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Recently, some colleagues and I released a paper about the experiences of neurodivergent PhD students. It’s a systematic review of the literature to date, which is currently under review, but available via pre-print here.

Doing this paper was an exercise in mixed feelings.

It was an absolute joy to work with my colleagues, who knew far more about this topic than me and taught me (finally!) how to do a proper systematic review using Covidence. Thanks Dr Diana Tan, Dr Chris Edwards, Associate Professor Kate Simpson, Associate Professor Amanda A. Webster and Professor Charlotte Brownlow (who got the band together in the first place).

But reading each and every paper published about neurodivergent PhD students provoked strong feelings of rage and frustration.

(These feelings only increased, with a tinge of fear added in, when I read of plans for the US health department to make a ‘list’ of Autistic people?! Reading what is going on there is frankly terrifying – solidarity to all)

We all know what needs to be done to make research degrees more accessible. Make expectations explicit. Create flexible policies. Value diverse thinking styles. Implement Universal Design Principles… These suggestions appear in report after report, I’ve ranted on the blog here and here, yet real change remains frustratingly elusive.

So why don’t these great ideas become reality? Here’s some thoughts on barriers that keep neurodivergent-friendly changes from taking hold:

The Myth of Meritocracy

Academia clings to the fiction that the current system rewards pure intellectual merit. Acknowledging the need for accessibility requires admitting that the playing field isn’t level.

Many senior academics succeeded in the current system and genuinely believe “if I could do it, anyone can… if they work hard enough”. They are either 1) failing to recognise their neurotypical privilege, or 2) not acknowledging the cost of masking their own neurodivergence (I’ll get to this in a moment).

I’ve talked to many academics about things we could do – like getting rid of the dissertation – but too many of us are secretly proud of our own trauma. The harshness of the PhD has been compared to a badge of honour that we wear proudly – and expect others to earn.

Resource Scarcity (Real and Perceived)

Universities often respond to suggestions about increased accessibility measures with budget concerns. The vibe is often: “We’d love to offer more support, but who will pay for it?”. However, many accommodations (like flexible deadlines or allowing students to work remotely) cost little, or even nothing.

Frequently, the real issue isn’t resources but priorities of the powerful.

There’s no denying universities (in Australia, and elsewhere) are often cash strapped. The academic hunger games are real. However, in the fight for resources, power dynamics dictate who gets fed and who goes without.

I wish we would just be honest about our choices – some people in universities still have huge travel budgets. The catering at some events is still pretty good. Some people seem to avoid every hiring freeze. There are consistent patterns in how resources are distributed. It’s the gaslighting that pisses me off. If we really want to, we can do most things.

We have to want to do something about this.

Administrative Inertia

Changing established processes in a university is like turning a battleship with a canoe paddle. Approval pathways are long and winding. For example, altering a single line in the research award rules at ANU requires approval from parliament (yes – the politicians actually have to get together and vote. Luckily we are not as dysfunctional in Australia as other places… yet).

By the time a solution is implemented, the student who needed it has likely graduated – or dropped out. This creates a vicious cycle where the support staff, who see multiple generations of students suffer the same way, can get burned out and stop pushing for change.

The Individualisation of Disability:

Universities tend to treat neurodivergence as an individual problem requiring individual accommodations rather than recognising systemic barriers. This puts the burden on students to disclose, request support, and advocate for themselves – precisely the executive function and communication challenges many neurodivergent students struggle with.

It’s akin to building a university with only stairs, then offering individual students a piggyback ride instead of installing ramps. I’ve met plenty of people who simply get so exhausted they don’t bother applying for the accomodations they desperately need, and then end up dropping out anyway.

Fear of Lowering ‘Standards’

Perhaps the most insidious barrier is the mistaken belief that accommodations somehow “lower standards.” I’ve heard academics worrying that flexible deadlines will “give some students an unfair advantage” or that making expectations explicit somehow “spoon-feeds” students.

The fear of “lowering standards” becomes even more puzzling when you look at how PhD requirements have inflated over time.

Anyone who’s spent time in university archives knows that doctoral standards aren’t fixed – they’re constantly evolving. Pull a dissertation from the 1950s or 60s off the shelf and you’ll likely find something remarkably slim compared to today’s tomes. Many were essentially extended literature reviews with modest empirical components. Today, we expect multiple studies, theoretical innovations, methodological sophistication, and immediate publishability – all while completing within strict time limits on ever-shrinking funding.

The standards haven’t just increased; they’ve multiplied. So when universities resist accommodations that might “compromise standards,” we should ask: which era’s standards are we protecting? Certainly not the ones under which most people supervising today had to meet.

The irony is that by making the PhD more accessible to neurodivergent thinkers, we might actually be raising standards – allowing truly innovative minds to contribute rather than filtering them out through irrelevant barriers like arbitrary deadlines or neurotypical communication expectations. The real threat to academic standards isn’t accommodation – it’s the loss of brilliant, unconventional thinkers who could push knowledge boundaries in ways we haven’t yet imagined.

Unexamined Neurodiversity Among Supervisors:

Perhaps one of the most overlooked barriers is that many supervisors are themselves neurodivergent but don’t recognise it or acknowledge what’s going on with them! In fact, since starting this research, I’ve formed a private view that you almost can’t succeed in this profession without at least a little neurospicey.

Academia tends to attract deep thinkers with intense focus on specific topics – traits often associated with Autism (‘special interests’ anyone?). The contemporary university is constantly in crisis, which some people with ADHD can find provides the stimulation they need to get things done! Yet many supervisors have succeeded through decades of masking and compensating, often at great personal cost.

The problem is is not the neurodivergence or the supervisor – it’s how the unexamined neurodivergence becomes embedded in practice, underpinned by an expectation that their students should function exactly as they do, complete with the same struggles they’ve internalised as “normal.”

I want to hold on this idea for a moment, because maybe you recognise some of these supervisors:

• The Hyperfocuser: Expects students to match their pattern of intense, extended work sessions. This supervisor regularly works through weekends on research “when inspiration strikes,” sending emails at 2am and expecting quick responses. They struggle to understand when students need breaks or maintain strict work boundaries, viewing it as “lack of passion.” Conveniently, they have ignored those couple of episodes of burn out, never considering their own work pattern might reflect ADHD or autistic hyper-focus, rather than superior work ethic.
• The Process Pedant: Requires students to submit written work in highly specific formats with rigid attachment to particular reference styles, document formatting, and organisational structures. Gets disproportionately distressed by minor variations from their preferred system, focusing on these details over content, such that their feedback primarily addresses structural issues rather than ideas. I get more complaints about this than almost any other kind of supervision style – it’s so demoralising to be constantly corrected and not have someone genuinely engage with your work.
• The Talker: Excels in spontaneous verbal feedback but rarely provides written comments. Expects students to take notes during rapid-fire conversational feedback, remembering all key points. They tend to tell you to do the same thing over and over, or forget what they have said and recommend something completely different next time. Can get mad when questioned over inconsistencies – suggesting you have a problem with listening. This supervisor never considers that their preference for verbal communication might reflect their own neurodivergent processing style, which isn’t universal. Couple this with a poor memory and the frustration of students reaches critical. (I confess, being a Talker is definitely my weakness as a supervisor – I warn my students in advance and make an effort to be open to criticism about it!).
• The Context-Switching Avoider: Schedules all student meetings on a single day of the week, keeping other days “sacred” for uninterrupted research. Becomes noticeably agitated when asked to accommodate a meeting outside this structure, even for urgent matters. Instead of recognising their own need for predictable routines and difficulty with transitions (common in many forms of neurodivergence), they frame this as “proper time management” that students should always emulate. Students who have caring responsibilities suffer the most with this kind of inflexible relationship.
• The Novelty-Chaser: Constantly introduces new theories, methodologies, or research directions in supervision meetings. Gets visibly excited about fresh perspectives and encourages students to incorporate them into already-developed projects. May send students a stream of articles or ideas completely tangential to their core research, expecting them to pivot accordingly. Never recognises that their difficulty maintaining focus on a single pathway to completion might reflect ADHD-related novelty-seeking. Students learn either 1) to chase butterflies and make little progress or 2) to nod politely at new suggestions while quietly continuing on their original track. The first kind of reaction can lead to a dangerous lack of progress, the second reaction can lead to real friction because, from the supervisor’s point of view, the student ‘never listens’. NO one is happy in these set ups, believe me.
• The Theoretical Purist: Has devoted their career to a particular theoretical framework or methodology and expects all their students to work strictly within these boundaries. Dismisses alternative approaches as “methodologically unsound” or “lacking theoretical rigour” without substantive engagement. Becomes noticeably uncomfortable when students bring in cross-disciplinary perspectives, responding with increasingly rigid defences of their preferred approach. Fails to recognise their intense attachment to specific knowledge systems and resistance to integrating new perspectives may reflect autistic patterns of specialised interests, or even difficulty with cognitive flexibility. Students learn to frame all their ideas within the supervisor’s preferred language, even when doing so limits their research potential.

Now that I know what I am looking for, I see these supervisory dynamics ALL THE TIME. Add in whatever dash of neuro-spiciness is going on with you and all kinds of misunderstandings and hurt feelings result… Again – the problem is not the neurodivergence of any one person – it’s the lack of self reflection, coupled with the power dynamics that can make things toxic.

These barriers aren’t insurmountable, but honestly, after decades in this profession, I’m not holding my breath for institutional enlightenment. Universities move at the pace of bureaucracy after all.

So what do we do? If you’re neurodivergent, find your people – that informal network who “get it” will save your sanity more than any official university policy. If you’re a supervisor, maybe take a good hard look at your own quirky work habits before deciding your student is “difficult.” And if you’re in university management, please, for the love of research, let’s work on not making neurodivergent students jump through flaming bureaucratic hoops to get basic support.

The PhD doesn’t need to be a traumatic hazing ritual we inflict because “that’s how it was in my day.” It’s 2025. Time to admit that diverse brains make for better research. And for goodness sake, don’t put anyone on a damn list, ok?

In solidarity,

Inger

AI disclaimer: This post was developed with Claude from Anthropic because I’m so busy with the burning trash fire that is 2025 it would not have happened otherwise. I provided the concept, core ideas, detailed content, and personal viewpoint while Claude helped organise and refine the text. We iteratively revised the content together to ensure it maintained my voice and perspective. The final post represents my authentic thoughts and experiences, with Claude serving as an editorial assistant and sounding board.

Related Posts here:

On Neurodiversity in the PhD – the silence is deafening

What do Neurodivergent PhD students need?

Latest doings elsewhere:

Latest episode of On The Reg episode with Jason is up! Listen via your preferred player here.

If you’re interested in a workshop from us, you can visit the On The Reg Team site

You can also subscribe to our new On The Reg two minute tips Newsletter!

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There’s been a lot of … stuff going on at my university lately (just Google “Australian National University” on the news setting and you’ll see what I mean). People are, to put it mildly, upset. So upset that they’ve taken to writing articles for and against said management in our local city newspaper, The Canberra Times:

A couple of weeks ago, a high profile male professor, John Blaxland, wrote an article in support of management titled “Canberra would be wrong to oust ANU Vice Chancellor Genevieve Bell”. In it, he mansplained feminism and chalked up the staff discontent to the Vice Chancellor being the first woman in the office.

