewing the final output and changing a word on page 4 – and now you have two copies of your paper.  Sigh.  So you track change that paper, and then re-input your changes back to Scrivener later… which is every bit as painful as it sounds.  And if you then edit the paper in Scrivener, you’ll have to re-do all that formatting again.

Finally – it is in the nature of the academic to procrastinate.  If a paper is due at 5pm, then at 4:55pm you will be madly checking the format.  One of the great things Scrivener does is separate the writing from the formatting.  But the formatting is integral – presentation is communication.  Formatting the paper can take Quite a While.  And as Styles in Scrivener don’t work as they do in Word, a decision to make your section headings 18 points instead of 16 points can really wreck your day.  This is a problem when you are up against a tight deadline.

So… I am conflicted with Scrivener.  I think that for writing the Great Australian Novel it is the perfect tool.  And being able to compile different versions of the same document is excellent as well.  However, there are a few issues that I am trying to get my head around to make it work for academic writing. I just may have to accept that I do not have the time to do that and thus may need to ‘stick with Word’ for my PhD.  As a bit of a ‘new tool’ buff, and being able to see the advantages of Scrivener, that hurts, but more procrastination just isn’t an option when you are past the journey to knowledge and wanting to graduate.

[Footnote:  Since writing this post, I have gone back to using Scrivener as Word crashes far too often on the Mac.  Word is fine for two page letters on the Mac but that’s as far as I’d trust it.  I have written an automatic style formatter in Word (very rough, very basic, and very ugly) that converts fonts of a certain size to a Heading 1, 2, 3 and 4 style in Word – see this post here:  Scrivener to Word Visual Basic Fromatter].

Scrivener – Draft academic template for academic writing

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At the urging of Twitter user beautyiswhatudo, I have posted up here my academic template for writing journals and publications according to a somewhat generally accepted approach.  The reader can download the Scrivener 2.0.4 template here.

I do have some notes for someone intending to use this template; these notes are included in the Academic template.

To the user:

This Scrivener 2.04 template provides an overall structure of how to proceed with writing an academic paper in Scrivener.  Much of this generated table of contents etc is based on research in the social sciences (Information Systems discipline).  Other advice has been sourced from the University of Queensland RHD Handbook (included as part of the research materials at the bottom), and from the publication Turabian, K. L. (2003). Identify key terms expressing concepts that unite the report and distinguish its parts:  Chicago Style for Students and Researchers (7th Edition ed.). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

This template will need to be customised for someone seeking to write papers (note:  this is a paper for journal or conference publication, not a thesis.  A thesis will have more and varied sections.

Note that to use this document, you should note that text within []’s needs to be searched for and replaced. And before you ask, [lorem ipsum] is generally considered to be Latin for ‘Insert Text Here’.

Released as is without warranty express or implied.  As the author, you will need to make changes to this template for your use.  Nonetheless, if you like it or  have an improvement to suggest, please feel free to email me at micheal@michealaxelsen.com with recommendations or feedback.

Thanks:  Micheal Axelsen
21/02/2011.

Here is a PDF so you can see what the template looks like; there is considerable metadata inside the Scrivener template with instructions for completing the paper.  You can only access that material, though with a copy of Scrivener.

Academic paper template

View more documents from Micheal Axelsen.

Hope that you find this of some use.  I may update this from time to time.  As always, feel free to email me on micheal@michealaxelsen.com with feedback, or leave comments below.

[PS:  You might be interested in this other post on my blog, where you can see how I use Scrivener, EndNote and Evernote for academic writing:  Using Scrivener and EndNote together on Mac OSX]

 

Using Scrivener and EndNote together on Mac OSX

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And so, some time ago I bought a Macbook.  And then I found the killer apps that I needed to write my thesis.  Scrivener, hands down, is the best writing tool on PC or Mac.  There is now a PC version, at least in beta, and although it’s not as mature as the Mac OSX version I believe it is getting there.

There’s so much more that I’d like to write about Scrivener and how it is helping with writing the thesis.  However, it’s not as easy as all that – so I did a video instead.  Voila, one video ‘Scrivener and EndNote’:

 

You can buy Scrivener from www.literatureandlatte.com, and EndNote from www.endnote.com.  Scrivener is not very dear at all (say, $A47.19 at the non-educational price).  So you can’t complain.  Endnote is usually available through a university licence – that software cost me zero to run under the UQ licence (so long as it is for research etc etc).

Anyway I highly commend these two applications to you (although apparently www.sente.com is coming up well from behind as well as an alternative to EndNote).  All worth the price of admission.

[PS:  You might be interested in this other post on my blog, where you can download my Scrivener template for academic papers/writing:  Scrivener – draft academic template for academic writing]

[PPS:  Since writing this post, I have written an automatic style formatter in Word (very rough, very basic, and very ugly) that converts fonts of a certain size to a Heading 1, 2, 3 and 4 style in Word – see this post here:  Scrivener to Word Visual Basic Fromatter].