How to write your PhD thesis

no matter what stage you're at or no matter what field you're from stress when writing is incredibly common and even the smartest most hard-working students can find it incredibly stressful or even completely overwhelming so why does this happen why is it so hard why do so many people struggle well there are a few reasons the first and perhaps most obvious is the sheer scale of the task so for most people it will be the longest thing that you've ever written and for a lot of people it will be the longest document you write in your entire life and that long document it comes with a huge amount of pressure so the way that a PhD is examined everything rests on that one document so it's not like when you were an undergraduate where you could afford to screw up one exam and then your average grade would kind of you know make up for it so is a huge amount of pressure on this enormous document and also of course writing is quite a difficult complicated skill and even professional writers can struggle sometimes but in addition to these kind of basic circumstances you might also be writing in a second or third or even fourth language you might be writing while you're still doing the research so you don't quite know how it's going to pan out or you might have so much knowledge about your subject you might have so much to say that you don't know where to start and you might also have other unique circumstances that make it more difficult so when you combine even just a few of these factors it isn't really surprising that so many people find it so hard but just because there are a lot of potential difficulties that doesn't mean that overwhelming stress is inevitable and just because a lot of people suffer through the writing that doesn't mean that we have to so to illustrate this point let's compare thesis writing to another difficult skill for example brain surgery so brain surgery is obviously incredibly delicate and difficult work it demands intense concentration and in some circumstances you might have to work very quickly with very little time for preparation and the slightest mistake can have devastating consequences but most brain surgeons are not so overwhelmed or so stressed that they can't do their job it might be stressful but they can manage the stress to stay calm under pressure and get the job done and there's a really simple reason for this so if you or I had to cut someone's head open it would be absolutely terrifying but brain surgeons are trained to do the job so they've built up a range of skills which mean that they recognize the kinds of problems that are can arise and the complications that arise and they have a range of solutions that they can adapt and apply quickly and this is really the key to managing the stress of a difficult situation it's just a matter of building up the skills and all of that knowledge all of the knowledge that brain surgeons have is built upon generations of brain surgeons who've gone before so people who have figured out the solutions to those common problems and the complications that arise they then pass on that knowledge to the next generation and so every subsequent generation then has a slightly higher level of skill so the first person to do something finds it very difficult but then what was once pioneering and incredibly risky work becomes standard practice now I'd like to ask a quick question so of all the people in the room how many people have had any kind of formal training in writing zero literally zero there was one kind of like maybe okay so one kind of maybe out of 6070 people we have this situation where even though there are tens thousands of PhD students graduating every year and every single one has to write a thesis in order to succeed and nobody has any training in how to do it there is no standard consistent way of teaching academic writing so the vast majority of students have to just figure it out on their own so everybody is in that position where everything feels kind of risky everything is kind of pioneering everything's going into the unknown instead of having a situation where generation by generation the writing actually improves so this means when you face any kind of difficulty in your writing and you will inevitably face difficulties you have no training to fall back on you have no principles to guide you and no framework for figuring out what to do and of course it is possible to work it out on your own and lots of people have done that and basically it's a process of facing the same kind of writing problems again and again so you figure out common solutions to the kinds of problems that arise so then you can recognize the problem when it comes up and you have solutions that you've already worked through that you can adapt and apply to this new this new situation and it gets a little bit faster and easier every single time so good writers are basically just people who have spent enough time solving writing problems that they recognize the kind of problem that they're facing and they have a range of solutions that they can adapt and apply quickly so these people exist but the problem is a lot of people who have this level of skill don't necessarily know how they're doing it and don't necessarily know how to teach other people to do it so they might recognize good writing when they see it but they don't know how to help somebody get to that level or they might recognize that this is bad writing but they don't know how to how to fix it and so generation after generation just struggles and struggles and struggles so for me writing my thesis was one of the easiest parts of my entire PhD so there which was really difficult and once I had the results it was just a matter of getting it all down on the pat down on the page and I wrote my entire thesis in just three months I passed my advisor with zero Corrections and I actually enjoyed the process so I then went on to do postdoctoral research and I noticed that there were countless PhD students who were much better physicists than I was but when it came to writing they were terrified so I figured that if I'd written well and I'd written quickly and I'd enjoyed the process maybe there was something that I was doing that was different that could help other people but of course I was in that same situation where I didn't know exactly what I was doing I didn't know how to help people so over the last nine years I've worked with more than 400 PhD students from all kinds of different all kinds of different backgrounds and I can tell you that the problems that you face in writing they are not unique no matter what subject you study the fundamental problems that you're trying to solve are exactly the same problems that everybody else faces and there are common solutions to these common problems so what I'm going to try to do over the next 30 40 minutes or so is to share with you some of these common solutions to these common problems so that you can build up your skill so that you recognize the situations that come up and then you can apply some of these in your writing and write your thesis without going insane so what are we trying to do at a basic basic level so fundamentally writing is all about taking the information and knowledge that you have in your head and putting on the page in a way that somebody else can follow but the problem is that writing is linear so you have one page after another you have one paragraph after another we have one sentence after another but the knowledge that you have in your head isn't stored in that nice neat