All posts by Madeline Walker

Academic Writing and Stress

Academic Writing, Art History, Goal setting, Learning, Motivation, Stress, Time management

By Ambreen Shehzad Hussaini

Have you ever experienced the joy of learning? Did you know learning is a “process,” not a “product”? Do you recognize that you are not solely a content learner; rather, you are a complex social, emotional, and intellectual being? Did you know that stress hinders your academic success? If this is true, how can you manage your stress and gain academic success?

Today, I would like to share a very important lesson that I learned while working at the Centre for Academic Communication. My primary responsibility here is to provide academic communication skill support and to help students to be self-directed learners. However, there are moments when I feel I am not coaching them to improve their academic communication skills; instead, I am helping them to be emotionally intelligent and to manage their stress. During conversations with students, I learned a life-long lesson that intellectual competence is intricately linked with emotional stability. I recognised that students must know how to manage the stress, particularly university graduate students who are stepping in the academic world with high aspirations. I observed that students make every effort to achieve higher grades. They spend sleepless nights drafting their writing assignments and preparing for exams. One thing the students often ignore, in my view, is to be emotionally intelligent so that they can experience the joy of learning. Let me briefly explain what emotional intelligence is, and how it is related to experiencing the joy of learning.

Emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize, evaluate, and express your emotions. It also helps you to regulate your feelings and to use your sentiments in identifying and solving challenges, making efficient decisions, and communicating with others. In other words, emotional intelligence can make you a self-aware, self-motivated, self-regulated, and self-reflected learner. It empowers you to exercise empathy, to built positive relationship with your peers and teachers, to ask right questions, and to manage stress. Once you become aware of your own emotions and know how to use them intelligently, you become intrinsically motivated and aware of your path. You understand that learning is not acquiring A+ or A on a philosophy assignment, for instance. Learning is experiencing the moment, collaborating with your peers, and learning something new from it. Learning is a process of exploring, discovering, and knowing. Learning is excitement; it is fun. It is certainly not the source of stress. When you do not exercise your emotional intelligence and do not recognize the joy of learning, they are caught by stress and fear of failure. Indeed, stress and fear are not your good friends as they may hinder your academic success.

Let me now outline two ways to manage academic stress and gain emotional stability with the hope that my words may reach other students. I know it’s hard to make an explicit relationship between academic career and stress. Believe me; managing academic stress is a mandatory requirement to achieve academic success.

  1. Plan your life:

The world is indeed demanding. We play various roles in our lives and the demands are indeed different for each role. We feel stressed when we struggle or fail to respond to the demands of life. In this situation, the best thing to do is to acknowledge the limitations of self and time. We all have twenty-four hours a day, and a certain amount of physical and mental energy to work. We may not change the stressful situations according to our desires; however, we can certainly employ strategies to use our time and energy effectively. Planning is one of the strategies that can be used. Learn to make schedules and plans. Learn to prioritize your tasks. Think about your main goals and plan the steps in that direction. Do not wait for demanding situations to attack you. Rather, manage your time and energy to control the ever-evolving situations. You can start by making day plans, and then eventually move towards crafting a five-year or a ten-year plan. Remember one thing:  if you have a humongous task, do not panic; rather, break it into numerous small tasks. Do not forget the golden quote “many drops of water make the ocean.” Fill each day with a drop of learning, and you will eventually be an ocean of knowledge.

  1. Value your life:

Life is a gift. It is valuable. It is our opportunity to learn, grow, and share. It is our chance to leave a mark in the world. Imagine, there are hundreds and thousands of people who are born with or before us. We do not know about all of them. We are aware of only those people who valued their life and shared that value with their contemporaries. Reflect on yourself and identify your strengths. Think about your weaknesses and try to make every effort to transform your weakness into an opportunity – an opportunity to challenge yourself, an opportunity to learn something new, an opportunity to experience the change in yourself. Remember, life is not a race; it’s not a battle ground either. It is a chance for you to share your values with the world. But the question is, how does valuing life impact your academic career? In a real-life setting, things are interlinked. They cannot be isolated and fixed into categories. The values of your life define your identity, your aspirations, your behaviours, your motivations, and the way you live your life.

These are just two ways to manage stress among many, and indeed, they are not new. Many people might have talked about these already. I hope that my fellow graduate students contemplate these ways and try to live a life that is intellectually stimulating and emotionally flourishing. I hope you consider your educational endeavors as a journey (a process) and experience the joy of learning.

About Ambreen

Ambreen Hussaini is a doctoral student in the Art History and Visual Studies Department, University of Victoria. She is working on the contemporary artistic expressions of the Qur’an. Ambreen is also a tutor at the Centre for Academic Communication.

Seeing the big picture: A review of How to Write a Better Thesis

Academic Writing, Book reviews, Dissertation writing, Inspiration and motivation, Motivation, Posts by Madeline, Productivity, Writing process, Writing resources

By Madeline Walker

David Evans, Paul Gruba, and Justin Zobel. (2014).  How to Write a Better Thesis, 3rd edition. [e-book]. Springer. 173 pages.

When you hit a snag or are feeling lost in writing your thesis, reading a “how to” book can be just what you need.  Such a book might give you a new perspective, a fresh idea, great advice, or motivation to continue. I recommend you have a look at the e-book How to Write a Better Thesis, free and easily accessible in UVic’s library. Writing in a friendly and knowledgeable collective voice, Evans, Gruba, and Zobel cover every stage of the thesis-writing journey.  Surprisingly, they recommend you start by exploring the end-point. Look up institutional expectations for the finished thesis (get guidelines from your department). Then, read theses in your field (this is easy for UVic students; just access UVicSpace and search). These investigations will orient you to thesis-writing’s big picture.

Part of big picture thinking is recognizing that dissertation writing is not a logical, linear journey. Evans et al. (2014) acknowledge that this journey involves both the left and the right sides of our brains: “the process of research is often not entirely rational. . . . Research is a mixture of inspiration (hypothesis generation, musing over the odd and surprising, finding lines of attack on difficult problems) and rational thinking (design and execution of crucial experiments, analysis of results in terms of existing theory) . . . without the creative part, no real research would be done, no new insights would be gained, and no new theories would be formulated” (p. 10, emphasis added).  This claim resonates with my own experience of writing the dissertation: moments of serendipity and light-bulb flashes punctuating long periods of reading, research, and painstaking writing.