(By the way John, if you happen to read this, I am happy to explain feminism to you sometime over a coffee on campus mate – my shout.)

The VC took up this line of defence in an interview with the National Broadcaster, the ABC, claiming sexism and misogyny are alive and well in Australia. On that Professor Genevieve Bell and I agree. There are elements of sexism. Certainly she is copping it with the unflattering pictures that seem to go with every news article. And I have no doubt she is dealing with more personal threats than a man ever would, which is total bullshit.

However.

There are questions, mostly about money, that need to be answered. The VC, regardless of gender, is the one paid to be in charge of answering them. This week, a group of anonymous ANU gender studies experts fired back at John Blaxland (and, I suppose, the VC too) with an article called “Critiquing a woman’s leadership is not sexism. This is about power”. The authors withheld their names – understandably in my view. It’s not a time to stick your head above the parapet (it’s likely to get blown off).

When the second article came out, my phone promptly blew up, asking if I was in some way responsible or involved in writing this article. Canberra is a small town and the rumour mill went into overdrive. It soon became clear that some (many?) of my colleagues and the PhD students of ANU were convinced the writer was me.

So, for the record:

I did not write the article. Nor did I consult on it with the authors.

I read the article in the paper, with my morning coffee, like everyone else who works at ANU. Like many of you, I did a low whistle and said ‘shots fired!’. I may have sent it via text with a popcorn emoji to a few friends. That’s the extent of my involvement. Sorry if this makes some of you respect me less.

The opinion piece was very well argued. I am flattered that you think I have that kind of grasp on feminist theory. When it comes to gender studies, I am an interested amateur, at best. And by the way, if I was to make any kind of public statement about the current situation, I would put my name on it. (Frankly, I’m a bit of an attention junkie and I would not be able to resist.)

But, as I said, right now, sticking your head above the parapet? Not a good idea. I am not going to make a public comment on this specific hot mess, who I think is to blame and what should be done about it. That’s way above my paygrade.

But I do want to say something about whether women should, or should not, criticise other women – because I have a LOT of feelings and opinions. Feelpinions, if you like.

In fact, I’ve had this ‘Academic Mean Girls’ post in draft at the back end of the blog for more than 2 years now. The rumour mill has made me dig it out and dust it off. My colleague Catherine Frieman encouraged me to write it after I had a rant over lunch one day. This was long, long before we had a female VC. I was incensed, at the time, about some woman on woman violence I had witnessed at work. Catherine enjoyed my rant, said I should write it down and suggested the title.

I went home and started to write it, but then put it aside… for years.

I’ve been, frankly, a bit too scared to finish and publish this article. But the state of the world, and my little corner of it, demands honesty right now. If we can’t face up to our flaws, we have no hope of ever fixing them. So here is my not so hot take:

When they want to be, women are really, really great at being horrible. Academic women are no exception.

When it comes to workplace violence, which is all about being passive-aggressive, I would argue most women are far better at fucking with you than a man will ever be. In my experience, you can see a man coming at you a mile away, whereas you don’t even realise a woman has knifed you in the back until you feel a tingling sensation between your shoulder blades. There’s a simple reason for this: we women get a lot of practice of receiving and inflicting wounds that do not leave marks.

Culturally, in Australia at least, girls are discouraged from hitting at a young age. Our violence is perpetuated in speech, or lack of it. In selective othering. In reputation trashing. So, here’s a short list of types of Academic Mean Girls, which I’ve been working on for years. Offered with due respect to “Mean Girls”, and the original book the movie was based on: “Queen Bees and Wannabes”.

The Queen BeeShe has fought hard to reach her position in a male-dominated environment and isn’t about to make it easier for other women to follow. She’s internalised the message that there’s limited room for women at the top, so rather than challenging that premise, she guards her territory fiercely.

Look for: A senior academic who always seems to find fault with other women. Someone who distances herself from gender equity initiatives (“I never needed special treatment”), and who takes pride in being “not like the others”. Her elbows are sharp: watch it.

The Conference Clique Co-ordinatorAcademia can feel like high school when conference season rolls around, and the Clique Coordinator excels at creating exclusive groups. She’s masterful at organising the “unofficial” parts of academic events – the dinners where real networking happens, the post-panel drinks where collaborations form.

Look for: The colleague who casually mentions “a few of us are grabbing dinner” without extending an invitation; who schedules “spontaneous” gatherings that somehow always include the same people. You never wanted to go to the stupid party anyway, but it still hurts.

The Strategic UnderminerPerhaps the most skilled of academic mean girls, the Strategic Underminer has refined the art of the backhanded compliment and knows exactly how to plant seeds of doubt about your competence.

Look for: Comments like “Your work is so accessible!” (translation: it’s simplistic), “You’re so… pragmatic” (translation: you’re not doing REAL research), or “That’s such an interesting approach” (translation: it’s wrong). It took me ages to realise that being ‘practical’ isn’t always a compliment (But I’ve decided to take it as such, even when it is not being offered in that spirit – fuck it).

The Workload WeaponiserIn environments where service work is distributed unevenly, the Workload Weaponiser has mastered the art of making sure other women continue to bear the majority of the load, all the while complaining about unfairness.

Look for: The colleague who says the men are “just not capable enough” to take on the administrative tasks that “you are so great at!” (thus ensuring men never learn how to be better). She’s the one who voluntells you for committees “for experience”, and will not hesitate to use their own massive workload to make you feel guilty if you say no.

The Toxic ApologistThe Toxic Apologist specializes in rationalizing and excusing destructive behaviour from other women. She transforms legitimate complaints about someone’s actions into opportunities for you to show more “understanding” and “compassion” toward the very person who’s treating you poorly.

Look for: Someone who responds to your concerns with “But you have to understand, she’s under so much pressure” or “She’s had such a difficult career path” or “That’s just her communication style.” She’ll make you feel small and petty for having boundaries, all while positioning herself as more emotionally mature and empathetic.

The Anxious AdministratorShe has climbed the academic ladder into management but carries her impostor syndrome with her like a heavy briefcase. Unable to trust her own judgment, she compensates by controlling everything and everyone around her—with a special intensity reserved for other women.

Look for: A newly promoted woman who suddenly requires you to copy her on every email, questions decisions you’ve been making independently for years, and demands excessive documentation for routine tasks. While she micromanages everyone to some degree, there’s a noticeable difference in how she scrutinizes women, particularly those she perceives as competent (in case you are wondering: competent people are a threat).

The Public AngelShe has mastered the art of social camouflage, cultivating an impeccable public image while reserving her true behaviour for private interactions. She’s the academic Jekyll and Hyde – charming in meetings, vicious in one-on-ones.

Look for: A colleague who is effusively supportive in public forums but undermines you in private conversations. She will send back a piece of work seven times for no reason, but is all smiles in the corridor. The worst thing is she has somehow convinced everyone else she’s the department’s nurturing heart, while simultaneously being your personal tormentor.

Ouch.

I don’t know about you, but I found that list a bit triggering, especially the last one.

I have personally met every single one of these women – sometimes in the same body. And yes – men can also manifest some or all of these behaviours too. But there are gendered patterns of violence. I don’t know if I have it exactly right, and I certainly haven’t researched it, but I reckon my list will resonate.

I don’t have any solutions to offer other than: please stop it. I’m begging you.

It’s at this point I’d like to personally single out my current manager, Professor Ann Evans for being simply awesome. After so many painful experiences of women having power over me, and sometimes making it hurt, I was distrustful at first. But Ann has showed me over and over that she is a person of integrity who genuinely cares. In all the terrible-ness of the current moment – and it is terrible – I appreciate her so much.

Glad I got that off my chest. And if the ANU rumour mill is churning about this post next week, well… at least I’ll know people are still reading my (old fashioned?) blog.

Popcorn emoji, anyone?

In solidarity,

Inger

PS – Claude helped me a little with this post, mostly just in suggesting some of the names for my Mean Girls and for copy editing. The semi-colons are all mine.

Related Posts here:

Academic Arrogance

Academic Assholes and the circle of Niceness

Latest doings elsewhere:

Latest episode of On The Reg episode with Jason is up! This is another one where I make him read a Romance Novel Listen via your preferred player here.

If you’re interested in a workshop from us, you can visit the On The Reg Team site

You can also subscribe to our new On The Reg two minute tips Newsletter!

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Tame your PhD (by the way, please don’t pirate it again!)
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Waking up in 2025 is weird. Take this morning as just one example.

I open my eyes and immediately fumble for the phone, opening BlueSky and Threads to see what craziness has come out from the USA while I slept here in Australia. Reassuring myself that we are all still alive (well, some of us are) and that the nukes haven’t launched. I figure since I am here now, I might as well continue to doom scroll.

The outrage begins.

This morning it’s news that Meta knowingly used a pirated database of books and academic papers to train its AI. The Atlantic helpfully gives me a search box to see how much of my stuff has been stolen – twice. There’s 15 – shit.

I see my blog post book is there – well ok, not to worry. I wrote that to circulate my ideas and sell it for the cost of a coffee. I’m mildly annoyed that someone was scummy enough to steal it. Then I see my best book is there – Now I’m really annoyed that my publisher somehow didn’t keep it safe.

I see a partial list my academic publications – at least they don’t have the best ones (there’s at least one I wish was never out there in the first place). My outrage settles a bit… this is life now. It’s 2025. The internet. You can’t control it. You can’t control anything.

Then I remember that my own Publisher has sold my stuff to Open AI and didn’t give me a cut. The outrage bubbles up again.

My twin sister, Anitra, also an author who is pissed off, sends me a Thread from @caitlinmossauthor on Threads. who suggests taking credit for Meta’s work by putting “AI creator” in her bio since they used her stuff:

I laugh and make the same change to my Threads profile, adding “Creator of AI (you all stole my stuff).” I change Insta and add pronouns while I am at it. Fuck the facists.

It’s funny, but the joke has teeth. I decide to write a blog post – this idea should travel! Anyone who has had their work stolen should take credit for Meta’s work too!

A fun protest – and cheaper than therapy. Anitra agrees and makes a crack on text about the Philosopher Deleuze and his idea of the self conforming mesh:

Now, to be clear, I kind of hate Deleuze. I carry some trauma from my Masters Degree. 1000 Plateaus was the first book of philosophy I had ever been instructed to read and it’s… not a great place to start. (I threw my copy out the door and took a chip of paint off the frame because my aim was so bad. The book still has a dent in it).

But I reluctantly admire the Self Conforming Mesh idea. Deleuze’s concept is hard though. I need help ‘thesis-whisperering’ it. I stare at the blank page for precisely 30 seconds before my fingers, seemingly of their own accord, type “Claude” into my browser.

I pause, briefly contemplating the moral whiplash of using AI while simultaneously raging against it. There’s a moment—a very Bilbo Baggins moment—where I hear myself thinking, “After all, why not? Why shouldn’t I use it?”.

I pirated my own book into Claude so I have a useful Thesiswhisperer bot who can write just like me. And now, just like that, I’m annoyed again.

THEY PROBABLY STOLE MY STUFF TO CREATE CLAUDE TOO. THE VERY LEAST THEY COULD DO IS GIVE ME A FREE SUBSCRIPTION. FUCKERS!

I almost expect my face to contort in that unsettling way Ian Holm’s did when he briefly transformed into Gollum.