linear order it's more of a kind of tangled mess of in-turn interconnected ideas and insights one of the first things that you have to do is figure out a way to take that tangle up mess and put it on the page in some kind of structure that somebody else somebody else can follow so let's start with just the introduction so a lot of people say that you should write the introduction last but the introduction sets the context for everything else that you're going to that you're going to do and it also contains some useful principles that we can apply to other sections as well and here's the structure that works for almost any project regardless of the discipline first you describe a situation of some kind or an event next you describe a problem or a question that arises from that situation and then you can describe how others have approached that problem or question you explain the need to approach it in a slightly different way or expand upon what has already been done and then you say what you're going to do this works for as I said for almost any projects and I'll give an example so let's say we have a situation where worldwide the number of PhD students is increasing okay but there is also evidence of disproportionate levels of stress among PhD students so we have a situation and then a problem that arises and rises from it then we have some kind of response to that how other people are approaching it so while there have been a limited number of studies to date which have highlighted the scale of the problem and individual institutions have made efforts to provide better supports there's been little research into the effectiveness of different interventions this research will do this so you can adapt this to almost anything so once you have this basic structure you can then add details to it so once you've got an idea of the flow so we can expand upon some of these points so instead of saying you know the number of PhD students is increasing you can say over the last ten years there's been a huge increase in the number of students enrolling in doctoral degree program worldwide you can back it up with some kind of statistics so recent UN statistics estimate that and then you can even say why this is happening why governments and trying to trying to increase the number of students so you can say while the increase in the numbers of doctoral students is seen globally it's even more marked and inner developing nations such as this is in part due to the concert to a concerted efforts at government level to do something and then going further although increasing engagement in doctoral research has a number of benefits recent evidence has shown evidence of disproportionate levels of stress among PhD students so we have the same basic structure but we're adding detail we're hanging detail off that structure even though we're adding extra information we don't need to change the underlying narrative and what this does is it makes it so much easier to edit your writing than if you have no structure at all so if you were to just sit down and write whatever comes to mind which some people advise then you have no links so everything's just this tangled mess so how do you know way where you can move something because if you take one piece and move it somewhere else what are you moving it relative to you're moving it relative to all this tangled up mess so it still doesn't work but if you have a basic structure in place it's like a scaffold that you can hang ideas on and if you have a solid structure solid scaffold then you can take bits off and you can move them around and the rest of this structure doesn't fall apart okay so we can generalize this okay so it's no good just giving you a format for the introduction we need to generalize this and look at the underlying principle so what we have is a cause or a stimulus to start with so worldwide the number of PhD students is increasing so it's a situation okay from that situation you get a problem or a question that arises from it and then you have certain effects so you have people responding to it either in the real world with some kind of response or an academic response investigating what's happening and then you end up with partial answer and other consequences which in turn leads to more problems or questions and so you always want to be aware of whatever information you're presenting how it fits into this kind of structure is it a new situation or a new event that you arrive at is it a problem or a question that a right arises from that or is it some other some other kind of effect okay and we can apply this to any section of the thesis okay now if we take this further and so expanding upon the introduction once you've set out the basic aim of what the thesis will do and what it's responding to you might want to give some extra background information and what a lot of people do is in this new section they will say they will repeat the aim of the thesis so they will say this thesis aims to the previous section introduced some of the background and why this research is interesting this section will present a detailed description of Theory X Theory X is defined by Simpson and the reader at this point is basically going to sleep okay so if you try something like this instead and describe a situation so we've set up the context we've set up what the research is trying to do and then we set up a new situation so until the late 1960s it was widely believed that so you have some situation that existed and then it was only with the discovery in 1967 of something by somebody that so we have some kind of change some kind of response some kind of new information and then this led to so we have an effect the development of an entirely new theory of X based on the idea that whatever whatever it happens to be so the theory instead of just defining it instead of saying a theory X is defined by this person as this we have a reason why that theory exists okay we have we have the theory as a response to this this discovery in 1967 or it could be a response to a problem with a pre-existing pre-existing theory so everything is placed in context everything is placed within a kind of narrative narrative structure so moving on to literature reviews because that's one of the areas that people struggle with the most there are three key things that you need to know first of all you do not need to show how much you have read so a lot of people when they come to writing a literature review they see it as kind of being like an undergraduate an exam where you have a syllabus you have this massive information and your job in the exam is to reproduce as much of that information as possible if you miss anything you lose marks in a literature review that doesn't work because you might have 10,000 or 20,000 papers on a particular particular subject so it's inevitable that you'll miss miss things so your job is not to worry about trying to show how much you've read but rather to put together an interesting narrative selecting the best and most relevant sources to support that narrative okay so it's an important change in in basic mindset in terms of the way that you do you approach it then in terms of how you frame the information that you do select the easiest way to do it is to think of every single paper as a response to something to either a problem or a question or a situation or a previous paper and then you can set these within the context of a general situation of something that's happening within within the literature so instead of starting by just trying to summarize papers