Another example of how these writers home in on the big picture is their discussion of aim and scope, where they show how writers sometimes conflate research methods with aims. Using a cogent example of a student named Alistair, they quote what Alistair has identified as the aim of his thesis about attitudes toward a marginal group in Japanese society called the burakumin:

The aim of the research is to establish which groups of mainstream Japanese continue to harbour anti-burakumin attitudes, analyze what those attitudes are and why they have remained extant, and to investigate which political measures are needed to solve the problem. (p. 64)

Evans et al. (2014) rightly ask, “what was the real aim?” and go on to show that Alistair has crammed four aims into one sentence:

  • to establish which group has attitudes,
  • to analyze attitudes,
  • to determine why they persist,
  • and to investigate measures to solve the problem.

According to Evans et al. (2014), the first three “aims” should not appear in the intro chapter, but in the research design chapter. They go on to explain that a common problem for graduate students is that they have too many aims and should identify only one aim that follows as a “logical consequence of the problem statement” (p. 65). Finally, the conclusion should respond to this aim.  So, in a nutshell, they say “stick to a single paramount aim” (p. 65, emphasis in original). This is simple but excellent advice. Less is more.

This book has many strengths:

  • The book is well organized, with introductory chapters on structure and mechanics followed by chapters on each section of the dissertation.
  • The authors are practical and sensible on mechanics; for example, if you are wondering what style is permissible in your writing, “go to the top five journals in your field and determine what style is used. Look, too, at the use of voice to see if it is first person singular, active (‘I investigate’) or perhaps third person passive (‘the event was investigated’). If your work is cross-disciplinary, settle on a single style so that your work is consistent” (p. 29).
  • They provide a comprehensive final checklist, “Dotting the ‘I’s and Crossing the ‘t’s” to review before you submit (pp. 129-136).
  • Summaries are provided at the end of each chapter, so it’s easy to dip in and out of the book and choose only what is relevant to your thesis-writing journey.

Although the authors write from an Australian perspective and they claim their book is suitable mostly for students in the physical, biomedical, mathematical, and social sciences, I believe this book has nuggets of good advice for all thesis writers.

Note: “Thesis” in this book is an umbrella term covering both the master’s thesis and the doctoral dissertation.

About Madeline

Madeline Walker is the Coordinator of the Centre for Academic Communication. She has a PhD in English and enjoys helping students to engage fully with their writing. She loves red and purple, colours of the heart.

The role of writing in becoming a graduate student in Canada

Applications to grad school, Centre for Academic Communication, EAL graduate students, Education, Genre, Graduate student writers, International graduate students, Tutoring

By Thiago Hinkel

The process I went through as a teacher in Brazil to become a PhD candidate in the faculty of Education at the University of Victoria involved a series of steps. Learning about the procedures and formalities related to applying for both admission and for a student visa were certainly the ones that required the greatest amount of time and effort. In this post, I will share my journey related to figuring those steps out and reflect on the role of writing in succeeding in them.

I lost count of the hours I spent on UVic’s website reading about the graduate programs offered in Education and the requisites I needed to meet for admission. I soon found out I would have to contact a prospective supervisor and have their support before I could officially apply. The technical pieces I should consider for that first approach by email were clear to me due to the genre in question. I knew I would have to be mindful of audience, objectives, and language use. I had been working as a language teacher before that, and determining those elements was like preparing a lesson on writing. However, the challenge was dealing with questions whose answers, by that time, were not clear to me – What are my research interests? Why UVic? Why am I the right person for the position? What I knew then was that I would not be able to answer those questions before thinking about them thoroughly.

While tackling those interrogations, I started looking into the requirements to obtain a student visa to come to Canada. Since I decided to do the whole process without the help of an agency, there were numerous hours of exploring and learning before I was able to start the application process. Not surprisingly, I realized there would be a great deal of writing involved in this step as well. Nevertheless, unlike the email to my supervisor, the hardship here was not related to not knowing what to include; it had to do with genres I had never worked with before, which included financial reports. Luckily, I had been working with writing long enough to know where to look for help, but mastering a new genre can be a difficult task even to a proficient writer, especially when your first try at it is, perhaps, your only shot.

The main lesson I learned from this endeavor is that form and content are intrinsically related when it comes to writing. When writing to my future supervisor, I knew exactly how I should present my words. However, what to include and what to leave out required much reflection. As for the reports I had to attach to my visa application, I learned that one is not likely to be successful if not using the appropriate format required by a specific genre, even though when knowing exactly what pieces to include. Comparing that email and visa application to the assignments I have to do today as a graduate student, I can see how they are closely related. When today I struggle to figure out how to express my ideas, it is a sign I have to be better acquainted with the genre in question.    When I am not sure about what to include in a writing piece, it is telling me I might need to read and reflect more about the topic. In both cases, going after and accessing resources is crucial.

About Thiago

I am a second year PhD student in the department of Curriculum and Instruction in the Faculty of Education at Uvic. My research interests involve digital literacies in the field of teacher education. I have a master’s degree in Education and a bachelor’s degree in English teaching, both received in Brazil, my home country. I have worked as an EAL teacher for the last fifteen years, which often included university students seeking to improve their communication skills and academic writing practices. As a tutor at the Centre for Academic Communication at UVic, I work toward sharing my experience to contribute to the academic journey of other students.

How the Centre for Academic Communication can support your writing

Academic Writing, Anxiety, Centre for Academic Communication, Dissertation writing, EAL graduate students, Inspiration and motivation, International graduate students, Make writing social, Posts by Madeline, Tutoring, Writing resources, Writing workshops

By Madeline Walker

Experienced tutor Gillian Saunders helps a graduate student

In graduate school, students are expected to write skillfully in their disciplines, yet explicit writing instruction via academic writing courses is rare at the grad level. Moreover, instructors are not often able to provide the intensive mentorship many students require, and if they can, such supervision “is costly and time consuming” (Dunleavy, 2003, p. 4). Tutors at the Centre for Academic Communication help to close this gap in grad student support by providing regular meetings to talk about writing, help to plan writing, and work on specific writing issues.

