Category: On Writing

Where a simple question turns out to be anything but…

Once I had to write 60,000 words in 3 months. This is how I did it. It’s not pretty, but it worked.

In this post I hone in on the first problem almost every PhD student confronts – how to make sense of all that information out there…

This guest post is written by Elizabeth Humphrys, who has recently completed her Masters Thesis. Her day job is investigating student complaints and misconduct at a public university. Here Elizabeth shares her thoughts on the feelings she experienced just before submitting. I submitted my Masters thesis in October 2010. I recently received the examiners’ reports …continue reading.

In which I turn around an old favourite of mine to make a list of don’ts

When my son was born I was obsessed with parenting books in the way only first time parents are. Most of the advice seemed to be on the subject of sleep. The sleep literature is extensive because babies are bizarre creatures who spend most of their lives fighting to stay awake. The cruel irony is, …continue reading.

In which I share an experience of ‘threshold crossing’ as a way to understand being ‘stuck’

In which I wonder what Foucault would have to say about word processing software.

Stuck with all that literature? Here’s five simple ideas to make sense of it all.

There’s so many, many books on the market that claim to help you with your PhD – which ones are worth buying? I have been thinking about it this topic for some time, but it’s still hard to decide. So here’s a provisional top 5, based on books I use again and again in my …continue reading.