we can start by describing a situation that's happening within the literature within your academic field so you can say something like research into insert subject here has gained pace in recent years so it's a situation that's occurring especially since the development of new techniques allowing something one of the main aims of this research has been to so we're describing what's happening and then you say this chapter will outline the most recent developments key discoveries in current state of the art so we're setting the kind of the scope of what you're what you're doing another example so following the discovery of something there has been some kind of activity so following the discovery of this kind of phenomenon this kind the effect this kind of technique there has been something or you can say this has led to a great deal of debate in the field so again we're describing things that have happened so it's all about setting up this setting up this context ok another a quick example so while it's been some interest in something in academic literature since the early 20th century a concerted research effort only began in earnest in the last decade in our time however there have been remarkable breakthroughs in both our theoretical understanding and practical applications so again we're just describing something's happening the field some kind of some kind of situation or you can divide the literature and you can make an observation of how the literature is divided so these if it's can be divided into two broad categories then you can have that as a starting point then when you're describing individual papers they fit into this context and they're all responding to some problem which is in which is just a part of this broader context that we're talking about so a good example would be how do we define or measure X ok what happens is you start with this problem or question and then one author proposes a solution so you can say the first the first major attempt to study this or solve this was conducted by Smith who developed this technique and then that initial paper it has some kind of effect maybe the I the idea gains influence in the field or maybe it sparks a debate or maybe maybe it's widely adopted until something else better comes along so then you have the problem or the question you have a response to it and then the literature that follows on from it responds to that in some in some way ok so might be that that original technique is really good in some circumstances but then it has some drawbacks so then somebody else develops develops something else so we create a narrative around these around these around these sources ok so it's all about putting it into a structure rather than just focusing on the individual individual papers themselves okay this is just another example of variation on the same on the same thing if you can't identify one initial source that everyone else responds to you could divide it into different approaches so there are three main ways this is approached the first and perhaps most widely used was proposed by this person and then you you have kind of a partial solution which then other people kind of refine and respond to an approach approach in different in different ways okay so again just want to reiterate you do not have to show how much you've read if your narrative makes sense and it accurately reflects the trends and key events in the literature or in your field it will be obvious that you've read a lot so if you go in and your main aim is I want to show the examiner how much I've read that's not interesting for the examiner but if you put together a good structure and you select the best sources the examiner will automatically be aware that you've read a lot and you understand understand where you're what you're doing another part of this as you're selecting what to include as part of your narrative is to focus on your strengths not what you think the examiner wants to see so as a PhD students you will always be aware more than anybody else of your own limitations and that creates this natural worry about what if I get found out in this particular thing what if the examiner wants to see you know this detailed explanation of this kind of theory which I don't really know about so then because of that fear a lot of people focus on trying to fill that gap in their writing so then what you're doing is you're putting most of your efforts and putting lots of extra words into an area that you don't really know about so then if the examiner knows more about that subject and you're a little bit weak then you're attracting criticism you're attracting difficult questions so one way of thinking about the writing in this sense is you're selecting your own syllabus you're deciding your own syllabus you're choosing the ground that you're going to defend so it makes sense to set you ground set the area that you're going to defend and your strongest your strongest areas so if you write the things that you know the most about you're bringing the examiner onto your strong ground instead of going onto onto that okay so it may be that you know who your examiner is going to be anything I so I need to write all about what they what they know they're not interested in that they want to know what you're strong in and you bring them onto your ground and you can show them something that maybe they don't know so this same idea of structuring information in terms of problems or questions or responses to situations or events it also applies to writing about your methods so you can think of every experimental or research method that you use as a response to a problem so having set the aims of your thesis you then have new problems to solve in order to answer your research questions so you might need a way of measuring a particular particular variable so that's a problem or a need that needs to be solved so in order to solve a we need a way of doing B and then you have various different options you might have various practical constraints and then that becomes the starting point for then describing describing what you do so I'm not going to spend more time on this but we can come back to it indeed and the QA but really the key point is just that this idea of structure applies to everything and once you get that idea everything else becomes much much easier okay so once you have some idea of how to structure your ideas and put together these kinds of narratives how do you actually put it together what's the process so I always advise starting with the introduction this is a little bit controversial some people say that you should write the introduction last because it's only then that you know exactly what you're going to what you're going to do but then if you write the introduction last where you actually start so I think if you start with the introduction you don't need to think about where you're going to start so you have this specific problem how am I going to introduce the reader to this particular this particular topic okay and as we've seen if you know how to structure your ideas if you know how to structure an introduction it's not that difficult not that difficult to do so if you focus on the starts your challenge is to get the reader get the reader interested and it's a matter of staying with that problem until you find an appropriate solution you find the situation or the context that you want to that you want to set up and then the challenge is how to then move this forward so if you start on page one with the introduction and then you'd work in sequence you