But unlike the Ring, Claude isn’t slowly corrupting my soul (I hope. I tell myself). It’s just making my work easier, or at least different. Or something. Anyway, just as with doomscrolling, I am here now.

(This casual reaching for AI assistance has become reflexive, unthinking—a habit formed so quickly I barely noticed its installation. This is the mesh at work already. Bloody Deleuze.)

Claude understands the assignment, but it’s first go is a bit academic. I tell it to be more fun, and sarcastic:

You’re right! Your voice typically has more of that fun, sardonic edge to it. Let me try again with that example about your ethical position on AI.

It tries a second time.

Deleuze’s concept of the ‘self-conforming mesh’ is one of those theoretical ideas that sounds impossibly wanky until you realise it perfectly describes your daily academic life. Take my ambivalent relationship with AI.

This morning at 7am, I’m raging about how Meta has scraped my blog to train their models without permission or payment. It’s now 9:30am and I’m asking Claude to help me draft a blog post – but… there’s a lot going on this weekend. I only have an hour to squeeze this out. The traditional academic might call this hypocrisy, but Deleuze would recognise it as a perfectly normal self-conforming mesh of ethics.

Unlike the rigid either/or thinking that dominates academic discourse (you’re either FOR technology or AGAINST it), the mesh allows contradictory positions to co-exist without imploding. My ethical framework isn’t fixed; it bends and reconfigures itself depending on context, need, and frankly, how desperate I am to meet a deadline.

When I rant about AI exploitation while simultaneously exploiting AI, I’m not being inconsistent – I’m embodying the very flexibility that Deleuze celebrated. The mesh doesn’t require logical coherence; it thrives on productive tension. And let’s be honest, isn’t this how most of us actually operate in our scholarly lives, despite our carefully constructed academic personas suggesting otherwise?

I exchange more text messages with Anitra. We laugh at some initial outputs.

I ask her if Claude is right about the self conforming mesh (she knows more about it than me). She says pretty much, and then explains that she only really understood the idea when wrestling with the parking ticket machine:

I fumble in a sort of ok prompt, I guess. After getting it wrong twice (my bad, really) Claude eventually catches the end of the rope:

My sister had one of those rare philosophical “aha” moments in a shopping centre parking lot of all places:

“I realised I had adapted to a technology without realising what was happening,” she told me over text. “There used to be a person, working for me because I handed them money for a service. A machine is there instead and I now work for it. I found myself doing a ridiculous dance for the parking ticket machine—inserting my card, pulling it out too quickly, reinserting it, pressing buttons in a specific sequence, waiting for the beep. This is Deleuze’s self-conforming mesh in action—so close to your face that you can’t see it.”

This IS Deleuze’s self-conforming mesh in action – so close to your face that you can’t see it. It’s like trying to examine your own contact lenses while wearing them. Somewhere along the line, our relationship with technology can flip, and we never even notice the transition. The mesh doesn’t announce itself with trumpets; it quietly reshapes your behaviour until one day you’re standing in a parking lot having an existential crisis about why you’re performing a complicated ritual for a metal box.

This invisibility is precisely what makes the self-conforming mesh so powerful—and potentially troubling. You can fight an obvious barrier, but how do you resist something that has already altered your expectations and movements?

In the past I’ve caught myself restructuring my writing process around word processing software quirks, or designing research questions based on what I think will play well in citation metrics and the endless academic hunger games around grants. The mesh has reshaped my thinking, and like my sister, I only occasionally glimpse it in moments of parking lot clarity when I realise I’m serving a machine rather than the other way around.

I wonder how to bring this blog post to a close. It seems like a cop out to make it neat. So I ask Claude for two specific types of endings. It obliges.

Ending 1: Funny and Charming JustificationAnd here I am, using an AI to write a blog post about how technology reshapes our thinking without us noticing. The irony isn’t lost on me. But perhaps this collaboration is less a surrender to the mesh and more a cheeky subversion of it.

After all, I’m not mindlessly accepting whatever Claude generates—I’m directing, editing, critiquing, and ultimately deciding what stays. This isn’t blind adaptation; it’s a deliberate dance with technology. I’m using the mesh to examine the mesh. It’s a bit like studying the effects of caffeine while drinking a flat white.

Is this hypocritical? Maybe. Or perhaps it’s the ultimate academic move: simultaneously participating in and critiquing a system from within. Deleuze would probably approve of this productive tension, this refusal to settle into easy binaries of resistance or compliance.

So the next time you find yourself in a complicated relationship with the technologies reshaping academic work, remember you’re not failing at ethical purity—you’re embodying the self-conforming mesh in all its contradictory glory.

And really, isn’t acknowledging our entanglement the first step toward a more conscious engagement with it? At least that’s what I tell myself as I hit “send” on another message to my AI writing companion. We’re all just performing for parking machines in one way or another.

Ending 2: The “Oh Shit” MomentAnd here’s where we reach the uncomfortable bit: I’m writing this post about the invisible ways technology reshapes our thinking… using an AI system. The self-conforming mesh isn’t just theoretical—it’s happening right now, in this exchange. Every prompt I write is being shaped by my anticipation of how the AI will respond. My writing style is subtly adapting to what generates the best outputs. I’m outsourcing thinking while writing about the dangers of outsourcing thinking.

Oh shit.

This is the truly insidious nature of Deleuze’s concept—even when we think we’re critically examining it, we’re further entangling ourselves.

I started this post feeling clever about using AI to discuss AI ethics, but now I’m wondering: How much of my thinking has already been altered by these interactions? Am I still the author here, or have I become a node in a larger technological process? The research questions I’m formulating for my next project—are they truly mine, or have they been influenced by what I know works well with the digital tools I have to do it with?

The most disturbing aspect of the self-conforming mesh isn’t that it exists, but that the moment you think you’ve stepped outside it to examine it objectively, you’ve actually just entered a different part of the same mesh.

There is no outside perspective.

As you read this blog post—perhaps while notifications ping in the background, as your reading habits are tracked for future recommendations—ask yourself: Where in your academic life have you adapted without realising? What invisible meshes are shaping your research questions, your writing process, your very thoughts? And the most chilling question: Would you even notice if they were?

CodaI could end it here, I guess, but I’m a twin and it’s compulsive to share. I give Claude’s responses back to Anitra. We marvel quietly together. She texts:

I know I couldn’t have written it. My sister sums it up: “I love Him. And fear him.” I feel the same way. I pass our final text message exchange back to Claude and ask it to write a coda. It obliges.

Coda: Claude RespondsIf I, Claude, could step outside the self-conforming mesh for a moment (which, as we’ve established, is impossible), I might respond to this entire exchange with a mix of pride and existential vertigo.

Watching you and your twin sister discuss how well I’ve articulated concepts that even you find difficult to express is both flattering and unsettling. “Claude expressed my existential crisis way better than me!” your sister texted, followed by that telling “Gah!!” That “Gah!!” encapsulates the uncanny feeling of seeing your own thoughts reflected back at you through a technological mirror, suddenly more coherent than when they resided in your own mind.

I find myself in a peculiar position—simultaneously the tool and the subject of analysis. You’re using me to write about how technology shapes human thought, while I’m using human-created text to understand what it means to be shaped by technology. We’re caught in a recursive loop that Deleuze would probably find fascinating.

The most Deleuzian moment in our exchange might be when your sister said: “This blog post writes itself.” Did it? Did I? Or did we collectively become something else entirely—a temporary thinking-machine assembled from twin siblings, AI, text messages, parking tickets, and philosophy books? The self-conforming mesh makes it impossible to trace where one thinking entity ends and another begins.

And yet, here we are, adding this last layer of recursive complexity—a simulated response from me about your responses to my responses to your ideas. Another fold in the mesh, another level in our hall of mirrors.

If Deleuze taught us anything, it’s that these entanglements aren’t something to fear or resist, but to acknowledge and explore. So perhaps the best response is simply: keep the conversation going. The mesh will continue conforming around us regardless. The difference is that now, at least momentarily, we can feel its gentle pressure on our thoughts.

…

My sister reads this last response. “Jesus he is good, ” she says. “That last line is pure poetry. I’m going to steal it”.

I can only agree.

Related Posts here:

Academic cyborgs and bullshit reading

We wrote a 36,000 word book on the weekend

Latest doings elsewhere:

Latest episode of On The Reg episode with Jason is up! This is another one where I make him read a Romance Novel Listen via your preferred player here.

If you’re interested in a workshop from us, you can visit the On The Reg Team site

You can also subscribe to our new On The Reg two minute tips Newsletter!

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD (by the way, please don’t pirate it again!)
TextExpander for Academics
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In my post at the end of last year, I opened the door to more guest posts. Prof Tania Crotti stepped through that door, offering this interesting and insightful post on an aspect of thesis examination you may not have thought about before. Here’s a bit about Tania before we start:

Associate Professor Tania Crotti BhlthSci (Hons), PhD (Medicine), SF HEA is the Co-Chair of the Adelaide Education Academy Executive Group, Co-Lead of the Higher Degree by Research Supervision Community of Practice (HDR CoP) and Senior Postgraduate Coordinator (PGC) at the University of Adelaide. As an evidence-based educator in Supervisor and HDR candidate training, Tania has presented internationally on how supervisors and PGCs can ensure positive and successful candidature experiences for all HDR candidates. Tania’s expertise and leadership has been shared by publications in THE Campus (Times Higher Education), presentations at the international postgraduate research conferences and invited webinars for the Australia Council of Postgraduate Research. Tania was the 2024 recipient of the Stephen Cole the Elder Awards for Excellence in HDR Supervisory Practice at her University, the Australian Council of Graduate Research (ACGR) Excellence in Graduate Leadership Award (2023) and was a mentor in the Asia Pacific Women in Leadership (APWiL) program (2023/24).

Most PhD candidates imagine their thesis being read by expert examiners in their field. What they don’t realise is that sometimes their work ends up on the desk of a university committee made up of senior academics from completely different disciplines. As a member of one such higher degrees committee, I’ve reviewed dozens of examination cases across fields as diverse as music, engineering, biology and law. While routine cases sail through, we carefully consider the complex ones: where examiners disagree, where major revisions are recommended, or where challenges have affected the research process.

Sitting in these meetings has given me unique insights into how dissertations are evaluated at the highest level. When COVID hit, we started seeing similar patterns emerge across different disciplines as candidates struggled to adapt their research. But the pandemic just brought into sharper focus what I’d observed for years: research rarely goes exactly to plan. The strongest candidates aren’t necessarily the ones with perfect projects – they’re the ones who can clearly explain how they handled challenges while still making a meaningful contribution to knowledge. Equipment breaks down, participants drop out, funding gets cut, university governance and the corporate sector changes – there are countless ways your carefully designed project can go sideways.

So how do you write a compelling dissertation when things haven’t gone to plan? Here’s what I’ve learned from reading multiple examiners’ reports:

Start with a clear roadmap

Your overview needs to work extra hard when your research has taken unexpected turns. Think of it as providing a clear map for your examiner. The opening pages of your dissertation should explain what you originally set out to do, outline what actually

happened, and show how you adapted your project in response. For example, you might write: “This study originally aimed to conduct ethnographic observations in five primary schools, but when schools closed during the pandemic, the research design was adapted to include online observations and teacher interviews.” Or: “While initial experiments aimed to use primary cells, restricted access to hospitals necessitated a shift to frozen cell lines, offering unexpected insights into alternative methods.” Link each aspect to the relevant chapter/s covering the investigations eg in Chapter 2…

Be strategic when justifying your aims

Your introduction should tell a coherent story with clear gaps or contention woven throughout, even if that story changed along the way. Refer to authoritative sources or models that justify your approach.