Grad students benefit from CAC tutors’ knowledge of and experience in graduate academic writing.  Additionally, graduate students appreciate the continuity of support  we offer. For example, one MA student finds that meetings with her busy supervisor are sporadic, but she can count on a weekly meeting with a tutor to check in. Another Master’s student (EAL) saves questions throughout the week and uses his time with a tutor to check vocabulary, syntax, meaning, and organization of his thesis in computer science, questions he deems inappropriate to ask his supervisor.

Students also appreciate the encouraging, non-judgmental approach we take during tutoring sessions. Writing at the graduate level involves developing a new scholarly identity, and this process can be fraught with anxiety and self-doubt.  Students often feel reassured after meeting with a tutor because they realize they are on the right track. They can set goals and talk about how to be more productive—topics their supervisors may not have time to discuss.

Graduate students number over 3,000 at UVic, and they need academic writing support. With faculty members supervising multiple graduate students in addition to their teaching, research, and service commitments, the role of the Centre for Academic Communication has never been so important.  Connect with us by creating an account online and booking an appointment with a tutor. Check out our spring schedule for tutoring, workshops, and other services. Come to the Grad Writing Room, Library 151B on Fridays from 10 to 1, where you write in community with others. Or just drop by and say hello.  We’re located on the main floor of the  Mearns Centre for Learning – McPherson Library. We’d love to see you.

 

 

 

 

 

Reference

Dunleavy, P. (2003). Authoring a PhD: How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

 

 

Make writing social

Academic Writing, Blogs and blogging, Centre for Academic Communication, Dissertation writing, Environment, Inspiration and motivation, Make writing social, Motivation, Productivity, Tutoring, Writing groups

cropped-cropped-cropped-2110144017-2.jpg“Isolation is killing.” (Thomson & Kamler, 2016, p. 50)

Writing a thesis can feel isolating. Even if you are traveling the grad school journey with a cohort, you may get out of sync with others or feel different from the group. One way to break out of isolation and kick-start your writing is to connect with your peers and either write together and/or share your writing. Wendy Belcher, editor, teacher, and the author of Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, is a proponent of making your writing social and collaborative, whether through involvement in a writing group or with a writing partner. Writing with others can allay writer’s block and other forms of anxiety, make you more productive, and help you feel connected to others.

Following are some ideas to get you started in creating a sense of writing community:

  • Thesis Writing Starter Kit: This resource provides tips on how to form a writing group or partnership.
  • The Centre for Academic Communication: Working with a tutor at the CAC can help you deal with writing challenges that you don’t necessarily want to bring to your supervisor. You can book a 50-minute session once a week (2 X 25 minute sessions, back to back), working with the same tutor for continuity or trying out different tutors.  Email cacmgr@uvic.ca to inquire about our face-to-face and online tutoring.
  • Every Friday from 10-1, the Centre for Academic Communication hosts a “writing room” for graduate students in Library 151B. It’s a quiet space where you can write alongside other graduate students.
  • Check out the twice-yearly Thesis Boot Camps for graduate students.
  • Blogging about your experience can help you feel less isolated on your journey and, according to Thomson and Kamler (2016), is an important part of performing your “scholarly identity” (see pp. 116-121). As a UVic student, you can use the Online Academic Community to start a free WordPress blog with technical support from the experts at Technology Integrated  Learning, UVic.  If you don’t want to start your own blog but would like to share your story, get in touch with me at cacpc@uvic.ca and we can talk about getting your story up on the Graduate Student Writers’ Community blog.
  • You may not relish the idea of connecting with a writing partner, writing group, or writing tutor. Have you considered reading academic blogs on topics relevant to you? Reading academic blogs can make you feel connected to the wider community of academic writers, graduate students, and researchers. A few recommended blogs follow; please let me know if you have a favourite one you’d like to add:

The Thesis Whisperer. From the blog: “The Thesis Whisperer is a blog newspaper dedicated to the topic of doing a thesis  and is edited by Dr Inger Mewburn, Director of research training at the Australian National University.” Mewburn and guest writers from across the world post about every possible topic related to writing a dissertation. Her approach is humanizing, playful, and encouraging.

Patter. From the blog: “Patter is Pat Thomson, Professor of Education in the School of Education, The University of Nottingham.” Thomson blogs often on scholarly writing, writing a dissertation, publishing, and writing or research problems and solutions. Her posts are organic—springing from what is happening in her busy life as an academic.

Explorations of Style| A blog about academic writing. From the blog: “Explorations of Style offers readers an ongoing discussion of the challenges of academic writing. The ability to formulate and clarify our thoughts is central to the academic enterprise; this blog discusses strategies to improve the process of expressing our research in writing.” Dr. Rachael Cayley, from the University of Toronto, covers many topics of interest to dissertation and other academic writers in a down-to-earth style. The blog appears to be inactive now, but there are some great classic posts about reverse outlining, paragraphing, and transitions.

Do you have a recommendation about how to “make writing social”? Send your ideas and resources to Madeline at cacpc@uvic.ca

This is adapted from a page written by Madeline Walker in the Dissertation Writers Resource on this blog; last updated November 22, 2018

 

 

 

 

Jacquie plays: The literature review as a journey up the mountain

Academic Writing, Centre for Academic Communication, Creative writing, Kinesiology, Literature review, Reading, Research, Structure, Tutoring, Writing process

By Jacqueline Allan and Madeline Walker

Jacqueline Allan, a masters’ student in kinesiology with a background in recreation, started visiting the Centre for Academic Communication early in her program. When Jacquie , who is studying adult play, shared her novel approach to the literature review with us recently, I just had to see if she was willing to let the community experience it as well.  Click onto the sound file to hear Jacquie’s journey up the mountain.

Earlier in the semester, Jacquie and I had a conversation about her life and her work.