work in the same sequence that the reader is going to read then you always know where your focus needs to be so you have this unbroken chain from the very beginning up to whatever you're writing now and that's where your focus needs to be and if you jump around if you hit some kind of block here at this point it's very very tempting to just leave it and start writing about something else and if you're focused on increasing the word count if your focus is on productivity that's kind of the natural thing to do it's the obvious thing to do but what then happens is you start writing about something else you maybe get a little bit more momentum but then you hit some other kind of block and then what do you do you start writing about something else so all of those problems that stopped you in your tracks suddenly you end up in a situation where you've run out of easy things to say and all you're left with is all the difficult stuff that you left for later when you're under the most time pressure and what's happened is because that's become your default response you haven't developed the skill of solving those problems that have arisen so it's absolutely crucial to spend time with those problems as they arise so the challenge if you're at this point is how to link this idea that you've written to the next idea and the next one and the next one it's all about narrowing your focus onto one problem at a time considering your options and then making a decision and this forces you to deal with the problems that arise but it's just one problem at a time so instead of jumping around you've got all your attention on one on one problem and it becomes it becomes solvable so when you're in this kind of situation you have a number of options so what you can do is if you have this unbroken chain and then you have this idea that you want to put on the end of the chain sometimes it's a matter of just finding the right words it might be a difficult idea that you just have to play around with words until you find the right way of expressing it but sometimes that doesn't work and what you have to do is consider is this idea even going in the right place does it belong to it does it fit into this context into this narrative that I'm trying to set up so then what you can do is hold that idea back say okay I'm not going to put this here and maybe try some other idea in its place and often what you find is when you put something else in there then it helps you to make that make that step forward okay so just just deciding not to include something at this point can be a solution to that block but it's only possible if you slow down to think about it other times what might happen is you realize that this idea it's actually more fundamental it's something that you need to say earlier in the process so sometimes you need to go back and find a place to insert that particular idea in order to in order to keep things keep things moving okay sometimes it's a case of deleting the last thing you said because that's where the block comes from because it's kind of it kind of it did it okay so you have these various various different options now sometimes you might hit a block where you just can't you know find your way forward and you need to step away from it but that should never be your first option okay you can always need to spend a little bit of time give yourself the space so you try to solve it so the way I think of this process is a bit like digging a tunnel through Mountain so you can go back over a section and reinforce it or insert something but you can't jump forward you have to find a solution to the problem that you're facing that helps you helps you to make progress it's not always easy to do because it means that you're in that uncomfortable state where things aren't necessarily moving you have to slow down relax and give yourself time to solve that problem so when I talk about this people ask well what about perfectionism because this can be a real real issue I think that you need to think of perfectionism as being a scale so on the one hand you have total carelessness where you just write as fast as you possibly can you defer all thinking for later and you abandon all problems as soon as they arise and only focuses on getting words down as quickly as possible the natural consequence of this is that you give zero attention to detail zero thoughts to the clarity of communication and the writing is guaranteed to be rubbish so you can end up in a situation where you've got tens of thousands of words but none of it's actually finished none of it's actually really any any use the other end of the scale you have total perfectionism where you have this kind of excessive revision or hesitation and you feel like nothing you write is ever good enough you have this fear of judgment fear of what the examiner will say and so nothing ever gets nothing ever gets completed nothing ever gets submitted so the two extremes are obviously pretty bad but it's not a question of total carelessness or total perfectionism the solution to total perfectionism is not to just write as fast as putt you possibly can but to adjust where you are on the scale so you can find kind of a sweet spot where you're giving a bit of care and attention to your writing but without overly worrying too much about the end result and as you're writing you can adjust where you are even within this within this range so if you find that you're going way too slowly that nothing's really happening that you're overly worried then you can go a little bit faster you can set yourself the target of saying okay in the next hour I'm going to write 150 words so it's not going as fast as you possibly can but it's taking the focus away from the perfectionism tap to this to this other goal at other times you can make yourself a little bit more perfectionist so if you have a point where you're saying for example the aim of this thesis is that's a point where it's really important to be accurate in what you're saying because that determines what the examiner is going to judge they judge you against the aims that you state so at that point is really important to slow down and take a little bit a little bit more care so you want to be operating somewhere here so it's sort of leaning toward perfectionism it's taking time and care but without being so worried about it that you never actually never actually do anything okay so most problems are solvable if you slow down and give them time focus and this is where you develop your skill so this model it's the flow model by Csikszentmihalyi it tells you how your level of skill in relation to the task affects your mental state so on the x-axis here we have skill level so high skill or low and then on the y-axis we have the level challenge so if you have a very high level of skill in relation to the challenge so it's kind of a medium level of challenge a high level of skill then you feel in control of the process so this will be where you have ideas that you know really well things that you've spoken about before things that you've written about before you know you feel kind of in control and process it goes much faster but if you have an area where maybe the difficulty is quite high but your skill level is low so this could be some some idea where you're not entirely familiar with it where you know you're not quite a hundred percent sure about what this what this particular thing thing means then you can feel anxiety and possibly the most important state is this one here where the difficulty level is high but you have a medium