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Research students as editors

Ruth Trigg, Barry Jeromson, Nicole Markwick
University of South Australia

Paper given to the Australian Style Council Conference,
Sydney , 11 July 2004

Background

A three stage program for writing and editing PhD and masters theses will begin as a pilot project at the University of South Australia next semester. Professor Tricia Vilkinas, research degrees coordinator in the School of Accounting and Information, in the Division of Business and Enterprise , is hosting the pilot program.

The program has been devised by Ruth Trigg, a former lecturer in the successful University of South Australia Professional Writing and Communication BA. She has formed a team with a former colleague, Dr Barry Jeromson, an academic editor with expertise in crossdisciplinary research, and Nicole Markwick, a freelance editor and recent graduate of the professional writing degree.

The team will apply new theoretical understandings and tools of analysis provided by critical discourse and new rhetorical theory. This approach moves beyond traditional approaches to technical writing that focus narrowly on prescriptive descriptions of writing processes and the 'standard' features of a range of texts. It acknowledges the need to work within different disciplinary and epistemological fields, each with their own practices of doing research and writing it up.

Three stage program

The first stage of the program offers supervisors and candidates rhetorical and linguistic knowledge about writing up research and writing a thesis that has developed over the past two decades. We believe this has developed beyond that normally available within the disciplinary or crossdisciplinary field of a supervisor.

Stage two helps the researcher 'translate' their thesis into appropriate texts for a variety of audiences. These include academic, industry, government and community groups.

Stage three develops active links with scholarly publishers so that research can be published sooner and more widely.

Editing theses: the traditional paradigm

Traditionally, editors have been employed at the very last stage in developing a thesis. The task is seen as removing surface errors, such as spelling or grammar. The writer is often looking for confirmation that all is well. The editor is usually given very little time to provide feedback before the submission date. It is then too late to work productively on structural problems or sort out poorly handled referencing.

When a research project begins there is a great deal of collecting of data, of positions, of theories. A journey begins, often with a lack of clarity about the pathways ahead. When more material is at hand the writer commonly manages the material by writing an account of the journey; this happened, then this and then this, and this is what I make of it. This 'thesis' then looks and reads like a recount narrative. A narrative is not a thesis (unless the thesis is specifically about constructing narrative). The 'headings' that are inserted often do not hold together as a logical case to advance the thesis. Often the thesis itself is not even stated. It has become so familiar to the researcher and supervisor over time that they have lost the capacity to see that it has not been provided for the reader.

Recent university policy developments on thesis editing

The national discussion of the ethics of accreditation of postgraduate research degrees, which involves the question of how much and what kind of editing, is a welcome development. The issue of difference in quality between disciplinary achievement and language proficiency presents an unresolved dilemma for universities in awarding postgraduate degrees.

Janet Mackenzie, from the Council of Australian Societies of Editors (CASE) presented the policy on the editing of research theses by professional editors, at the recent Style Council Conference in Sydney . This policy was developed jointly with the Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies (DdOGS) and CASE. The policy is a working document and the two bodies invite further discussion from supervisors and candidates as it is trialled in university departments. The focus of this policy is on end-of-thesis editing (www.case-editors.org).

The Carson report, released recently for the Division of Business and Enterprise at UniSA, investigates the management of postgraduate programs with a research component in the Division of Business and Enterprise at UniSA. Two of the 41 recommendations address the issue of editing theses, as follows:

Recommendation 12: A pool of reputable copy editors should be developed who can build up a relationship with the University of South Australia and with it an understanding of the University's requirements regarding copy editing.

Recommendation 13: While the National DDoGS [Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies]/Australian Society of Editors guidelines are still in development stage, DBA staff should be informed of draft guidelines and subscribe to the guidelines when they are finalised and ratified by the National DDoGS. ( Carson n.d., p. iv)

Challenging the existing paradigm

The approach of this three-stage program is not to copy edit the work of students in the last stage of development of a thesis, but to provide knowledge about how to manage the structure and writing of a thesis from the beginning.

New relationships of professional interaction need to be developed if scholarly editors are to participate with supervisors and candidates in this way. This model challenges the existing policy developed jointly by the Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies and the Council of Australian Societies of Editors and the Carson report for the Division of Business and Enterprise at UniSA.

This program offers supervisors knowledge about writing theses that they can then share with other candidates. It offers candidates knowledge about writing which they can then transfer to any kind of writing they are asked to produce after the PhD is completed.

Theorising practice: meta, macro and micro levels

As scholarly editors, the members of this team are also concerned to theorise and structure their practice. They see their role to begin with as ethnographic, as sitting alongside supervisor and student and observing their practices, as beginning from where the student is at.

The program structure then follows a three-layered strategic approach, applicable both to the project and to editing itself. This structure, consisting of meta, macro and micro levels has its origins in editing strategies developed in undergraduate professional writing and editing courses at UniSA.

