Adopting authoring mindsets and strategies

This resource introduces approaches to starting, sustaining and strengthening your thesis writing. It includes activities to help you apply tips and reflect on your own learning. It should take you 15-20 minutes to read and complete. Check out the further resources at the bottom of each section and references on the last page for more information on this topic.

Writing a graduate research thesis to a publishable standard requires you to adopt the identity of an author and expert in your field and seek ways to maximise your readership. Developing these ‘authoring’ skills involves heightening your awareness of the processes of doctoral writing and establishing a productive writing routine.

Write to think

Writing shapes and refines
your thinking. A sort of
gym for the intellect.

Writing deepens insight into ideas and information, reveals gaps and creates opportunities to refine expression. Writing down your ideas regularly helps you to not only record them for later use but also process them into new knowledge, freeing up mental space for further thinking.

Write-to-think tips:

  • Try free writing: write continuously on a topic, with as few pauses as possible, without worrying about writing structure or syntax. Give your free writing a time limit, such as 10 minutes at a time, to help you focus on the task of idea generation.
  • Use a writing plan but treat it flexibly. You may need to go back and adjust it as your ideas develop through writing.
  • Write frequently: dedicating specific, regular timeframes to writing can help you avoid procrastination.
  • Try the ‘sentence skeleton’ technique (Thomson & Kamler, 2013):
    1. Choose a thesis or article in your field which you consider a good model.
    2. Remove all the substantive content – language that is specific to the topic – until only the language that frames the content remains.
    3. You’ll end up with a ‘skeleton’ you can expand with your own ideas.
    4. In a later stage, you can modify the language of this skeleton, but using a template of framing language is not plagiarism.

'Skeleton sentence' example:

"Accumulating research on … [my topic] in recent years has indicated a growing need to … [my research problem]. For example, many studies have shown … [my synthesis]. This suggests that … [my interpretation]. This issue needs to be addressed using … [my new approach] because … [my reason]. In this paper, I aim to … [my focus/contribution]"

Shape your writing as you go

It is important to accept ‘good enough’ writing in the early stages, because it is likely that you will need to polish your work as your research progresses in any case.

Just do the best you can early on, knowing that you are writing mostly for yourself and possibly your supervisor, and you will probably revise the writing later to make it suitable for an external examiner.

When revising, note how much your knowledge and understanding has grown in the intervening months or years. Such growth is often assisted by your earlier writing as a first step in the clarification process.

Have the courage to let go of earlier ideas and snippets of writing that no longer have a place in your thesis. If you are hesitant to delete material, create a document for these snippets in case you want to revisit them later.

Write for your reader

A text is a kind of journey that the reader takes, with you as their guide. When refining your writing, anticipate and work to meet your readers’ needs so that they receive the message you intended in the simplest way possible within your field.

    • Think about the widest possible readership to help you shape your writing so that it appeals to as many scholars as it can.
    • Set the right expectations and deliver upon them. For example, only criticise what you will properly discuss through your work. Be consistent and don’t oversell.
    • Create short-cuts for your readers, for example, by using informative headings, because they will be looking for them.
    • Anticipate what is likely to be familiar and what might require definition or further explanation.
      • Which terms and concepts can you be confident that your reader will know?
      • Which ones may require explanation? These might be very new, or not widely used beyond a few ‘schools of thought’. They may come from another discipline or have different uses in different but related fields.
        In any of these cases, state the meaning you are referring to.

    • Direct the reader as to where the text will lead and what will be presented along the way. This often appears in chapter or section introductions.
    • Summarise the main points established at the end of a section or chapter.
    • Signal forward, for example, ‘This problem will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2’, and remind readers, for example, ‘as was presented in chapter 3, section 3.1’
    • Indicate your stance, for example, expressions such as “this promising study shows” or “one minor consideration is...” help your reader understand the relative importance of an idea.
    • Use cohesive devices, such as ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’, to signpost and link elements.

Study examination criteria and model theses

First and foremost, a thesis needs to meet examination criteria. Explore the UoM examination criteria and then find an example thesis in your field.

  • How does the thesis address each of the criteria?
  • How can you use these criteria to guide your writing?

Use the side menu to go the next section: Writing complex information clearly, where we look at ways to enhance the clarity of your writing.