Madeline: “Thank you for providing your literature review recording for us to enjoy. Can you tell me a little about why you wanted to study adult play for your master’s thesis?”

Jacquie : “I teach a lot of fitness classes, and I noticed that when I present something that’s playful, there are people who really resist that. They think, ‘I’m here to get a good hard workout, let’s just stay with what we know about exercising. Let’s not do anything playful.’ In fact, I’ve had people leave the class. So, I’m interested in what happens when we want to become playful. Or, why don’t we become playful?”

Madeline: “I love your question, ‘why are people resistant to play?’ I can relate as I used to be one of those people. Part of it was self-consciousness. What would people think? We’re not children anymore, I can’t look foolish. That was part of my resistance.”

Jacquie: “I think that’s a lot of it. People say I was a kid then, and I’ve left all that behind. Why is that? What are the forces acting on us as adults that don’t allow that? Is it still the work ethic thing, that if I am not working, I’m not seen as being productive? So it doesn’t have value? I am interested in that.”

Madeline: “When I first heard your lit review, you were on a hike, and there was birdsong in the background—you were embodying this spirit of play in your work, which I think is so wonderful.  I wanted to know what was the spark to give you this idea?  Was it, ‘I want to do a lit review and I want to record it, to make it a story?’”

Jacqueline made a wry face. “You just said I wanted to do a lit review; I HAD to do a lit review!” We both laughed about that.

Jacquie then described a childhood memory that informed her literature review journey: “I thought back to when I was a kid. I grew up on the North Shore of Vancouver, and we lived at the bottom of Grouse Mountain, and that was one of the things I did with my cousins, who lived in the same neighbourhood. We used to go down to the creek at the bottom of the mountain, and we would start going up the mountain, looking for Santa Claus. That was the culture we grew up in. It occurred to me that we didn’t really know where we were going. We knew that we were having fun, and this lit review is a journey for me into the unknown, into the wilderness.”

Madeline: “So that’s where you got the model for the journey up the mountain? “

Jacquie: “Yes. So I took all the people I was looking at in my research, and I could envisage them being at certain places along the way. One person that comes to mind is Brian Sutton-Smith [play theorist from New Zealand, 1924-2015]. I read his material for the literature review, and at one point I thought—wait a minute—I’ve met this person before! There was a prof who came to UBC and gave us a lecture for a convention or something, and I walked back with him and we were laughing and he looked like a surfer, and he had an accent. He reminded me of somebody who embodied playfulness! I could see him in the forest. He was with all the elves, just running around in this grove. So he takes a big part in this because he, for me, having met him, was playful even in his work. . . . And toward the end of the lit review, I came to the realization that I didn’t know anything!

I responded, “That means you’re very wise, Jacquie, when you know you don’t know anything!”

We chuckled about that nugget of truth voiced by Albert Einstein: “the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”

Jacquie: “Brian Sutton-Smith said that play is ambiguous–even Aristotle and Plato said that. We don’t really know what it is. Play is a noun and a verb in our culture. In particular, what is play for adults? As adults, we tend to know when we are not at play. To me, that means we know what play is. If you know the shadow of it, then you know what it is. But at the same time realizing this is so huge and I thought I would get to this literature review, and this would be the basis of a thesis I wanted to do, and I would think, ‘great, I’ve done it.’ Oh my gosh, no, not even close!”

The Wisdom of Ravens

Reflecting on her feeling of not knowing, Jacquie starts to describe her experience with ravens.

“I have met ravens on Grouse Mountain. One day, I was up there at the chalet where you can sit and look over the city. A raven came down and sat right there looking at me. This was the raven I had in my head. Speaking of wise–they’re so very wise.  The raven looked at me:

‘You think you know what’s going on but you don’t have a clue! And furthermore this path is way longer and way more ancient than you ever thought.’

I know now that ravens in First Nations culture symbolize an awful lot, but one of the things is knowledge. I thought, well that’s interesting. The raven is holding all this knowledge, and it’s up to me to try to find out, but the raven had no intention of telling me any of the knowledge except to say, it will be revealed to you.  First, you need to put in the work. So I’m at the bottom of the Grouse Grind, not at the top, and I need to keep going. That was the message from the raven.”

Jacquie thought for a bit then added, “Ravens also symbolize the subtlety of the truth. Am I looking for the truth of play?  Will ever approach the truth? Or get close?”

Wondering with Jacquie, I offered the following thought: “Maybe there are multiple truths.”

Jacquie: “Good point. Ravens also symbolize the unknown. In fact, I wrestle with and have to get comfortable with and accept that I’ll never know the truth about play.”

I remembered what a favourite writer of mine said about the literature review. “Pat Thomson says that the literature review is about getting comfortable with ambiguity, with not knowing. You’ll never know it all. I love your attitude, of seeing it as a journey of revelation. Even if you only get a little bit of it, there’s still a sense of appreciation. Sometimes we get arrogant as academics, thinking we can capture all this information, but in fact it’s always changing and dynamic, and it’s impossible to know it all.”

Jacquie admitted that this was a surprise to her.

“Jacquie,” I said, “I know you are an accomplished jazz vocalist. Is that what you do for play?”

Jacquie: “It is playful, but within a massive structure. So knowing the structure is super important, and improvisation is all part of jazz. So that becomes the playful part but within this really tremendous structure. So for me personally, playfulness is an attitude. I have a strong feeling that all of creation is playful, and the fact that we as humans don’t get that is kind of our problem. And so I look for that, every single day, and I look for the people–you  recognize somebody who has a playful spirit. Most day to day situations can be turned into playful situations. But that makes going through it fun; why not have fun? We’re all in it together. To do what we do individually to the best of our abilities. Let’s just have fun together. It’s very social for me as well. I can be playful by myself, you know I like physical recreation, but being playful with other people is where it’s at.”

Madeline: “So playfulness is an attitude for you?”

Jacquie clarified: “It’s actually a behaviour trait. Most of the researchers would distinguish play as one thing, but playfulness is something different. One researcher, Gordon, says her feeling is that playfulness can be learned or re-learned as an adult, and that fascinates me. What are the conditions under which a person learns for the first time or relearns how to be playful in their life?”