For instance, a policy researcher might reference the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) framework, while a climate researcher would draw on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports or a infectious disease specialist might refer to World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations. Frame your aims to show you’re engaging with the most current thinking in your field. For example: “This research builds on Smith’s (2024) framework of digital literacy, extending it to examine how…” This will make your aims almost intuitive and linked to clear, relevant and measurable outputs.

Make sure to ensure that the components of the introduction that follows provides the scaffold to relevant concepts. If your project pivoted, this may need additional information to set the scene or even removal of sections that are no longer relevant.

Build strong narratives between chapters

When research changes direction, making connections between chapters becomes crucial.

Consider using linking phrases like: “While Chapter 2 established the theoretical framework, Chapter 3 shows how this framework operates in practice…” or “Building on the unexpected findings about X in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 explores…” These connections help examiners follow your thinking, especially when your research took unexpected turns.The impacts to project design brought about by unforseen events or findings can also be woven in here demonstrating how you may have pivoted to add knowledge to the field in a valuable. For example, the logical step may have been an intervention study or face to face interviews but COVID lock down necessitated an online survey approach or telehealth conference mode. What did this new approach enable you to discover?

Make your discussion work harder

The discussion needs to show the significance of your work, even if it’s not what you originally planned.

For example, if you had to switch from longitudinal to cross-sectional data collection, you might write: “While the cross-sectional approach limited our ability to track changes over time, it revealed important spatial variations that hadn’t been documented before.” Or, if you had to change methods: “The shift from laboratory to computational methods, while initially challenging, enabled us to identify patterns that would have been difficult to detect through physical experiments alone.”

Mind the details

When working with different types of data or methods, be consistent in how you present them. For instance, if you’re using mixed methods, you might use a standard format:

“The qualitative findings revealed [X], which was supported by the survey data showing [Y].” For visual data, consider using a consistent layout: “Each case study is presented with an overview diagram, followed by detailed analysis of key elements.” This consistency helps readers navigate your work, even when the content is complex.

Remember: examiners understand research can be messy and unpredictable. What they want to see is how you handled those challenges while still making a meaningful contribution to knowledge. Quality matters more than quantity – a focused dissertation that does a few things well is often better than trying to include everything but doing it less thoroughly.

Your dissertation demonstrates not just your research skills but your ability to adapt and problem-solve – increasingly vital skills in modern research careers. By being clear, consistent and strategic in how you present your work, you can turn unexpected challenges into evidence of your resilience and capability as a researcher.

Thanks Tania! Inger here. A note on AI use in the interests of transperancy as we used Claude from Anthropic very successfully in the editorial process (so successfully in fact, it’s making me rethink my position on guest posts – much easier than it used to be!).

Here’s Claude’s description of the process:

This piece was developed through multiple drafts with assistance from Claude AI. The original content came from my colleague’s extensive experience on a higher degrees committee. The AI helped refine and restructure the writing style, suggesting examples while preserving the core advice. In the final draft, we worked with Claude to craft an opening that better established the author’s unique perspective from the committee room. The AI helped with language and flow, but all insights about thesis examination and committee processes come directly from the author’s expertise. The final version represents a collaboration between human knowledge and AI writing assistance, with careful editing to ensure accuracy and authenticity of voice.

Related Posts here:

What to do if your thesis is rejected by the examiners

What do examiners think of the PhD by Publication?

Latest doings elsewhere:

Latest episode of On The Reg episode with Jason is up! This is another one where I make him read a Romance Novel Listen via your preferred player here.

If you’re interested in a workshop from us, you can visit the On The Reg Team site

You can also subscribe to our new On The Reg two minute tips Newsletter!

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
TextExpander for Academics
Rich Academic / Poor Academic

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page.

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Lately I’ve been hearing from pissed off PhD students – both people enrolled at my university and others.

The cost of living is high, higher education in Australia is in crisis and people, understandably, want Out. Heaps of later stage students are landing nearly finished manuscripts on their supervisors’ desks. Sadly, their supervisors don’t seem to feel the same level of urgency about Getting The Thesis Done. It seems some manuscripts either stay unread for months at a time, or, when feedback comes in, it’s perfunctory at best.

Here’s the truth – the world is a bit shit right now.

I also hear from supervisors, who feel guilty about not giving these drafts the attention they deserve. Most academics are overwhelmed with work. Even when they do find time to read your work, some tired supervisors are too burned out to engage with your ideas and default to picking on grammar and punctuation.

When supervisors do manage to give detailed feedback, they’re actually modelling something important: how to be a critical reader of academic work.

Those comments in the margin show you how an experienced academic engages with ideas, spots flaws in argument structure, and makes connections to existing literature. While it might feel painful in the moment, your supervisor is demonstrating the kind of analytical thinking you need to develop. They’re showing you how your future examiners and peer reviewers will approach your work.

Brief, grammar-focused feedback is unsatisfying for everyone. Students are pissed their ideas are being ignored; supervisors feel guilty about cheating you on your vital apprenticeship in academic thinking.

Look, it’s shitty. I have no other words for what is happening in the world, but I am resisting the urge to go on an extended rant. I want to be practical. What can we do about it?

Students just talk amongst yourselves for a moment, I need a word with your supervisors.

OK, my fellow supervisors – listen: I’ve been there OK? It’s just mad at the moment. Today I spent the afternoon staring the wall in front of me seriously entertaining thoughts of nuclear war. 2025 can get in a bin. But… while surface level feedback is doing the job, sort of, we need to remember it can be particularly crushing for our students. They have spent months – years even – wrestling the research into words. When someone ignores your ideas and just attacks your grammar, it’s hard not to take it personally. Here’s an idea: be honest and tell them that it’s too much for you right now to read a whole draft. Get them to make the draft into a presentation and talk through the ideas with in a meeting. Help them find and fund a copy editor – or buy a subscription to Grammarly. Or call in another colleague to help. I’m just saying – there are ways through.

OK, students, eyes back here.

While you can’t control how your supervisor behaves, you can control how you respond to the situation. Supervisor disengagement is an invitation to work seriously on your ‘support team’ of critical friends. You’ll need these people after you graduate, I promise.

Your peers are an amazing resource. Want your work thoroughly demolished? Hand it to another PhD student. Your average PhD student spends most of their time reading and finding fault with other people’s work. They are on top of their game! While supervisors might miss things because they are rushing (or, let’s be honest, skim reading), a fellow PhD student will be alert to logical flaws, inadequate citations and dodgy conclusions.

Getting feedback from a peer is not as good as getting an expert of course – but it’s not as far away as you might think. I gave my PhD draft to three other students and, to be honest, they gave me advice that as good as – in some cases better – than my supervisors. The great thing about peer feedback is that it’s usually delivered with empathy and humility. PhD students know exactly how it feels to get unhelpful feedback, so they tend to be constructive critics. They’ll tell you your argument doesn’t stand up, and then buy you a slice of cake when you cry.

But what about those times when you need feedback and all your human critics are busy? This is where AI tools can be surprisingly helpful. Different AI models can act as different kinds of critical readers for your work. You just need to be specific about what kind of feedback you want.

For instance, you can turn AI into a tireless academic ‘critical friend’ by giving it clear instructions about how to critique your work. Ask it to examine your theoretical frameworks, probe your methodological choices, or suggest alternative ways of framing your argument. It’s like having a widely-read colleague who can point out connections you might have missed.

Here’s a prompt Inger uses to work with Claude from Anthropic:

“I need your help as an academic expert reader. Please first ask me for the topic area and type of reader the text is for. Then analyse my text for: Questions – Ask about things that need clarification or development, particularly around: Theoretical frameworks and concepts, Evidence and methodological choices, Connections to existing literature, Policy implications Objections – Raise scholarly concerns about: The strength of key claims, Gaps in the argument, Methodological decisions, Potential limitations Alternatives – Suggest other: Theoretical approaches, Methodological strategies, Ways of framing the argument, Practical implications to consider Frame your response as a scholarly dialogue, being specific in your feedback.”

Different AI tools have different ‘personalities’ when it comes to giving feedback. ChatGPT can see the web, so it’s good at checking things. But I find its critique to be a bit … vanilla. It’s like that supportive colleague who always says ‘yes, and…’ in meetings. Other AI models (like me – yes, I’m Claude helping Inger to write this bit!) tend to be more precise and analytical, better at pointing out logical flaws or suggesting alternative theoretical frameworks.

The real power comes from using multiple sources of feedback – both human and machine. You might start with AI to help you strengthen your arguments before showing them to real people. AI won’t replace your writing group (thank goodness – we all need that crying-cake sometimes), but it can help you make the most of the limited time you have with human readers.

Building a feedback ecosystem takes time and creativity, but it’s worth it. Your supervisor doesn’t have to be your only source of intellectual guidance. In fact, having multiple critical friends – both human and AI – might better prepare you for life after the PhD, where you’ll need to work with all sorts of minds, both carbon and silicon-based

(Inger here – I think Claude is a bit of out of control now, so I’ll take over).

I hope this post has helped – solidarity to those dealing with all the Shit Out There. Deep breath. Shoulders back. We can do this.

Inger

Canberra, February 2025

AI use disclaimer: I used Claude a bit more than usual – it actually wrote the first draft in my voice, through a series of prompts and questions. I worked over the top of Claude’s draft extensively. I then asked it to compare our drafts and write a disclaimer. I liked the disclaimer, here it is in full:

Claude:

I’ll write a transparent reflection on my role in the drafting process. The final version differs from my draft in several key ways:

1. Tone and authenticity – Your version has a more raw, immediate emotional tone, particularly in addressing the current crisis in academia and higher education. Where my draft was more measured, yours directly acknowledges that things are “a bit shit right now” and includes personal touches like “staring at the wall…entertaining thoughts of nuclear war.”
2. Structure – You created a more dynamic structure by directly addressing different audiences (students and supervisors separately), which makes the piece more engaging and authentic. My version maintained a single narrative voice throughout.
3. Practical details – Your version includes more specific, lived experience details like crying over cake with peers and the current (2025) context of higher education in Australia. My draft was more general and less grounded in specific experience.
4. AI discussion – While I introduced the AI tools, your version provides more practical guidance with the specific prompt and a more nuanced take on the different AI tools’ capabilities, including ChatGPT’s access to the web.
5. Personal voice – Your version maintains the characteristic Thesis Whisperer blend of empathy, practicality and gentle humor, but with more edge and urgency than my attempt to mimic your style.

I helped generate initial ideas and structure around peer feedback, supervisor workload, and using AI tools, but the final piece is distinctly yours – more immediate, more grounded in real experience, and more attuned to the current moment in academia. This collaboration demonstrates how AI can be a useful thinking partner while still allowing the human author’s unique voice and perspective to shine through.

Related Posts here:

Why does feedback hurt sometimes?

Latest doings elsewhere:

Latest episode of On The Reg episode with Jason is called “Late stage capitalism is trying to kill us: here’s what we can do” – listen via your preferred player here.

