Tag: Writing

There are times I hate writing with the heat of 1000 flaming suns, as my sister would say. Like this week, when I have been editing a 105 page report filled with statistics. It’s the kind of writing job that makes me want to stab my eye out with a pen…

It’s been a while since we heard from the Student up the Back on the Left – the alter ego of RMIT teaching and learning advisor Ruth Mueller (who actually taught me how to teach long ago). Now we are in second semester the Student up the Back on the Left has a few words to say about the feedback you gave them on their essay.

This is another great post from PhD student, full time gallery worker and mother, Evelyn Tsitsas … who decided a while back to do 3 conference papers just 8 months out from submission. She is now questioning the wisdom of her decision! It seemed like a good idea at the time. Somewhere, among the photocopied …continue reading.

This is a guest post from Rod Pitcher, a PhD student in Education at The Centre for Higher Education, Learning and Teaching at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. The focus of his study is the metaphors that doctoral students use when describing their research and other matters related to their studies. In this post he shares a particularly useful metaphor with us.

This post was written by my fellow blogger Dr Geof Hill a.k.a The Research Supervisor’s friend. This post was written to help supervisors give better feedback, but I asked Geof if I could publish it here. Complaints about quality of feedback from supervisors are common. If your supervisor could do with some pointers, perhaps you could print this out and accidentally on purpose leave it lying in their office…

Every month a plastic wrapped wad of paper, sometimes 300 sheets thick, used to land on my desk. This wad contained the ethics committee paperwork, usually around 20 applications and supporting documents, for me to review.

This pile of paper drove me nuts.

This post is co-written with Pat Thomson, who is simultaneously publishing on her blog ‘Patter’. If you haven’t already, head on over there and check it out!

The Valley of Shit is that period of your PhD, however brief, when you lose perspective and therefore confidence and belief in yourself…

What exactly does one wear when giving a Keynote Lecture?

Deciding what to wear is not easy when you are an academic; we don’t have the luxury of suit-as-uniform like our counterparts in the corporate world. We often have to front classrooms full of people barely out of puberty and then go to a committee meeting….

Becoming a writer is also a bit like becoming a parent. It’s not until you have walked the floor with a screaming infant at 4am that you can truly understand what all the talk about ‘tiredness’ is about. But there are many aspects of parenting that no one tells you – or doesn’t think to mention. Here are some of them.