Jacquie and I agreed this seemed hopeful—that adults can re-learn their playfulness.

Jacquie’s top three tips for writing a literature review

I asked Jacquie to share her top three tips for a student who says, “I have to do a lit review and I’m terrified! What should I do?”

Jacquie responded without missing a beat: “Seek help at the Centre for Academic Communication. Those people know what a literature review is, and they can give you information on how to approach it right from the very beginning. They can give you tons of resources. That was so important to me. It was vital to me, not having done one before.”

Madeline: “Thanks for the plug, Jacquie!”

Jacquie : “Second, be looking at a topic you absolutely love because it can be onerous, and reading research is a bit of a process, so just stay with your loved topic. The third one is to have fun with it because it is a journey. In Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck says ‘you don’t take a journey, the journey takes you.’ So recognize that right off the top.”

Jacquie  started to gather her things to go. Time had slipped by quickly because we had been playing. “Thank you for the opportunity and the assistance you’ve given me.”

Thank you, Jacquie , for sharing your journey through this interview and your recorded literature review. Many readers will feel inspired to welcome playfulness into their lives after they read this. I know you inspired me!

 

 

Photo of Jacquie by Malakai Design Photography

Photo of Raven: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Female_adult_raven.jpg

By Bombtime [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

 

Doubting my Ability to Complete my Master’s Program

Academic Writing, Centre for Academic Communication, Cognition and writing, Cognitive process and writing, Distance students, Education, Graduate student writers, Inspiration and motivation, Learning disability, Productivity, Revision, Tutoring, Writing process, Writing resources

By Barb Fouts-Melnychuk

This is my first official blog post and I am thrilled and nervous to write at the same time.  I have just finished my seventh course for my master’s program in Curriculum and Instruction focusing on Literacy.  At this point in this 13-month journey I fall asleep if I sit still for more than ten minutes.  Hilarious but true!  Being a literacy consultant, doing a master’s program and trying to balance a family simultaneously is tough.  What made the workload even tougher is having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and a learning disability.  Translation:  I do not process directions, readings, people’s comments or class discussions in the patterns my classmates did.  My unique learning style translated to 25 very rewarding years teaching junior high, or as you say in BC, middle school, but the learning style has not made grad school easy.

I started a master’s program in July 2017 because as a consultant last year in Alberta, I supported 13 junior high schools and coached 100 teachers.  I was asked to come back month after month and every meeting there were more and more teachers in attendance.  Junior high teachers want to adopt practices that transform their student learning.  In my school district in Edmonton, there are 100,000 students, and approximately 263 schools.  Translation:  many teachers want to adopt their classroom practices to meet the varied needs they see hourly. My master’s program has given me the language and capacity to walk into every classroom or school, see the strengths of the staff, listen to their “what if we could . . .?” questions and find the scaffolds and strategies to support the inquisitive professionals. The master’s program also highlighted my learning disability and required me to ask for help.

I have always had difficulty writing for academic purposes because I could not understand the patterns I was to follow.  I saw connections between the theories and classroom practice. Twenty-five years of reading, studying, practicing and planning, which resulted in 55 to 60-hour work weeks, allowed me to find ways to motivate and engage my students. My whole career I was able to get results from students that were supposedly unattainable or from the students who don’t care. In my classroom I have LOVED making literacy theory practical for my students and my colleagues!   What my insane work schedule did not do was develop my writing skills for academia.

Then the Learning and Teaching Centre came on my radar after a professor this summer handed back a paper saying, “Barb you get the ideas and theories, but you need an editor to find the transitions and develop the coherence.”  The comment was said with kindness and in support, and I had already come to this realization during my last 12 months.  One of my supportive cohort members suggested the Centre for Academic Communication (CAC). I was spending HOURS trying to meet the academic standards and barely making it.

It is so humbling to ask for help once again in my academic studies.  New to me, NOT!  My grade 12 Chemistry teacher was so excited when I got a 67% on the provincial diploma exam.  He told me that mark meant more to him than so many of the students who got honors because of the hours of work he saw me put in that did not result in higher grades.  Yet now I was in a master’s program asking for help. Did that mean I did not actually have the stuff to be here?

At the CAC I asked for an editor and received a writing coach!  What a delightful surprise.  Someone who read aloud what I had written and allowed me to hear the lack of coherence and then that same someone asked me to clarify how the ideas related?  These were easy questions and I quickly rattled off the answer and then typed as if the keys were on fire and I had to quickly unload my ideas from my hands.  The words flowed from me because the gift of ADHD is that I learn the material to a level of specificity that most people don’t see.  My brain wants to understand the theory of literacy to the degree that I can disperse the theory into practical application for all the teachers I support.

I would leave an hour’s session at the CAC so excited and energized that many of my cohort group are planning on using the writing supports during the 2018-19 year as we complete our project.  My fellow grad students could not believe I revised 800 words in 45 minutes and took the quality of my writing to a much higher standard.  Not only was my writing more aligned with masters degree benchmarks but my confidence soared after each visit.  I started to realize I could write and that I was in grad school for valid reasons.  I want to help teachers so that I am really helping teenagers embrace the potential they have and encourage them to heal and bring hope to combat some of the ugliness in our world.

Who knew one hour could do so much?  Luckily, I did not, and I was so grateful to have been able to sign up for three hours in my last week.  My writing abilities can almost leap tall buildings in a single bound and it’s just in time.  This master’s project is going to take every writing skill I have and now I have more.