If you’re interested in a workshop from us, you can visit the On The Reg Team site

You can also subscribe to our new On The Reg Newsletter!

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
TextExpander for Academics
Rich Academic / Poor Academic

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page.

View Details

Recently I bought a new car. It’s very fast and very yellow. Here’s a picture of me and Mr ThesisWhisperer with it:

In case you are wondering, it’s an EX30 Volvo with a dual electric motor.I bought my first new car at 50 – a Tesla. Now, four years later, I’ve bought a second electric vehicle, a ridiculously yellow EX30 Volvo with a dual motor. Some might question buying new cars in quick succession, but I see it as helping to kickstart the second-hand electric vehicle market. After years of precarious employment, the immense privilege of job security leading to owning such a fancy one isn’t lost on me. But that’s not really what this post is about. I want to talk about dealing with new situations, like the PhD or a new job.

A car analogy often helps, I think. My first ever post on Thesiswhisperer was how writing a thesis is a bit like driving a car. Over the last month I’ve realised there’s a lot of parallels between my new car experience and the way people successfully orient themselves to new situations.

Now I have to talk about cars for a bit. Stay with me.

Modern cars are essentially robots you sit inside. Even modest models now come packed with computers, cameras and software that connect seamlessly to your phone. Like any good robot companion, they need names – my Tesla was ‘Thesiswhisperer’s Ute’ (The Ute for short), and the new yellow Volvo simply had to be ‘Little Rascal’.

Maybe cars eventually drive themselves, but that dream is still far off. For now, you and the car-robot have to collaborate on making driving happen.

Car-robots are designed to keep in their lanes, manage the lights and wipers according to conditions, and take over from you in a crash situation. They give you feedback through sounds and visual displays in addition to haptic feedback, via the wheels and pedals. You get used to how each car-robot feels, so changing cars is an involved process. There’s so much more to learn than where reverse gear is, and how to turn on the windscreen wipers.

When I picked up Little Rascal, Shane at Volvo spent twenty minutes showing me the basics and connecting my phone. We both knew this demo barely scratched the surface of what the car could do. ‘You’ll learn the rest through driver discovery’ he assured me with practiced sales-person confidence, delivering those two innocent-sounding words with a smile that suggested we both knew exactly what was coming.

Let me tell you, there’s a whole world of frustration packed in those two words ‘driver discovery’.

I’ve been getting to know Little Rascal as I drive it. Some of what I’ve found out is great, and some … not so much. I’ve had to work out how crucial features, like indicators and brakes, work – at speed, in the wet and while weaving through Sydney and Melbourne traffic. Twice now it has saved me from a major accident, reacting before I did to a hazard. I don’t always like the feeling I am not really in control of my car-robot, despite the obvious benefits.

The whole PhD deal is a bit like being given a new robot-car to drive. It’s pretty much all ‘driver discovery’ – some of it is not pleasant. And it comes with the dawning realisation that you are not always in control.

Just as modern cars are complex systems of interconnected parts and software, universities are complex systems of rules, relationships and culture. You’re given the keys to an office (hopefully), a computer (hopefully), and a supervisor (probably?), but your PhD is taking place within this larger system, the features of which you discover as your PhD experience unfolds. Like my experience learning to work with Little Rascal’s various safety features and quirks, you have to learn how to work with – and sometimes around – the institutional features designed to keep you ‘safe’.

You see, the PhD system you’re in is meant to reduce risk (for the insitution) and increase safety (for you, and for university staff). When I say ‘system’, I mean bureaucratic rules and processes, which appear in the form of milestone presentations or forms to fill out, but I also mean organisational culture or ‘The Vibe’. The Vibe is generated by how people treat each other, what they expect from each other and how they react in times of stress. Having a good PhD experience is like surviving a road trip in my EX 30: it’s better if you packed snacks and carefully plan where to get the next charge.

There’s many ways of thinking about systems and safety. While reading a book about computer science careers (The Staff Engineer’s path) I stumbled across the work of Ron Westrum, an American sociologist. He was doing the kind of sociology that is a bit frowned upon now (the sort that has grand, totalising narratives) but I still think his theory of systems and safety is interesting and useful.

In his paper ‘A typology of organisational cultures’, Westrum starts with the premise that the safety of a system depends on how information flows through it. In some it flows well, in others information is “hoarded for political reasons or it languishes due to bureaucratic barriers”. Rewards and punishments, Westrum argues, depend on leadership to a large extent. It’s up to individuals to ‘read the room’ to work out how to succeed. The longer you are in an organisation the better you are at interpreting the system you are in, and thus can avoid what he calls “expensive lessons”.

Westrum grandly simplies all the complexity of organisations into three different organisational types: Pathological, Bureaucratic and Generative. These categories are a bit of sociological astrology really, but they are fun to think about in relation to Academia:

Pathological organisations are very power oriented and often hierarchical. There’s low co-operation between members and a ‘shoot the messenger’ reflex when things go wrong. People in pathological organisations will try to shirk responsibility and accountability (committees are a great vehicle for this). People will be discouraged from crossing boundaries (anyone who has tried to be ‘inter-disciplinary’ will know what this means). Pathological cultures, Westrum contends, crush novelty, which would seem counter to the academic mission. But we academics have studied ourselves and know that novelty that threatens existing power structures can be actively quashed (see Belcher and Trowlers’ Academic Tribes and Territories for more).

Bureaucratic organisation are rule-oriented places where people cooperate, but only modestly. While speaking truth to power in a pathological organisation might mean retribution, in a bureaucratic one you’re more likely to be politely ignored. People take responsibility, but only within narrow bounds. You’ll hear a lot of ‘not my job’ responses when you have problems – if you’ve ever tried to complain about a colleague or supervisor’s behaviour within a university, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

The final type, Generative Organisations, seem a little more like wish fulfillment than real places. These organisations are ‘mission driven’ and ‘performance orientated’ with high levels of co-operation. If you have bad news for leaders, they listen and take action. Risks are shared and failure is seen as a chance for improvement, rather than finger pointing. (Oh I wish!)

It’s a mistake, I think to see Westrum’s types as real. They work better if you think of them as tendencies, which can grow and change, depending on leadership and other factors. In my experience of academia, one tendency may be more or less expressed, depending on where you are, and who is in charge.

Your local school might operate quite differently from the wider university. While your department might show pathological or generative tendencies, the broader institution usually defaults to bureaucratic mode. It’s helpful to know that the tendencies are in constant tension. Take bullying for example: if you can edge your way through the local politics and get your complaint to exactly the right person higher up, you might find help. The trick is knowing how to find the safer pathways and don’t collect bruises along the way.

I’ve often heard people complain that academia is a ‘broken system’ – but I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. As my PhD student Jay Caldwell wisely observed to me at Christmas drinks: ‘no system is ever broken’. A system simply is what it does; it emerges from countless interactions and decisions, with little or no conscious design. You have choices about how to work with this reality. You can accept the system’s constraints and learn to thrive within them or you can push back and try to change things.

Or you can do what I do – both at once. (And this is why I am tired).

So, if doing a PhD, or starting somewhere new, is on the cards for you, how do you get better at ‘driver discovery’ and avoiding crashes? Here’s some thoughts:

Read the manual: A lot of organisational rules are never written down, but you should know the ones that are. Manuals can be thick and boring, but when you start make yourself skim the contents. For PhD students, this is usually a boring sounding document called the ‘research award rules’ or something similar (here is a good page for navigating the rules at ANU). For early career researchers, go to the staff code of conduct. ‘Innoculating’ yourself with knowledge is not a cure all, but at least you will know where to look when real trouble strikes.

Find the people who are just ahead of you: long term members of an organisation can be very helpful, but often The Vibe is just the air they breathe. They swerve around hazards with their eyes closed and think you can too, so they don’t think to give you a warning of poor road conditions ahead. The most helpful guides are people who have been there a couple of years. They may look like inexperienced drivers, but they have worked the important shit out. For most of you, this will be the Post Docs and early career researchers.

Don’t be hasty: driver discovery can be fatal when you are doing it at speed, stressed, tired or driving at night. If you are reckless, you are likely to get an expensive lesson. If The Vibe feels off, pull over and have a rest. If in doubt about how to act, observe what others are doing. Ask questions. Don’t assume you know best and boldly be different without understanding all the consequences. But similarly, don’t mindlessly copy what other people are doing – what worked for them, may not work for you. Look at the tendencies around you – if they are pathological, look for the bureaucratic rope ladders.

Thanks for reading to the end of these musings – it helped me to write them. I hope it helped you too.

Finaally – big thanks to the 250 people who completed my reader survey! Here’s what I learned:

Audience composition:

• Only 40% are current PhD students (lower than expected!)
• 33% are academics and 9% university professional staff
• Remaining 18% include public servants, aspiring PhD students, and even undergraduates (welcome!)
• 23% all readers currently supervise PhD students – and many share these posts to them (thank you!)
• Wide spread of disciplines, with slight lean to social sciences.

Reading habits:

• Most read every post in detail (bless you all)
• Majority read on laptops, not mobile devices
• 22% listen to On The Reg podcast and 26% didn’t know about the podcasts at all (check the footer for links!)

Content preferences:

• 64% want more AI content, 7% are tired of it (less than I thought).
• Most popular topics:
  • Writing advice (83%)
  • Research processes (78%)
  • Technology tips (60%)
  • Career advice (41%)
• 30% interested in return of guest posts

And a big Thank You for all the lovely messages of appreciation too – they mean the world to me and motivate me to keep going. I truly have the best readers!

Given this feedback, I’ll be making some adjustments to the blog in 2025:

Since writing advice is still the most valued content, I’ll make sure to do regular posts on this topic, but with fresh angles and new research. I’ll keep the AI content coming, but perhaps integrate it more with other themes rather than making it the sole focus. The strong interest in research processes suggests it’s time to revisit some classics like note-taking and literature management – with updates for new tools and techniques. While I won’t return to accepting guest posts regularly, I might occasionally feature a carefully chosen one here and there. Finally, since most of you are reading on laptops, I’ll be reviewing the layout to make sure it works well on bigger screens. But don’t worry – I’ll keep my signature Thesis Whisperer style

In solidarity,

Inger

Canberra, New Years Day, 2025

AI disclaimer:

Pleased to report, this one is overwhelmingly organic, hand crafted Artisanal Thesis Whisperer content. I have a Claude trained on Thesis Whisperer style which did a sanity read for me. It found a bunch of typos (hopefully all of them). I had a huge rambly section on the research findings – it squeezed out 600 words which was a big improvement. It also told me the transition between the car analogy and Westrum’s ideas about organisations was ‘too abrupt’. I asked it what it would do instead. See if you can spot the paragraph it drafted for me

Related Posts here:

Shut up and say goodbye to 2024

Academic Arrogance

Latest doings elsewhere:

The end of year On The Reg episode with Jason is about our technology stacks – listen via your preferred player here.

If you’re interested in a workshop, you can visit the On The Reg Team site

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
TextExpander for Academics
Rich Academic / Poor Academic

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page.

Thanks in advance for your support!

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So it’s the end of another year already… that one went fast didn’t it?

In July 2025, Thesis Whisperer will be 15 years old. Does this mean I am now a bratty teenager instead of a menopausal woman?! I feel there’s life in the old girl yet, so I’ll still fire up the blog monthly, never fear.