Meta issues go beyond the body of the text itself. Undergraduate editing students typically tend to react to a new document by succumbing to the authority of the printed word rather than confronting it. A focus on meta issues encourages students to react more critically to a document, and ask such questions as: Where has the text come from? What are its intentions? What is going on here (subtexts, social and cultural implications)? Who is the audience?

Macro and micro issues correspond to the more familiar structural and finer-grained aspects of editing respectively.

A similar structure applies to this project.

Meta issues

Meta issues (issues that go beyond the text of the thesis) include:

Working with the school or faculty : How are research students inducted into the school's culture? What are the school's special requirements for research students? What are the most common publication outlets in the school's research fields? What contacts does the school have with current research in government, industry and community organisations? What protocols need to be established for working with the school?

Working with the supervisor : What is the nature of the power relationships between supervisor and student? How does the supervisor interact with the student? What advice can supervisors offer about their working relationship with their students? What protocols need to be established for working alongside supervisors?

Working with the student : What are the student's age and experience, academic background, cultural background and language background (if ESL)? What protocols are needed for working with students?

Ethical protocols need to be developed in consultation with the school, the supervisor and student, the administration and the research centre.

Macro issues

Macro issues concern genre and structure. The student needs to learn the distinction between narrative genre, which tends to surface as the story of the thesis unfolds, and the more rigorous thesis genre, in which the research will be logically ordered and presented.

Implicit in the notion of genre is that of thesis structure. The thesis develops by the researcher controlling the heading structure. Key information is given at the beginning followed by supporting evidence and rounded off by summaries and conclusions. Technically, there is also a need to introduce word processor style templates.

Micro issues

Micro issues arise from the question: what is a suitable writing style for a thesis? This question is addressed by collecting short samples of student's better and not so good writing. The qualities of the better writing can be analysed, noted and applied to recasting the less well written passages. Such activities form the basis of the student's individual writing style guide. This is supplemented by notes on the school's writing expectations, suggestions from the supervisor, relevant material from published style manuals and style sheets.

Nor should the sources of student writing be restricted to the thesis itself. If the thrust of this project is to intervene early rather than late, then it makes sense to begin gathering writing samples from the research proposal, the ethics proposal and the preliminary literature review.

Case study: an ESL doctoral student

This project is still at the proposal stage. However a preliminary case study is already under way. One member of the team, Nicole Markwick, is working as an editor with an ESL student writing a doctoral thesis in business management. Some of the strategies identified above are being applied and, while the team does not have ethical clearance to present any of this student's work, a number of issues have already arisen.

Initial problems and possible solutions

Predictably, given the student's ESL background, syntax is a problem. At the same time, the school in which this is taking place allows no leeway for ESL syntax. Assessment demands a performance equal to a native English speaker with high-level writing skills. Is this a commendable attempt to maintain standards or should there be some latitude for ESL syntax, provided that intentions are clear? As well, these rigorous demands cause the student to mimic what he perceives as academic discourse, with resultant awkward constructions.

To address these issues, the student is developing a portfolio of samples of his own writing, along the lines described above in the section on micro issues. In this way he is being encouraged to reflect critically on his use of English syntax. This, in turn, is the basis for rewriting larger sections of the thesis. However, theses tend to grow like fields of mushrooms and as new research material is inserted into already reworked sections, new syntactic lapses emerge.

Student response and future possibilities

Often, the student's response to being edited in this way is to become embarrassed. Is there a conflict between the student's view of himself as a cutting edge researcher and the editor's view of him as an ESL student who needs help with English? This could just be a personal issue, but it could also suggest a whole range of other subtexts: educational, intercultural, possibly gender.

Obviously, each student presents a different profile of competency and capacity to learn new syntax, but it is possible to see patterns and possibilities for future action. Ruth Trigg and Barry Jeromson have also worked with ESL students over many years. From these experiences and the results of Nicole Markwick's case study, typical ESL syntax problems become evident: confusion with verb tenses, inconsistencies in the use of singular and plural forms—to add an 's' or not to add an 's'—and, for many Asian students, misplaced or omitted articles.

Perhaps, then, after all the early work on teaching such students to edit their own work, these identifiable syntactic patterns—the ingrained ESL traces that remain—can become the focus for a more minimal approach to end-of-thesis copy editing.

Conclusion

This project is concerned to abandon the stereotype of an editor intervening at the end of a thesis to carry out a last minute copy edit. This view is implicit in some of the guidelines emerging from academe. Instead, the team intends to engage with the researcher at an early stage to help develop an editorial consciousness or awareness. The student then develops the thesis with an eye not only on content, but also on form and process. Thesis writing becomes genuine knowledge construction. It becomes learning and applying learning in a network of relationships consisting of student, supervisor, editor and school. The ultimate aim, then, is to move research students beyond the thesis to publication and to apply what has been learned in the workplace, so that they can be effective writers in their specialist fields beyond the academy.

Reference

Carson, E n.d., Investigation into the context of the management of postgraduate programs with a research component in the Division of Business and Enterprise, Final report, Dean of Graduate Studies, University of South Australia.

 

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