 

About Barb

Barb has taught junior high/middle school for 25 years and is now a literacy consultant with Edmonton Public Schools.  She has taught for many years, in all four disciplines, but landed in English Language Arts.  Her love of diverse learners has allowed Barb to teach the spectrum of learners who are gifted to learners identified with special needs.   Barb is part of the international Freedom Writer Teachers and is looking forward to the year when she finally figures out all there is to know about teaching. She can be reached at barb.melnychuk@epsb.ca

 

 

 

Learning to swim again

Academic Writing, Anxiety, Centre for Academic Communication, First year in graduate school, Posts by Madeline, Reading, Research

By Madeline Walker

With a wry smile, I look back on my first class as a graduate student. I registered for twentieth-century African American literature and eagerly signed up for the first seminar presentation.  The task was to comment on the third chapter from Paul Gilroy’s seminal 1993 book, The Black Atlantic, in which Gilroy presents his theory about a transatlantic Black culture that transcends diasporic differences.After a long spell away from university, I was jumping in head first. Little did I realize how deep the pool of knowledge was!

Although I knew a bit about the history of African America (slavery, the 13thamendment to the Constitution, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights era), I was completely unprepared for the kaleidoscope of concepts and ideas I needed to make sense of Gilroy’s jargon-laden writing. In every paragraph, I was confronted with dozens of new terms, for example, “post-structuralist,” “textuality,” and “metaphysics of presence.” What was the difference between “modernism” and “modernity”? What did Gilroy mean by “the politics of authenticity”? Who was W.E.B. DuBois and what was “double consciousness”?

My head was barely above water as I sputtered away. Worse, I had the haunting sense that the professor expected me to be familiar with the context and debates embedded in the book and the class, to breathe underwater. I wasn’t and I couldn’t.

The way I saw it, I had two choices. Quit now, or move forward. I had already quit grad school once in my twenties, and I didn’t want to disappoint myself again. So I chose to move forward. To avoid getting mired in feelings of inadequacy, I simply started where I was. I puzzled through the layers of ideas by making notes, asking questions, looking stuff up, and reading around the subject to build meaning from the chapter.  I relied on prior knowledge, basic reference books (dictionary of critical theory, encyclopedia of African American history), the introduction to Gilroy’s book, and book reviews of The Black Atlantic to help me find my feet at the shallow end of the pool.  Although my understanding of the chapter had big gaps, I was able to make a reasonable presentation and ask lots of questions as part of my talk.  Despite having to catch up my knowledge, I ended up enjoying the class, and a seed was planted. I was inspired to focus on African American literature for my entire graduate school journey.

If you are feeling out of your depth, take heart.  Things take time. I just had a chat with a student who was marvelling at how his capacity for reading academic writing has grown over the past three years. Material that he found obscure and dense at the beginning of his program, he now breezes through with high comprehension.  But building facility in his disciplinary discourse wasn’t accomplished quickly.  We don’t punish children for not learning how to swim quickly; rather, we put water wings on their arms and give them time to get comfortable in the shallow end. So don’t chide yourself for taking the time you need to learn to swim in the sea of knowledge. Things take time.

If you need support in academic communication, including reading to write, writing, presentations, academic integrity, or academic expectations, please see us at the Centre for Academic Communication (CAC).  We get it—we’ve been there.

You can drop by our offices in the McPherson Library at the end of the Learning Commons or make an appointment online:

https://uvic.mywconline.com


Madeline is the Coordinator for the CAC. She has a PhD in English (20C American Literature). She loves to write and to coach other writers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is the next new collocation you are learning?

Academic Writing, Collocations, EAL graduate students, Goal setting, International graduate students, Posts by Kaveh, Productivity, Reading, Vocabulary

By Kaveh Tagharobi

In my last post, I wrote about the importance of learning new collocations through reading and listening activities. Now, I am going to discuss how to record, practice, and learn those new collocations in a way that you can easily use them in your writing and speaking.

You all might have learned new words and collocations that you either forget after a while or seldom use in your writing and speaking. There are probably a group of words and collocations that you frequently see in different texts, and each time you see them, you wonder what exactly they mean. You might have a vague idea, but you are never a hundred percent sure. Or maybe you recognize and understand the word or collocation upon seeing them, but you don’t seem to remember to use them in similar situations when you write or speak. These are very common issues for many EAL writers and speakers, and in the following paragraphs I am going to introduce some simple strategies to help you learn new words and collocations at a level that they become part of your subconscious knowledge and you can effortlessly use them.

The first step is to create a list where you record the new collocations and words that you come across while reading and listening. Many of you might have attempted this in the past: to keep a list of the new words you learn. But has it helped you learn those words better and remember them more easily? Having an effective way of recording information about newly-learned items is the first step in learning them well. I have seen word lists that stretch like two parallel trains; one train is the new words and the one next to it is the translations. This way of keeping new words is not very helpful. Firstly because translations cannot fully capture the meaning of a word or collocation. We can’t always draw parallels between two languages, and translations do not account for the context in which a word or collocation is used. The second reason why keeping translations is not effective is that it does not provide a meaningful learning opportunity, and therefore it is easier to forget the new word after a while. We need something that offers a deeper understanding of the new collocations, and this is why I recommend keeping example sentences instead of translations or definitions. An example sentence features the new word or collocation in context and provides a much better opportunity to both learn and remember it better.

I recommend my students keep three example sentences for each new word or collocation that they add to their list. The first is the original sentence in which they saw that word or collocation for the first time. The second one is a dictionary example, and the last one is a sentence they make. Keeping these three sentences helps you both understand the meaning of the new item and remember it better. You can also keep a definition from an English-to-English dictionary if necessary.

Here is a sample entry:

Imagine you have a conversation with your friend, Doug, who has been running a hipster hangout downtown for the past few years. Unfortunately for Doug, business hasn’t been looking good lately with the population of people with thick rimmed glasses and messy shag cuts on the decline. (This, obviously, can’t be true so don’t take it as a fact! I am just making stuff up for my example.) Before getting into the red and losing money, Doug decides to go out of business while the profits and costs still balance out. This is when he tells you the historic sentence: “I decided to close the restaurant. It only broke even last year.” If you don’t know what “break even” means, this is your golden opportunity to learn it. Even if you know what it means, but you don’t use it yourself, you can still use the chance to make this collocation a part of your active vocabulary. Recording this sentence allows you to learn the meaning of this collocation in context. In addition, you will always remember it with the story of Doug and the decline of his watering hole that was once bustling with cool people in colourful socks and tight-fitted jeans.