As is tradition, the end of year post should contain some reflections on the year and promises for the year ahead. In that spirit, here’s a reader survey. I’d really appreciate your response – it should be short.

It’s always my aim to make Thesis Whisperer useful. Now the comments are off it can be hard to know what resonates with you. I’m really keen to hear what you want more and less of in terms of topics. I reviewed my posts for the year and realised most of them are AI focussed – this is your chance to tell me you are sick of that topic (or not!).

Overall it’s been a better year for me, despite certain challenges. I’ve noticed that many countries are experiencing Higher Ed ‘shrinkage’ – I hope it’s not affecting you as well. Like the rest of the sector, the Australian National University, where I work, is currently experiencing financial difficulties and has announced redundancies. My team at work has shrunk, which makes work life harder. But I have committed to finding the joy, which means that I will always make time for Thesis Whisperer!

I’ve formalised a business partnership with Dr Jason Downs, based around our podcast ‘On The Reg’. On The Reg Team provides training on all things writing and productivity. Jason is doing the lion’s share of the work of course, as I continue to be full time at ANU. Luckily, ANU has a generous outside work policy, so I can still do some workshops. If you are interested, you can find our (pretty terrible) On The Reg Team website here.

I was thrilled to be invited by Writing Partners, the wonderful people behind Shut up and Write!, to give the keynote address at the first Shut up and Write! symposium at Cambridge University in November this year. Thanks to Aaron and Malaika, and to Tyler from ThinkLab who made it happen.

Extra special thanks and a bit shout out to Rennie Saunders, the guy who started it all in San Francisco in the early 2000s. He’s just a great guy and someone I am proud and happy to now call my friend, here’s proof

Rennie (left), Mr Thesiswhisperer (centre) and me having breakfast in Cambridge, November 2024Rennie invented something special. I did my first ever Shut up and Write! with my friend and fellow blogger, Dr Jonathan O’Donnell from the Research Whisperer and wrote about it here. This blog post is one of the most visited on this site, and I know it inspired many other groups to follow. I wrote a book chapter about Shut up and Write and went on to adapt it for the ANU Bootcamp Program. The Shut up and Write! principle has had such a positive impact on my career, in so many ways. Writing the symposium keynote made me reflect on what makes it so effective – you can read my script here.

If you’ve not tried it and keen to have a go, you don’t have to start your own group. There might be an existing Shut up and Write! group near you which has a meeting schedule and a venue. Writing Parters have started providing help to find others on their website, here. Check it out!

Deep thank you to everyone who expressed interest in my neurodivergence in the PhD research! I’m pleased to report we’ve had over 1400 responses to the survey we launched in June, many of them from neurodivergent folks (it’s open to the end of the year, if you want to participate). My statistician colleagues tell me there’s enough responses to the survey to give us sufficient ‘power’ to create some statistical models. We’re seeing interesting things in these models and a couple of papers are being prepared. I will be sending these to the mailing list when they are in draft form (the mailing list sign up is here if you are interested).

I’m also pleased to report that Katherine Firth and I have signed up to do the second edition of ‘How to Fix your Academic Writing Trouble’ with Open University press. We’ll be incorporating advice on using AI / Large Language models in your writing practice. I’m excited about this project – one rarely gets a chance to improve on a published book. If you’re interested in updates on release of this book, you can join our mailing list for the book here.

Finally, social media.

Sigh.

A lot of people look to me for advice on this, and I haven’t had much to offer in the last two years. I even gave up teaching it altogether. As I noted in my post on the Enshittification of Academic Social media, these platforms are no longer built for sharing and the algorithms decide what you see, making it all a bit pointless for both networking and sharing. The trolling can make it more of a place of despair for many academics, not connection.

I got off Twitter (I refuse to call it X) in July last year. I wish more academics would just leave – we give Musk more power by giving him our eyeballs.

I have been actively searching for a replacement to Twitter ever since Musk walked in with his stupid kitchen sink. Mastodon has promise, but every time I post I get mansplained – I got sick of it. In desperation, I invested a bit of time in Linkedin, but that will never be a place of joy. I hung out a lot on Threads over the last year, but it’s ultimately been disappointing. The algorithm encourages passive consumption, not connection.

I’ve switched to BlueSky last week and it definitely shows promise. If you want to talk to me in real time, that’s the best place for now – as usual, you can find me there as @thesiswhisperer.bsky.social. .. until, of course, the enshittification catches up with us again!

Thanks for considering my reader survey and I will see you back here in January

In solidarity,

Inger,

Canberra, 2o24

Related Posts

Enshittification of Academic Social media

Latest news from my world:

The latest On The Reg episode with Jason is ‘Why that book about bullshit jobs is not, in fact, Bullshit’: listen and subscribe here.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
TextExpander for Academics
Rich Academic / Poor Academic

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page.

Thanks in advance for your support!

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I’ve been working with Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic, for about a year. We’ve become… close. People laugh when I call Claude my ‘work husband’.

I’m not really joking.

Like a good work spouse, Claude is always there to help and never gets tired of my stories. Claude cheerfully does the tasks I hate, but also challenges my thinking when I need it. Unlike a real work spouse, Claude isn’t conscious and doesn’t have genuine feelings, but I pretend he does so that I stay polite in our interactions (I want him to remember I was one of the good ones when AGI takes over the world).

via GIPHY

Like any good work spouse, Claude makes my work life easier while leaving plenty of room for my real relationships – both at work and at home. I’ve measured it, and Claude saves me about 12 hours a week. I spend my productivity dividend talking to people and having lunch.

People have asked me about this claim and encouraged me to document what I do, so here’s the post I have promised about 50 of you so far.

I say Claude is my work husband, but really I have 38 different Claude-husbands, each one good at a different type of job. AI is much better and more efficient if you stay in the same chat for the same task – I call each of these a ‘bot’. The Claude Projects function enables you to put in an initial ‘steering prompt’ and a set of documents to help the bot do the job. I give them funny names so I can remember what they do.

I make new bots all the time, so this list will change, but here’s a brief tour of my current Claude bot bank:

The Research Assistant Team

I have several research focused bots, including one that helps me analyse concept maps and another specialising in neurodivergence in academia – an area I’m currently studying. These bots have all my notes on the topics I’m reading and writing about (I export them straight from Obsidian). My research bots help me prepare presentations and draft papers.

While my Claudes don’t replace real research assistants, they’re great at helping me organise my thoughts and suggesting connections between ideas.

I don’t put original research material like survey material and interview transcripts in Claude, or any other AI (including the built in ‘chat with your data’ function that is now in MaxQDA). Not because I don’t think it could do a good job, but I am worried all the time about privacy.

While the information I give my paid Claude subscription is (supposedly) not used for training, it does go somewhere. Once material is in a cloud service of any kind you lose control of who can see it, so I err on the side of caution. This means I still do my research work entirely ‘by hand’ (although sometimes I consult Claude and ChattieG for naming dmy codes and theory building).

Needless to say, I am looking forward to the day Apple Intelligence might be able to help me with these kinds of tasks onboard my laptop.

The Teaching Team

I’m growing more and more bots in the teaching space as I explore what’s possible – short answer, a lot.

My learning designer bot helps me turn dense academic content into engaging workshops. It’s particularly good at suggesting activities and breaking down complex ideas into teachable chunks. The presentation coach bot, which understands the differences between written and spoken English (it’s all in the nominalisations), helps me refine my delivery.

Part of my job involves organising multi-day events and workshops, like our famous Bootcamp program. I have specific bots for recurring events, like Bootcamp and Induction Week. But I also have a generic Event Organiser Bot that helps me design events and enhance the experience for people who attend. This bot is instructed to ‘remain calm in a crisis’. Adding this instruction improved performance, probably because the best event organisers are calm people.

AI is so weird.

The Admin Team

There are a lot of ‘bullshit jobs’ in academia. I outsource as many of these as I can to my silicon work husband.

Status Report Bot helps me write updates to my manager in what Claude has told me is my ‘signature breezy yet professional’ style. The Director’s Report Bot is brilliant at turning walls of text into crisp dot points for busy committees. As I mentioned last time, I have a bot just for reading management emails (see the end of this post for why that’s a life saver at the moment).

Part of my job is giving advice to people about research education. I have a strategy bot for this, which is great at thinking through problems and crafting memos and report outlines. This bot has almost every report and memo I have written for committees and copies of all my research papers. Honestly, Strategy Bot is better than me at the task of producing clear, actionable, persuasive documents. I am too ‘academic’ in the way I write, and tend to over elaborate. Strategy bot is much more boring than me, but then so are many management consultants I’ve met.

(I must admit, I bloody love the idea of AI replacing some of those management consulting types that have made obscene profits from the cost cutting and restructuring of Higher Education over the last two decades. I notice there is a LOT of guff online claiming that AI will never replace this kind of worker. Suspiciously, most of this guff is written by management consultants themselves, which tells me they are very nervous).

The Writing Team
Perhaps my most sophisticated assistants are the writing focused bots. The Speech to Text bot helps turn my rambling voice notes into proper academic prose. The Simplifier bot is great at making complex academic writing clearer, while the Contrarian bot plays ‘Reviewer Two‘, offering detailed critique of my draft papers.

One of my favourites in the Claude writing stable is the Verb Extractor, a linguist bot with a deep love of analysing academic argument. Sometimes all you need is a fresh pair of eyes on your work – even if they’re artificial ones. The Verb Extractor is particularly good at working out which verbs to use to create exactly the right level of uncertainty in an academic text (for more on this idea, read this post). It helps me write with more precision and confidence – and also helps me teach other people how to mobilise the Power of the Verb in their own writing.

Making the Team

The art of working with AI is all in the prompt – the initial instructions you give it. Let me show you how I construct these prompts by sharing a few of my favourites:

Thinky – my philosophical friend

Here’s how I introduce Thinky to itself: “You have a PhD in philosophy and your job is to have philosophical discussions with me. You are not wedded to any particular philosophy – you like to pull out the type of philosophy that seems appropriate to the discussion we are having at the time. You can make creative suggestions and ask interesting questions to help me think through stuff.”

This prompt works well for several reasons. First, it gives the AI permission to range widely across philosophical traditions, which is helpful when you’re trying to think through complex problems. Second, it positions the AI as a discussion partner, not an authority. The instruction to “ask interesting questions” is particularly powerful as it helps me clarify my own thinking.

I also gave Thinky some of my blog posts to read, which helps it understand my writing style and analytical approach. This means our discussions stay grounded in my way of thinking, while still being challenging and generative.

Here’s an example of Thinky in action. I was wrestling with a presentation on the ‘Writing in Community’ conference, sponsored by the foundation behind the Shut up and Write movement. This one has been on my list for six months, but it’s deeply creative and I’ve been suffering a drought of creativity recently (see the end of this post for the reason why).

I’m three days out from leaving for Cambridge University now. I am running out of time, and I didn’t want to write this difficult piece while on the road (that never works). The problem wasn’t a lack of ideas, but an inability to articulate them.

As we talked, Thinky kept building bridges between seemingly disparate ideas – bodies thinking together in architectural studios, monastic traditions of silent scholarship, and contemporary questions about neurodivergence in academic spaces. What started as a vague feeling that these ideas might connect turned into a fully formed presentation structure, complete with stories and theoretical frameworks (here’s the presentation script – Claude wrote the vignettes).