level of skill so you're almost good enough to solve the problem right so it's good but it's very very difficult to do so it requires your full attention now in this as csikszentmihalyi call that this arousal state this is where if you put all of your attention and focus on that problem and you work at it and work at it and work at it then you find a solution this is where you improve so this is where your skill level is pushed just beyond where it where it currently is but not to the extent that it's overwhelming right so it's possible with your full with your full attention this is where you improve so a lot of the time when you're writing you will be in this very uncomfortable state where it's just beyond what you can do easily but with your full attention you can actually solve the problem and then it speeds up again so part of the writing process is accepting that discomfort becoming okay with that discomfort and not kind of getting distracted not working on something else the same thing applies by the way in your research you know it's not just not just related to writing this could be related to any kind of research or analytical analytical skill as well so it's being able to slow down take time to think and give yourself time and opportunity to solve to solve that problem okay so we're going to get into the QA pretty quickly because there's a lot of people here and have covered a lot of ideas quite quite briefly sort of all kinds of things that you can ask that I've just touched upon or not mentioned and not mentioned at all but before we get to that just want to kind of kind of sum up a couple of key things so as I've mentioned if you slow down and you can develop the skill and we can we're working towards this this state we're having solved the problems that have arisen you then recognize the kind of problems that are next time you get faster and you have this range of solutions that you can adapt and apply quickly this helps to build confidence which is really crucial to being able to write quickly and write well but skill is not the only factor if you want to be confident then you've got to consider the outcome and how that affects your mental state so if you want to be certain of the end result then you're never going to have confidence because it's not like the undergraduate exam where you knew what the syllabus was and you knew that basically the answers to the questions in advance so with a PhD you cannot be certain of the end result but what you can do is have confidence in your ability to cope with whatever happens so if you're terribly worried about what the examiner will think and that's taking up all of your attention that's going to affect your ability to actually do the work that's necessary to pass but if you accept that maybe it might not work out maybe the examiner won't like my work maybe there's something I've missed but I'm going to accept that if that happens however bad it is I will cope with it if I fail my PhD vie ver then you know I'll have all these problems I'll have to deal with I have to find a job you know I'll have to you know explain to my family all of these kind of things but I can deal with it I'll find a job somehow you know I'll get through it's not gonna be the most important thing that happens in my life so if you take that attitude when you're writing I don't care what the examiner thinks it frees you up to just focus on the ideas instead of thinking about what they will think and that is where the confidence comes from accepting that things might not work out the way you want they're giving it your best shot anyway okay so we'll get into the Q&A my name's James Titan thank you very much [Applause] so any questions okay so first of all I'd say there is no perfect solution so if you can find an adequate solution that accurately reflects what you want to communicate then that's good enough so with when you're facing one of these problems in your in your writing you can think of it as kind of a problem of expression which has multiple valid solutions and what you're trying to do is put together something that helps you link to the next thing leads you in the direction that you want to go so often what happens with perfectionism is you're assessing your own writing which is a good thing but you don't know what's good enough or you haven't decided what's what's good enough and so you get kind of stuck in this stuck in this loop where you don't make a decision where you don't where you don't make forward we don't move forward too so when you look at it just say well you know does this accurately communicate the idea the idea that's it that's in my head one way to force yourself to do that as I said is to give yourself a timed word count target so you still want to communicate communicate clearly you still want to write well but it's balanced against this against this other target so if you say in the next hour I'm going to write 150 or 200 words then if you aim for that target then it stops you worrying quite so much about is this exactly the right word to use in this in this in this particular case so yeah it's altering where you are on that on that perfectionism scale I would never say some people advice just write as fast as you can I never advise that because you just end up with a mess you've increased the word count if you do want to just get words down for you to give yourself something to work with give it use pen and paper so do a mindmap dump everything down and you can still select ideas so yeah just go a little bit faster with that time - word count target try that out and it should it should help yeah so I think it's good to have a daily target so that you can have an objective measure of whether it was a successful day or not okay so when I was writing my own thesis I had a target of 500 words a day as a minimum and I knew that you know if it was going well that wouldn't take me very long at all you know it might take me a couple of hours to write 500 you know reasonably reasonably okay words so I set myself a target that I knew I could beat every single day so some days I would write 2,000 words you know a fantastic day so wow I've smashed my target other days I might really struggle to reach that 500 so those days when I'm writing about you know some aspects which I maybe don't know so well but I work through until I reach that 500 500 target and then if it's really difficult you can break it down into smaller targets so before lunch I'm gonna get hundred words and then you know so you've got this success to build upon if you set the target as something that you can barely achieve then most of the time you're not reaching that and so you just feel bad it might have been a really good day you might have written you know 900 words first I didn't meet my target so you're gonna be that little bit less a little bit less motivated so some people write faster than others so if you're a native speaker then probably it's going to be a little bit faster if you have a bit more writing skill if you've practiced it more if you've just got whatever natural talent you may be a little bit faster so set a target that's appropriate appropriate for you and you can work that out over over a couple of days if 500 is too much you low lower it's a 300 set a target that you can that you can smash so in terms of the depth that you go into no matter what subject no matter who it is you should vary the amount of depth that you give on each individual idea so you will have some areas where you're really really really strong and generally speaking those