Even if you don’t have a story that you can attach to a new collocation, you can make one. Just like what I did with the story of my imaginary friend, Doug.

Writing up a short paragraph gives you a chance to spend some quality time with your collocation, building a narrative around it, adding fun details to it, and in this way making it more memorable.

In that paragraph, you can also use some of the collocations you have learned before. Can you locate some of the collocations that I inserted into my paragraph about Doug’s restaurant?

Keeping a list, however, is never enough, even if it consists of made-up, real-life, and dictionary examples. To make sure these new items enter your long-term memory, you need to review and practice them, and not just randomly; I think to get the best results, it is important to have a system. One recommendation is to pledge a specific number of new items for each week when you can focus and work on those words and collocations. For example, you can decide that you read for 25 minutes every day and pick at least two useful collocations from every reading session (see my previous post on how to identify useful collocations in reading passages). In this way, you will have 14 new collocations by the end of the week. Then you can focus on reviewing those 14 new collocations the following week (while keeping reading and finding new items for the subsequent week). For reviewing, all you need to do is to remember the sentences in which the new words and collocations are used. If you can’t remember the sentence, you can look at your list and review by reading the example sentences. The reviewing part can also be a little organized. You can focus on the first sentence for all your 14 new collocations on the first two days of the week and then move on to the second and third sentences on the next four days. In this way, you will be reviewing your new items six times a week, going back to each item in a new sentence every two days. Finally, you can review all 14 items on the last day of the week.

This is not time-consuming at all, since you don’t have to set dedicated time aside for reviews. All you need to do is repeat the sentences in your head during the day. You can do it while taking a walk, waiting in line, or doing daily chores. If you don’t remember the sentence, you just need a glance to remind you of the sentence. Moreover, as you head into next weeks, keep an eye out for the items from previous weeks. If you keep reading regularly, you will encounter those words and collocations again in new texts. Every time you come across one of your old items, go back to your list and put a check mark next to the entry. Once you have at least three check marks next to your entry, you can be more confident that you will not forget it.

The next step is to insert the newly-learned words and collocations into your speaking and writing. Have a plan to write a short essay every two weeks and use the new items from the past weeks in it. Also, you can prepare a short speaking using the new collocations and present it during a one-on-one session at the CAC. Don’t wait for opportunities to reveal themselves to you; instead, create chances where you can use the new words and collocations deliberately.

It is also a good idea to review your whole list every month. You will find that there are still words or collocations that you do not have complete mastery over. Write them down on a separate piece of paper and stick it somewhere you can always see. Put it on your fridge or next to your monitor, and in this way, you can review these stubborn words and collocations every time you open the fridge or get a chance to use some of them as you are writing at your desk.

My final tip on this subject is about access: where should you keep your list for the most convenient access? What if you are waiting in line in Biblio and want to take a glance at your list to remember a sentence? In the past, I kept my lists in notebooks, which is not the most accessible format. I most probably won’t have my notebook with me when I am taking a walk or standing in line. For a while, I kept my lists in Word files, which was better, but still I had difficulty copying them from device to device. My final solution is to keep my lists on a cloud-based note-taking app. There are several such apps out there that allow you to keep, organize, and update your notes in a space that automatically uploads them to a cloud server. I use Evernote because I think it offers great options to organize your notes. On Evernote, you can create notebooks and keep several notes in the same notebook. You can also group notebooks together under a single topic. This is especially useful if you keep multiple lists, which I recommend. Based on where you find your new collocations, you can have different lists for formal, informal, and academic words and collocations. You can also keep collocations that you have seen before (but can’t quite use) in a separate notebook. Beside allowing you to organize your notes in different notebooks, Evernote synchronizes your data across different devices (you can install it on iOS, Android, and Windows), and you can also access them through your web browser on any device.

Of course, this is only one of many apps where you can keep your lists. Or maybe you want to go old school and stick to the good old paper notebooks. As long as you regularly add to, review, and use your new words and collocation, you will continue to learn and grow as a writer and speaker. In the end, I believe what is most important is that you have purpose, enthusiasm, and a clear plan to add to and expand your vocabulary. So let’s get started. What is the next new collocation you are learning?

About Kaveh

Kaveh is an EAL Specialist at the CAC.

Kaveh Tagharobi has two MA degrees in English, the second one completed at UVic in 2017 with a concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (CSPT). Before starting to work at the CAC in 2013, he was an ESL/EFL instructor for 10 years in Iran, teaching a variety of topics to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. At the CAC, Kaveh works with both international and domestic students, helping them to plan their research, organize their writing, edit for grammar, and improve their reading and critical thinking skills.

New or old? How to expand our vocabulary by combining words we already know

Academic Writing, Centre for Academic Communication, Collocations, EAL graduate students, International graduate students, Posts by Kaveh, Vocabulary, Writing process, Writing resources

By Kaveh Tagharobi

“My sentences are too simple.”

“I can’t write professionally.”

“I need to use more big words.”

Have you heard any of these complaints? Or rather, have you been making them yourself? If so, you are not alone. Many EAL (English as an Additional Language) and non-EAL students find themselves in situations where they feel their academic vocabulary is “just not enough.” Whether prompted by feedback received from instructors and peers or just driven by the desire to impress our readers, we always have this urge to use “different,” “more difficult,” or “more academic” words in our writing. English language is also inviting us to do so. According to the Oxford Dictionaries website, “there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words,” and “if distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.” This is more than almost any other language. These statistics alone put a huge pressure on student writers to expand their vocabulary and use a variety of words in their writing. But is this a reasonable expectation, and does using new words always lead to better academic writing?

Let’s consider the following sentence written by an EAL student:

“An illustration of this is the school system, which is one of the main sources of distributing cultural capital.”