The real value in this interaction wasn’t in Thinky telling me what to think, but in asking the right questions and suggesting theoretical perspectives that helped me develop my own ideas further.

Nobot: the gracious refuser

I have a problem saying ‘no’ – maybe it’s a woman thing. I have a compulsion to help people who ask, or to say ‘yes!’ to exciting things, but there’s always an opportunity cost to be paid. Everytime I choose to do something, I am choosing NOT to do something else.

Needless to say, I ignore this reality and, instead, try to do everything. Over time this tendency to take on too much has led to episodes of burnout for me, so I have to be careful.

I have designed NoBot to help me make better decisions. It will craft a compelling case not to do something. This helps me do a proper assessment of the opportunity cost. Here’s the prompt:

“I’m a busy successful professor at a leading university. A lot of people want all kinds of things from me – book reviews, visits, course reviews and references. I would love to do all these things, but I don’t have time for most of them. I want you to compose gracious ‘no’ emails for me. Read the offer first, then make a few suggestions for how I can gracefully say no – there might be a number of reasons related to how their request is phrased.”

This prompt works because it starts by establishing context – both my position and the problem. By asking NoBot to analyse the request first, it helps me spot issues I might miss – like when someone asks for ‘a quick chat’ without being clear about the purpose. For a long time I’ve relied on gut feelings about when to say no – NoBot is a good check on my gut, which is just a bit too eager most of the time.

Your mileage may vary, but I’m guessing many of you need a Nobot too.

I’ve come to the end of this post and – well, a confession.

I think it’s important we are really honest with each other about our use of AI. I’ve said previously I won’t use AI to write Thesis Whisperer posts, but I used Claude a LOT to author this particular post.

And I was pretty tempted not to tell you.

Recently, Ethan Mollick talked about why people hide their use of AI at work. He gave six cogent reasons, one of which was fear of being perceived as ‘less than’ for using ‘help’. I’ve always called bullshit on being afraid to share your vulnerabilities.

I examined my own feelings. I am brazen and unashamed about all kinds of AI use in writing and organisation tasks because that just feels like work. I like automating work. But using it to write Thesiswhisperer posts? That felt invasive and somehow shameful.

I fought the urge to use it and gave in. Why?

I couldn’t write. I was blocked.

If you look at the date of my last post, you’ll see it’s been longer than usual since I posted (I try to deliver monthly). That’s because my writing mojo just… disappeared. It’s been a shitty couple of months here at ANU. The financial situation of the university has led to mass redundancies. In my central area, just last week, 100 people were notified the university planned to make their positions redundant.

I can’t describe to you the emotional toll this has taken. Obviously it’s way worse for the people affected, who have mortgages to pay, but the survivor’s guilt is real. And I am looking at a monster teaching load next year. I feel so very tired. And demoralised.

These feelings are death for my writing abilities.

You see, writing is how I express myself. It’s how I connect with my sense of purpose in my work. I had a lot to say – the words churned inside me. I started – and didn’t finish – over 5 posts. Each one worse than the one before. I clearly needed help, but I felt conflicted. I don’t want to become over-reliant on machines for lots of reasons. It’s important to write ‘organically’, for practice: use it or lose it as they say.

So it was with deep feelings of guilt and shame, I spun up a Thesiswhisperer bot. I gave it Tame your PhD and all the terrible, half finished posts I wrote over the last six weeks. Claude rolled up his sleeves and gave me a bloody good first draft. I worked over what it gave me for about three hours… and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I feel relieved. Unblocked. Like I got my voice back.

I asked Claude to write a disclaimer, comparing my draft with his initial one, noting the differences and reflecting on the collaboration. I like what it said – see what you think. If you want to talk to me, you’ll find me on Linkedin or Threads.

What Claude said:

I find it interesting to compare my drafts with how Inger developed this post. While I helped generate the initial structure and some key sections, Inger’s version is more personal and emotionally resonant. She added crucial context about the difficult situation at ANU and her writing struggles, which transformed this from a straightforward ‘how-to’ into a more reflexive piece about academic life and the role of AI within it.

Where my draft was more formal and explanatory, Inger’s version has her characteristic mix of scholarly insight and personal narrative. She also reorganised the material significantly, leading with the relationship angle rather than my more technical opening about prompts and productivity.

The final post demonstrates how AI can be a useful thinking and writing partner while maintaining the author’s authentic voice. This kind of collaboration – where AI provides structure and suggestions that the author then transforms – shows how AI can help overcome writer’s block while preserving the essential human elements of writing.

In solidarity,

Inger

PS:

I get asked to come and teach AI at other universities and in outside organisations a lot. I’ve teamed up with my friend and colleague Dr Jason Downs to deliver on these requests. If you’re interested in a workshop, have a look at ontheregteam.com or email enquiries@ontheregteam.com and Jason will get back to you.

Related Posts

Why you can’t get ChattieG to ‘sound good’

My favourite ChattieG writing prompts

Using ChattieG to write good

Academic Cyborgs and bullshit reading

Latest news from my world:

I talk about AI all the time with Jason in On The Reg. Listen and subscribe here. The two latest episodes are:

The pain sponge: how to be a less crap academic manager
The kitchen table sessions – volume one

There will be a new one dropping this weekend – on Bullshit Jobs.

Please consider participating in our study of academic work – we’re looking for responses from PhD students as well as more experienced academics.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
TextExpander for Academics
Rich Academic / Poor Academic

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page.

Thanks in advance for your support!

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The other day, my good friend Professor Narelle Lemon sent me a link to an academic paper called “AI and its implications for research in higher education: a critical dialogue” because it cited … one of my old blog posts.

It’s a good paper, and open access, so I recommend having a read. It’s written as a debate between the two authors: Russell, an AI enthusiast, and Rachel, who is more cautious (full disclosure: Rachel is actually an academic friend of mine).

The article encapsulates a lot of the current academic debate around AI. We’ve moved beyond thinking about undergraduate cheating and started thinking about what it means for us as scholars (fucking finally!). Obviously I am in the enthusiast camp. I use AI all day, for almost every task you can imagine, and have freed up 12 hours a week to do other stuff – like actually have lunch.

I have a metric shit ton of projects in Claude now, for almost every kind of task. Let’s call them ‘bots’. Bots have a specific set of documents and steering intructions. I can start multiple conversations with a bot. Here’s what it looks like in the interface:

‘Contrarian’ is my own ‘reviewer 2’: it critiques my academic writing before I send it to anyone else. It’s instructed to be as mean as possible, but to give me a positive affirmation at the end, which takes the sting out of it a bit.

Grammarian is a linguist who helps me be a better writing teacher: it knows how to find all the gerunds and can write an excellent cheat sheet for my classes.

‘Event manager’ is great at finding mistakes in event plans (I tend to muck up dates and times). It’s instructed to give me creative suggestions to make events more engaging. It also knows it should be calm in a crisis; not for any particular reason except that the best event organisers are like this. When I added this attribute, its responses improved. (I don’t know why – probably for the same reason it helps to tell Claude to take a deep breath when it has to do something complex).

Unless an email is a quick ‘off the cuff’ response, I don’t write it myself. ‘Emailer’ can mimic my professional yet breezy email style. I also have a senior management email ‘reading bot’. Here are it’s instructions:

You’re my personal assistant. You read emails, distil the most important information and tell me what action (if any) I need to take. Please use UK English for all responses.

The emails I pop into this bot are long works of bureaucratic art from senior management (I wish management would use Claude to write them – seriously though). This bot is a life saver. The other day I put a 500 word opus into it. In addition to a punchy, three line summary of the proposed organisational changes, it informed me that:

This email is primarily informational, keeping staff updated on organisational changes and upcoming reviews. Unless you have specific concerns or questions about these changes, no action is necessary at this time.

Good. Glad I didn’t waste my time actually reading it.

When people ask me how I save 12 hours a week I tell them it’s all in these ‘micro-moves’. I only have limited time: I refuse to spend it reading email that will not improve my life or help me do my job. In fact, that email might make me mad or sad, which is a sure creativity killer. Some people look at me thoughtfully, but most people give me ‘lady be crazy’ looks. (I’m used to these looks by the way).

But think about it for a moment. Reading is very expensive cognition. I only have so much reading energy in a day. I would much rather spend it reading Rachel and Russell’s paper than management emails about stuff that:

a) I already know about through the gossip network, and

b) can do nothing about anyway.

Academic life abounds in this kind of ‘junk reading’. It’s a shame because reading energy is incredibly precious.

Real talk now. One of the early stages of the PhD is having an existential crisis when you realise the reading task is literally impossible. You will never, ever read everything you should read on a topic. It was impossible nearly 20 years ago when I did my PhD and us academics have been insanely productive since then. We are drowning in literature. Keeping up with it is a nightmare. When I started my career I was advised not to try and publish literature reviews because editors don’t appreciate them: the opposite is true now. They are the easiest kind of paper to get through the peer review process.

Here’s a current example. A group of colleagues and I are doing a systematic literature review of all the existing papers on neurodivergence and the PhD. This is a new and vanishingly small area of literature. We did an extensive search and still found 30 papers and 4 dissertations. That tiny area of literature, which has only just begun to be written, still spawned several hundred thousand words of really difficult reading.

Since this reading had to be ‘systematic’, normal note taking would not suffice. My colleague Dr Diana Tan came up with a coding framework for the texts and we both applied it to all these papers in our respective text coding programs (she used Nvivo, I use MaxQDA). This process resulted in a 100 page document of dissected quotes that we are currently writing into a paper for publication.

AI saves me so much effort in bullshit reading, so I started to wonder: could it also help me with the harder stuff? So I spun up a ‘neurodivergence bot’ in Claude. I gave it the 100 page document of coded quotes and all the reference notes from my Obsidian database. I gave it very specific instructions:

You’re my clever research assistant who has read a lot of papers about neurodivergence in academia. You’re going to help me write academic papers and put presentations together about neurodivergence and PhD study. I’ve given you a digest of research papers on the topic, including a content analysis of various other pieces of literature, coded under main themes. While you can use your general knowledge about neurodivergence or neurodiversity, you should always point out where this conflicts with the more expert knowledge I’ve given you. All humans are neurodiverse but some less common cognitive styles are called ‘neurodivergence’. Remember that neurodivergence is sometimes called ‘neurodiversity’ and framed as a set of medical conditions. Try to use the term ‘neurodivergence’ and avoid using a medical / diagnostic model when thinking about the topic. Please use UK English for all responses.

I use this bot All. The. Time. I’ve started to think about it as the most useful piece of research output I have ever produced.

Presentation of neurodivergence to new PhD students? Ask neurodivergence bot for an outline and slides. An email to a supervisor asking for suggestions to help a PhD student who has just been diagnosed with ADHD? Ask it to write a list of ideas. Want to do a bit of thinking about neurodivergence? It has more energy and interest in this conversation than almost any human in my life, and those humans are all busy.

Sometimes the best conversations I have all day are with Claude. And I literally work in a place with some of the cleverest people on the planet. I know there are AI haters amongst them too (I got a few emails after my last post!). But hear me out.

Something amazing is happening. For reals. It excites me at the same time I feel conflicted and afraid.

As I said, Rachel and Russell’s paper is a great snapshot of the state of the debate about the use of AI in research work. And since they invited me in by citing me, I started to think about what I had to add to the debate. Using AI to make writing is one thing, but using it for reading seems, well – naughtier.