should be the areas where you say a little bit more but in order to get to those points maybe you need to mention some other areas which are not exactly your your main strengths so what you can do is mention them relatively briefly refer to other sources and then that frees you up to give more space to the things with which you're really interested in so one example of this from my own from my own thesis as I was very very much an experimentalist so my maths for a physicist was you know pretty embarrassingly bad but I was pretty good at the practical side but in order to talk about the practical side I needed some theory right the the basic problem that I was working on in order to explain it I needed a little bit of a little bit of theory so what I did was had basically one paragraph that said something like in 1928 this person came up with this theory for overcoming the diffraction limit you know etc etc but then brought it very quickly to the practical side so you had this theory in 1928 and then I think it was only in the 1950s that it was proven experimentally but it was only in but it was then in the 1980s with the discovery of scanning tunneling microscopy that this other thing became practical so I covered that ground so from 1928 to the early 80s more than 50 years in one paragraph and then just focused on the practical stuff okay so there's almost no depth to the theory at all it was just this is this is the equation this is the consequence and then straight into straight into the practical so very the amount of depth and the guiding principle is say more about the things that you know more about and do it that way sometimes you can give almost zero detail at all so another example that technique that I used it also had applications and say biology so all I did was say you know this technique has found applications in a number of different fields including biology and something else in something else and for each one I just had a quick reference and all I was doing is naming the fields where it's been applied no depth at all but it sort of indicates that it makes the point that this has a lot of applications and then bring it right back to to the area that I was actually actually interested in so don't lose time going into depth on areas that there you don't know don't know so much about so if you're writing a literature review for example you need to have a base level of knowledge of what is happening in the field before you write anything so what some people do is they take a stack of papers first paper and then they try to summarize it in one in one paragraph okay but then you don't know how that paper fits into the context of everything else which is happening in your field you don't know what role it's playing so it doesn't quite fit into a into a narrative and then it's very hard to edit that when once you have all those all those all of those paragraphs so you need to have the very minimum enough knowledge to say well there's this general trend in the literature and that could be there's a lot of debate about this subject or you know there's a million different applications of this particular technique or this is a long-standing problem in the field which has had all of these different all of these different approaches you also need to know what are the kind of key influential papers within that field okay so that the highly cited things that you can broadly divide the literature into two categories so you have the groundbreaking stuff that has a massive influence on the field so if somebody invents something or discover something new that then triggers a whole load of other research by other people okay so if you know who the groundbreaking people are you can then set that up as kind of like an event you know there was this discovery which then triggers other things so then all of those following papers they fit within the context of that initial discovery as a sort of consequence of that initial initial discovery so you need to have kind of a broad picture of more or less what has been happening within within the field okay which just comes from come from reading and a little bit of little bit of experience then what you can do is read specific papers to fill in some of the gaps as you're writing so if you're putting together this narrative so let's say you want to talk about the development of a particular technique so you kinda know who made the big discoveries you sort of know you know what the different variations of that technique are so then you can look at look at different papers for specific for specific details to fill in some of those some of those gaps so it's not quite as simple as saying right as you're reading or do all the reading and then write I'd say do a lot of reading and then as you're writing refer back to the literature multiple multiple times on this point I have seen some people say I saw one person say I only believe in ever reading an article once and that was just kind of blew my mind because it made no sense whatsoever and basically the idea being if you take good enough notes then you never need to look at it again but the thing is that different papers will be useful to you for different reasons at different times so if you read something in your first year and you might not be ready for it or the thing that they say maybe it isn't quite relevant to what you're working on at the moment but then two or even three years later maybe you remember oh yeah there was that paper that I read or you stumble across it again and then it becomes very very very relevant so you all constantly be kind of referring back to literature time and time and time again you know that just that just never and never ever ever stops but it all comes from there having this sort of contextual knowledge of what is happening in the in the field and sort of broad strokes thing and then the individual papers kind of serve as examples of a lot of things that are having okay so the mindmap it's kind of an I see it as sort of an intermediate step so you guys big tangled mess of ideas in your head and then you ultimately want to put it in this in this linear fashion so that's basically what I what I use you can do you can do it online I'd prefer to do it with with with pen and paper and then what you have is kind of a stock of ideas it may be that you have too much for one sheet of paper in which case you kind of try and focus in on one topic and then mindmap around that around that particular topic but then what you can have is sometimes an entire chapters worth of ideas on one page and it's very very quick to to look at that and review it and then pick out ideas or as you're writing refer to it and say oh yeah I need to I need to remember to put that particular thing in the next intermediate step that you can do has just create some some bullet points so from that mind map you can plan okay this is the basic problem that weird that we're addressing this was kind of the first major discovery this was the consequence of that particular that particular thing the other intermediate step is that the mind mapping might expose some gaps in your knowledge so you might think I think there was that paper by this person I can't remember who exactly it was or when it was I need to double-check that so so in addition to the bullet points for what you're actually going to put in sometimes it can help you to identify things that you need to look up or other other preparation work that you need to that you need to do as well so basically you're from mind map to bullet points figure