Abstract
This chapter draws on writing theory and research to consider the challenging task of supervising doctoral student writing. First, the dissertation is presented as a complex rhetorical act that makes great demands on students and their tutors. Next, data from supervisory sessions are analyzed to identify the patterns of concern in supervisors’ comments. Chief among those concerns are organization and audience: supervisors strive to offer students advice on textual structure and tips about their disciplinary community. Finally, the chapter concludes with a description of practices that supervisors and institutions might adopt to create an environment for writing.
In academic writing you have to say this kind of thing in this kind of place.
(Doctoral supervisor)
I don’t know where we decide how we do this.
(Doctoral supervisor)
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- 1.
The five canons of classical rhetoric are invention, arrangement, style, memorization, and delivery; the final two point to rhetoric’s birth as an art of oral persuasion. In the reinvention of rhetoric that supports the contemporary study and teaching of writing (see, for example, Berlin 1987; Harris 1997a; Ede 2004), emphasis has been placed on the first three canons, particularly invention.
- 2.
In fact, as both a learning genre and a research genre, the dissertation responds to multiple needs, anticipates multiple readers and situations, and has multiple objectives (Paré et al. 2009).
- 3.
Quotation marks are used to indicate the supervisor speaking as the student writing.
- 4.
In accounting to the student for her use of images, the supervisor said this: “I’m very visual so I tend to draw these doodles, but you don’t have to do it that way. But you have to think it through that way.”
- 5.
Note that this sentence moves to conclusion down the abstraction ladder, from everyone to atypical children to the physically challenged.
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Paré, A. (2011). Speaking of Writing: Supervisory Feedback and the Dissertation. In: McAlpine, L., Amundsen, C. (eds) Doctoral Education: Research-Based Strategies for Doctoral Students, Supervisors and Administrators. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0507-4_4
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