At the Centre for Academic Communication, I often see sentences like this. At a first glance, such sentences can be confusing because of their word choice, but with a closer look, it becomes evident that the student has tried to replace a word with a synonym that does not quite work in this context. In the above sentence, the word “illustration” has replaced “example” to avoid repetition. Repetition is something many student writers are concerned about, and rightly so. Academic writing often puts us in situations where we have to repeat the same words over and over again. It is just natural that we prefer not to repeat the same words several times in a short chunk of writing. This reluctance is also enhanced by negative feedback most writers receive about repetition. Another reason words like “example” don’t always get much love is that they are thought to be “too simple.”  But is there anything inherently “simple” about the word “example”? It could be that it is shorter than a word like “illustration” and is not an obvious derivative with a formal-sounding suffix. But in reality, what probably makes “example” look simple is the fact that we know it too well; we use it too commonly for it to qualify as a “hard” word, which brings us full circle to the issues of repetition and variety in writing.

But whether these poor “simple” words get discarded for the accusations of simplicity or repetition, what is certain is that many of our students identify the need to have more options when writing. What many student writers and especially EAL writers overlook, however, is that not all synonyms can be used interchangeably. In fact, many synonyms that can be found in thesauri or through MS Word are just similar words that cannot simply replace the original word in the sentence. In such situations, I recommend my students to stick with the words they know rather than trying to add variety to their writing. Common words are common for a reason: they are good words! And repetition is not always bad; it can be a way to consolidate meaning and create consistency. This can be a safe option, but what if they want to improve their writing by using a variety of sentence structures? This is a legitimate need, and there must be a way for it.

This is when I suggest learning academic phrases and sentence structures instead of learning new words.

As counterintuitive as it may sound, learning new “difficult” words is not a priority in improving your academic writing. In my opinion, learning “old” and “simple” word combinations is much more important.

While the previous statistic from OED estimates English words to be at about 750 thousand, other statistics show that of all these words, only a very small percentage are used in everyday writing. The general consensus is that only about 3000 words cover 95% of common texts like newspapers, blogs, and most books[1]. That is only 0.4% of the number OED quotes as the total number of words in English. This means that in order to master the use of words in writing, learning new words like “contumacious”  and “gasconading” is not as important as learning how to combine more familiar words such as “for,” “boastful,” “respect,” “in,” “lack,” and “manner.” (see the end for a fun quiz!) Or to return to our example, finding synonyms like “specimen” and “exemplar” (words that are listed as synonyms for “example”) does not necessarily help us with finding alternatives. It is the use of old words like “true” and “case” that makes the difference between intermediate and advanced level writing. Using these words, our student writer could have written the following sentence as a variation of their sentence:

“This is certainly true in the case of schools which are one of the main sources of distributing cultural capital.”

But where do these combinations come from? How can student writers learn such academic phrases and add them to their repertoire of active vocabulary? We certainly cannot just make new collocations ourselves. Learning a language is one of the very few areas of knowledge in which being inventive is not always a recipe for success. Surprisingly, here, imitation and copying are more fruitful ways of learning and improving. We have to have encountered a certain arrangement of words to be able to reproduce it in our writing.

Therefore, my first suggestion to learn new collocations is to look for them in other people’s texts. Instead of going to vocabulary books or resources that introduce phrases and collocations, you can look for, notice, and try to learn such collocations while reading and listening. Academic articles, books, lectures, and more general texts like news articles, podcasts, and even daily conversations are great sources to find and learn new collocations, phrases, and sentence structures. This can make learning new collocations part of your daily routine without the need for setting aside dedicated time for it. You can form a habit to treat your daily reading and listening activities as learning opportunities to expand your vocabulary circle.

But to do this, first you need to develop an eye for finding useful collocations in written and spoken texts. In other words, you have to learn how to identify word combinations that might look ordinary at the first glance but are in fact specific arrangements of words that you would not normally use in your writing. To give you an example, look at this short excerpt from an academic article[2] on Digital Humanities:

“This essay traces some of the ways modernism and digital humanities have converged of late. It covers some of the key modes in which that convergence has so far found expression.”

They seem like a couple of normal-looking sentences with apparently no “difficult” or “fancy” words. However, with a closer look, you can notice that the authors have used the words “of” and “late” to mean “recently.” This is a very simple word combination; but despite its simplicity, it is an arrangement that an EAL writer would not necessarily know or use. Similarly, the words “found” and “expression”, two more seemingly “easy” words, have constituted a collocation that can replace words like “show,” “demonstrate,’ or “manifest,” all words that student writers overuse and would want to find synonyms for. With more attention, it becomes evident that the collocation “find expression” is used with the preposition “in” and is followed by a noun, but in this sentence, the preposition and the noun have moved before the verb. Therefore, the complete expression that we should extract from this sentence is “to find expression in something.” As you see, this requires attention and bit of experience, but with some practice, you can easily mine valuable collocations by just analyzing ordinary-looking sentences.

Finally, remember that the type and usage of the collocations you find will vary based on the sources where you find them. What you will find in a magazine article or a podcast can be fairly informal and suitable for daily situations. In the same way, if you review academic texts, like journal articles and books, you are more likely to find collocations that are useful for your academic writing.

So far, we discussed the ways to identify new collocations in others’ texts. In a next blog post, I will talk about developing a system to record, practice, and finally master the newly-learned collocations.

And now is the time for this post’s quick quiz. What sentences would you make with the “simple” words “for,” “boastful,” “respect,” “in,” “lack,” and “manner” I proposed to use instead of “contumacious” and “gasconading”?  Comment on this post if you want to play!

 

[1] Fry, E. B., 1925, & Kress, J. E. (2006). The reading teacher’s book of lists (5th, 1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

[2] Ross, S., & Sayers, J. (2014). Modernism meets digital humanities. Literature Compass, 11(9), 625-633. doi:10.1111/lic3.12174

Credit for  photo of books: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Alborzagros#/media/File:English-English_and_English-Persian_dictionaries.JPG

About Kaveh

Kaveh is an EAL Specialist at the CAC.

Kaveh Tagharobi has two MA degrees in English, the second  one completed at UVic in 2017 with a concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (CSPT). Before starting to work at the CAC in 2013, he was an ESL/EFL instructor for 10 years in Iran, teaching a variety of topics to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students.  At the CAC,  Kaveh works with both international and domestic students,  helping them to plan their research, organize their writing, edit for grammar, and improve their reading and critical thinking skills.