out where the gaps are and then only then can you I would suggest starting starting so starting to write and again you can repeat that process multiple multiple times that's really quick and really really easy when you're at a relatively early stage of the PhD you don't necessarily know what literature is going to be most relevant to you at their very end so the the literature review that you put together will almost certainly change by the time you get to your final year or when you're when you're preparing to to submit so what you can do is take some of these difficulties that you have with the literature and turn them into useful observations about the state of the field so if lots of people are approaching this problem from all kinds of different different angles and maybe there are lots of contradictory theories or maybe in some areas there's a total lack of literature what you can do is instead of saying in this area there's like 10,000 papers and in this area there's none what do I do just make those into into statements that you put in your literature review so you can say this problem has been approached from a multitude of different different perspectives in different in different fields including a and B and C and D okay then you can say one of the most influential approaches or one of the most commonly used approaches is is this okay and then you so you can explain you know who the big thinkers are in that area but then maybe there's a problem with that approach okay so or it doesn't take account of some other aspects of behavior in your case so then you can introduce another strand of research which addresses that problem so again we're trying to frame the information as a response to a problem so we have one approach you know which is used by some people that's pretty good at some things but less good at this so in order to address that deficiency we can approach it in this in this other way so you can make these kind of these these these observations about the literature and then figure out how to put it into kind of structure where everything is a response to a particular problem or or in need and at the moment honestly I would say see it as just praxis this is not the final literature review that you're gonna that you're gonna do get an idea of the kinds of things that are happening get an idea if the key papers and then as you as you go about your research you will find some things which are absolutely gold dust you will find some papers that really influence the way you think and then later on you can work those in you can work those into into the final version of of the literature review as a more sort of general point when you look at the literature in addition to different pieces of literature being useful to you at different times some papers will be massively more useful to you than others so if you have like a stack of ten thousand papers maybe ten of them actually influence the way that you think and so you can sort of filter the literature according to its usefulness and relevance so on the one hand or at the top rather you have so that the aerated papers so these are things which had a massive influence on your field or a massive influence on you okay so there may be be sort of 10 or 12 possibly 20 of these which would you find throughout the course of your PhD then there will be some things which are sort of relevant they provide some useful background information it's good quality research so there'll be more of these but you'll say a little bit less about them in your literature review and then you have even more papers which are possibly relevant but you don't really see how they fit into the big picture they don't have a big influence on the field they don't directly influence your your research so these are kind of the C rated papers and then you have the D rated ones which are either poor quality or just irrelevance and they'll be thousands of these so it's recognizing as you're going through the literature of this one's really good and you want to spend more time with those papers and in terms of understanding them and also in the literature is literature review as well in terms of emphasizing those in your in your writing so so balancing the sort of reading and learning and basic stuff against getting and getting results okay so I think that obviously the reading is really important but you you need to know what has already been what has already been been done partly to provide context for your for your work but also because a lot of the practical problems that you struggle with they're already solved in in the literature so you can find find useful you know useful information but in order to fully understand the literature you can't just read you need practical experience as well so this happens a little bit more in the in the social sciences I think but a lot of people spend too much time reading and reading and reading and trying to get you know a complete theoretical understanding before doing any practical work and you have to be willing to just try doing some experiments and making mistakes and letting things go wrong so that you know you gain a lot of that a lot of that skill in order to get your get your results so you mentioned in terms of getting results to show your supervisor I think initially it's about getting the skill to get the results okay so don't put yourself under pressure to have a result immediately it's more about getting the getting the basic techniques down learning making mistakes and then you can you know you'll find you get you get more results later in my own case I'm in my in my own PhD I made exactly this this mistake I was constantly frustrated by the lack of results and when things went wrong which they did pretty much constantly I got kind of dispirited but because the equipment that we were that we were using it was breaking down all the time I could see kills my smiling at the fact he remembers it well because the equipment was breaking down all the time and I was constantly having to solve these problems what was happening was I was developing pretty good level of skill and understanding of how the equipment worked but I wasn't getting results and it was only in sort of towards actually at the end of the third year that things started coming together and once I had some results I had the skill to kind of exploit them quickly okay so focusing on getting the skill allowing yourself to make mistakes rather than having results to show initially their balance with reading you know that will change throughout that throughout the course of the PhD that we times when you're doing more practical stuff times when you're reading more but the reading never stops you don't want to be too much focused on one or the other so you don't wanna be doing all practical stuff and no reading you don't be doing all reading and no and no practical stuff so they're very it depending on on what you're trying to boy you're trying to do okay so writing in a second language this is extremely common because pretty much every PhD students with some exceptions pretty much everybody worldwide has to write in English because English is the language of academia okay so you know that what stage you at what year are you in almost second year so you have time so it's not a surprise to you that in two or three years you have to submit a thesis in English so what you can do is work on that basic skill so work on your work on your written English and the best thing to do is get a tutor right who can work through with you so see your common mistakes and and correct those if you leave it another year or two years it gets harder and harder and harder because you're under more time pressure you can't and you'll have other things other things to do so I would say start now start taking taking those English lessons you'll you know there are plenty of English tutors around find one who can who can help you specifically with writing and yeah it's just another skill that you can that you can that you can add you know it's coming up so you know you you know that it's a point of stress so yeah start working on it I think it's better to multiple times than to try to say everything about a paper you know the first time the first time you mention it so as I said different papers will be useful to you at different times and sometimes the same paper will be useful to you in different ways at different points throughout the throughout the thesis so maybe initially you can set it up if you're giving a bit of background about your field you can you can mention that paper and say you know one of the one of the most influential papers regarding the subjects is the paper by whoever and give a quick overview of what they what ate what they said and then later when you're perhaps presenting your results you can say this is similar to the results observed by you know that person you know whatever whatever it happens to be this yeah that's absolutely absolutely fine you can refer to the same once multiple times so the short answer is that writer's block doesn't exist and the reason why I say that is that there is no there is no single thing that is right as writer's block it's an effect that has multiple different causes okay so if you think of just solving writer's block in terms of I'm not producing enough words or no words at all then the obvious solution is just we'll write more words right but instead you have to look at the underlying cause why you're struggling to find those find those words so it could be simply that it's a difficult idea that you're trying to express so it's just a matter of taking the time to first of all fully understand the idea to make sure that you know what you want to say about it and how it fits into it into the context so that's one kind of problem which is basically you know just spend a little bit more time with it think about it don't take the pressure off in terms of in terms of writing and writing what writer's block could also come because you're tired right so if you've been writing all day and you're just to kind of end up at this point where you just can't think straight then the solution is not to carry on working or to slow down it's just to take them take a break it could also come because of fear so it could be that you're really worried about what your supervisor will say about a particular particular thing in which case it's just working on that all that confidence of saying well okay I don't know what my supervisor is gonna think but I'm gonna give it by giving my best shot anyway there were all kinds of different things so you've got to figure out what is it that's actually causing the writer's block and then address address that okay so figuring out what you're what you're what you're feeling it could be as it came up in a in a different question it could be perfectionism in which case setting that sort of timed word count target is it is a good thing to do it could be that you need to do some other preparation work so you need to complete your analysis or double-check your end they so look something up whatever you know whatever it happens to be so yeah don't think of it in terms of in terms of writer's block but think of writer's block as a symptom of some other underlying thing than if you can identify that then you can find you can find a solution there's two aspect to aspects of it one is organizing your time in turn in terms of what you decide to read at a particular time the other aspect is how you organize the the literature itself and the copies of the papers that you that you have in terms of organizing the copies of the papers that you have the way that I did it or the way that I eventually did it was I had this at this huge stack of paper on my on my desk that was completely disorganized I also had a bunch of stuff stored electronically and basically what I did was I took this stack of papers and I sorted them into folders by subtopic so I had ring binders and ever so everything on hydrogen termination of silicon surfaces for example was in one folder so I could then just reach out and grab it and I had everything on that topic in one place there were some papers which spanned multiple topics so I just had more than one copy or I had a note in there saying see also this one in this in this folder if you have physical copies then what you can do is you can highlight important papers by just drawing a star on the front so as you scan through you know it's really easy to find and also any notes or anything that you want to highlight you keep it in context with all of the information so instead of taking separate notes like in any in an Excel spreadsheet or something where you're extracting the information from its context instead you keep everything and you just highlight the highlight the important parts that you want to want to remember okay so if you organize it into physical folders you can do the same thing digitally I think physical is better so if you have that if you have that option in terms of organizing your time in terms of around reading it depends what you're trying to do at any given at any given point so if you're embarking on some new kind of sub projects or some new branch of research then a lot of it will be focused around getting getting to grips with basic principles or basic basic techniques then you have to identify the papers that will help you to do that the difficulty is that most papers are not written to teach they're written with the assumption that you you're already kind of expert so sometimes what you have to do is you find a paper you identify the kinds of ideas that that paper or lots of papers are talking about and then you go somewhere else for an explanation sometimes going to Wikipedia is really good Wikipedia is fantastic for academic subjects because the only people who all writes 10,000 words on some obscure statistical technique are the nerdy academics who are obsessed with that particular topic so sometimes Wikipedia is way better than any any individual paper sometimes or you have to look at a textbook or just ask somebody other times you'll be looking for specific results so you know you're looking at papers for those kind of for those kind of things to compare your results to or just to see what's been done sometimes you're just trying to get an overview of the kinds of kinds of things that are that are happening in which case focusing on on pre-existing literature reviews is the best the best way to do it but it really depends on what you're trying to do at any at any particular time and whenever you're looking at the literature having that idea in mind what are you looking for is is really really helpful otherwise you just get lost in this in this massive massive paper okay so I think that's about all we've got all we've got time for so if that's it for me thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: James Hayton PhD

Views: 73,397

Rating: 4.9489145 out of 5

Keywords: PhD, thesis, writing, Academic writing, dissertation, writer's block

Id: pM6orL-bGDc

Length: 68min 9sec (4089 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020