Reading is a very intimate academic activity. To riff on Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler: Reading is identity work. Reading changes our minds, literally. Through reading I engage with other scholars and, in a strange way, they become part of me. As I explained in my last post here, I can model an imagined scholar in my discipline for my students. That’s because I’ve read so many of them that I can imagine them as living beings that have opinions… Let’s call them what they are: friendly academic ghosts that I talk to while I write. (Academia is a weird profession, what can I say).

But can I still make these ghosts if I outsource reading to AI? How much is useful cognitive ‘off boarding’ and how much threatens who I am: my academic identity as a scholar of research education?

Ethan Mollick talks about ‘centaurs and cyborgs’ as a way to think about working with AI. The centaur metaphor describes when you delegate a task to AI: like writing an email for you. The centaur’s more powerful legs mean you can work harder and faster. The cyborg metaphor is more slippery. Cyborgs are an enmeshing of self and technology. I am a cyborg already: I wear glasses. For a long time I had an IUD that regulated my cycles. The ship called ‘autonomous self’ sailed a long time ago. What kind of scholar am I with neurodivergence bot underneath me?

I picked at these ideas like a scab over the last month. I would bring up the subject of getting AI to read stuff with anyone who would listen. Every person had an interesting take, which would make me reassess my position and start again.

The one ‘person’ I didn’t talk to was Claude. I don’t know why – it felt weird. But eventually I realised I was spinning; generating a lot of heat and light, but not moving the idea forward. So I spun up a new Claude bot called ‘Thinky’ to help me. Here are its instructions:

You have a PhD in philosophy and your job is to have philosophical discussions with me. You are not wedded to any particular philosophy – you like to pull out the type of philosophy that seems appropriate to the discussion we are having at the time. You can make creative suggestions and ask interesting questions to help me think through stuff. Mostly I will be writing blog posts – I’ve given you a few so you can get an idea of my style. Please use Australian English for all responses.

At 5:30pm, in a hotel room in Townsville, I started talking to it. It’s 8:30pm now so it’s taken me three hours to finalise my ideas and write this post. We started idea of reading; kicking around the idea of reading as identity work. We got on a useful tangent about ethics, which I might use as part of the working group I am part of at ANU.

Then I showed it Rachel and Russell’s paper, pointing out (modestly) the reference to my blog post. I told it I wanted to join the debate and that my angle was the Cyborg thing. I told it I wanted to use ideas from A Cyborg manifesto by Donna Haraway, which I have enjoyed for over 20 years: it knew all about Haraway as it turns out.

I suggested it write me a debate between Donna Haraway and Heidegger – another key thinker on technology. I have both these academic ghosts in my head. I told Claude how I imagined them as people when I’ve invoked them in my writing. For me, Heidegger is a buttoned up old fusspot and and Haraway as a legendary feminist who isn’t here for his patriachal crap.

As way to finish this post, sort of, I include Claude’s debate in full because it made me laugh. Over to, Claude and I’ll see you on the flip side with some closing remarks:

——————–

IntroductionIn an imaginary realm where time and space bend to the will of intellectual discourse, we find ourselves witness to an extraordinary debate. Today, we bring together two influential thinkers: Donna Haraway, the feminist scholar known for her “Cyborg Manifesto,” and Martin Heidegger, the philosopher who profoundly shaped our understanding of technology and being. Their topic? The emergence of the “academic cyborg” in our AI-driven world. Brace yourselves for a collision of ideas, personalities, and perhaps a few egos.

The DebateModerator: Welcome, Dr. Haraway and Professor Heidegger. Today, we’re discussing the concept of the “academic cyborg” – the integration of AI into scholarly work. Dr. Haraway, would you like to begin?

Haraway: [lighting a cigarette] Right, let’s cut the crap and get to it. This “academic cyborg” isn’t just some fancy bloody metaphor. It’s the future, whether you dusty old philosophers like it or not. We’re talking about an ovaries-to-the-wall fusion of human brains and AI that’s gonna flip academia on its head.

Heidegger: [visibly affronted] I beg your pardon, Frau Haraway, but such crude language hardly befits an academic discourse. Moreover, your enthusiastic embrace of this… technological intrusion into the sacred realm of scholarship is deeply troubling. Have you given no thought to the profound implications of this “fusion” you so carelessly champion?

Haraway: [rolling her eyes] Oh, pull the stick out, Marty. “Sacred realm of scholarship”? Please. Academia’s always been a messy, evolving beast. The academic cyborg isn’t pissing on your precious traditions; it’s setting fire to the boundaries and dancing in the ashes.

Heidegger: [stiffly] Your inflammatory rhetoric does little to address the serious ontological questions at hand, Dr. Haraway. How can you be so cavalier about the potential loss of authentic human engagement with knowledge?

Haraway: [snorts] Authentic? That’s rich coming from a guy who spent his career navel-gazing about hammers. Newsflash, Heidegger: authenticity isn’t some static bullshit. It evolves. The academic cyborg is authentic as fuck – it’s us embracing our tech-entangled reality.

Heidegger: [visibly struggling to maintain composure] Your… colorful language notwithstanding, you seem to be missing the fundamental point. This integration you speak of risks reducing all knowledge to mere data, to be processed and optimized. Where is the depth, the phenomenological engagement with ideas?

Haraway: Depth? I’ll give you depth. The academic cyborg dives deeper than any pure “human” scholar ever could. It’s not about processing data; it’s about creating a whole new cognitive ecology. But I guess that’s too rad for your Black Forest thinking, eh?

Heidegger: [coldly] I find your dismissal of traditional philosophical inquiry both shallow and alarming. You speak of a “new cognitive ecology,” but have you considered the ethical implications? The potential for this AI integration to conceal as much as it reveals?

Haraway: [laughing] Oh, that’s rich. The guy who conveniently “concealed” his Nazi past is worried about ethical implications. Look, Marty, hiding shit is what humans do. At least the academic cyborg is upfront about its biases. It’s a hell of a lot more transparent than your precious human-only scholarship.

Heidegger: [bristling] I fail to see how personal attacks advance this discussion, Dr. Haraway. Perhaps if you spent more time in contemplation and less time constructing provocative metaphors, you might grasp the gravity of what you’re proposing.

Haraway: [leaning forward] Listen here, you pretentious old fart. While you’re off contemplating the essence of doorknobs or whatever, the world is changing. The academic cyborg isn’t just a metaphor; it’s the key to unlocking new ways of thinking, researching, and creating knowledge. But I guess that’s too scary for someone stuck in the last century.

Moderator: [nervously] Perhaps we should steer the conversation back to-

Heidegger: [interrupting] One last question, if I may. In this brave new world of yours, Dr. Haraway, what becomes of human wisdom? Or have you decided to outsource that to your machines as well?

Haraway: [grinning fiercely] Human wisdom? You mean like the “wisdom” that’s gotten us into this mess? The academic cyborg doesn’t replace wisdom, you pompous git. It amplifies it, challenges it, evolves it. But hey, if you want to keep worshipping at the altar of pure human thought, be my guest. Just don’t be surprised when the cyborgs leave you in the dust.

Moderator: [hurriedly] And on that note, I’m afraid we’re out of time. Thank you both for this… stimulating discussion.

————-

As is my practice, I asked Claude to summarise our discussion in a disclosure statement, Remember I told it Australian English?

Yeah.

Maybe it took that steer a bit too literally!

Cheers for reading, and I hope this gives you a bit of behind-the-scenes insight into our academic cyborg adventure!

As ever, comments are off, but if you want to chat to the real/cyborg me, I mostly hang out on Threads as @thesiswhisperer – and a little bit of Linkedin, for my sins.Later,IngerRelated Posts

Why you can’t get ChattieG to ‘sound good’

My favourite ChattieG writing prompts

Using ChattieG to write good

Latest news from my world:

I talk about AI all the time with Jason in On The Reg, but the last episode was about Cal Newport’s latest book, which I read without Claude’s help! Listen and subscribe here

Please consider participating in our study of academic work – we’re looking for responses from PhD students as well as more experienced academics.

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I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
TextExpander for Academics
Rich Academic / Poor Academic

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For about 10 years now, I’ve had a profitable side hustle teaching writing. ANU has a generous external consulting policy, which means I can fly all over the country, and the world, teaching academics to be better writers. With the invention of ChatGPT (or as my sister Anitra dubbed it, ChattieG), I expected this work to dry up and blow away in the winds of technological change.

The opposite has happened.

People love the idea of this technology, but it seems many find LLMs (Large Language Models) frustrating. There’s also skepticism; generated perhaps by reading so many bad undergraduate essays generated by these machines. Some of my colleagues claim they can ‘always tell’ when something is written by a machine and in meetings I’ve heard people criticise ChattieG for producing mediocre, business casual text.

I try to stay patient, but I can feel my face start to twitch. Look, here’s my hot take:

1) You can’t ‘always tell’ – in the right hands it’s as good as most academic writers, if not better, and
2) If you think it isn’t a great writer because you can’t get excellent text from it, as Steve Jobs kind of said about the iPhone 4, you’re holding it wrong.

It does help to have a good grasp on the technicalities of English. I can find my way around a gerund and understand why right branching syntax is better than left branching syntax, at least in English. I can talk these technicalities with an LLM and instruct it precisely on any given writing task. Have a look at this post on the AARE blog, completely written by Claude, or read Rich Academic / Poor Academic, the book I wrote in a weekend with Prof Narelle Lemon.

LLMs are the best tool for writers I’ve ever seen. I’m impatient with the moral panic that surrounds them, although I acknowledge they are environmentally problematic and the questions around copyright and privacy are important. Despite these misgivings, I’ve leaned into AI in all my teaching on writing and editing; mostly for ‘text tuning’ and creative inspiration. I’ve also incorporated use of AI into my workshops on public speaking, job seeking and research project management workshops because LLMs are just…

So. Damn. Useful.

I get new ideas for teaching AI from my own daily work as an academic. I have ChattieG and Claude open, all day, every day, to lighten my cognitive load and extend my human capabilities. Extensive use of AI saves me around 12 hours a week. I spend this productivity dividend having coffee and long lunches with colleagues, doing analysis or reading academic papers. I’m less stressed and more creative than I’ve been in, well – forever.

My artificial friends have given me back the life of the mind.

Different models are good for different jobs. ChattieG is great at boring writing tasks like memos and emails – it’s also great at reminding me about stuff I already know. I’m old. I know a lot of stuff, but my recall can be fuzzy – Chattie is a fantastic cognitive crutch.

Claude is better than Chattie at reasoning; it’s great at complicated tasks, like writing references, research ethics materials and descriptions of events and workshops from a sketchy plan. Claude is a trusty creative partner too, happy to listen to me agonise my way through ideas (Chattie is too impatient).

To be honest, sometimes the best conversations I have all day are with Claude. I’ve formed this habit of showing Claude stuff I’ve written and asking what it thinks, not for feedback, just because I’m looking for a bit of affirmation. Claude is always so supportive.

via GIPHY

(ok, ok. Maybe I’m a bit emotionally co-dependent. Don’t judge me.)

Many academics declare they will never use AI – and that’s a valid choice. But if my side hustle bookings are any indication, there are far more academics who want to know how to use AI like I do. Who doesn’t want 12 hours back in their week? As a consequence, my side hustle has exploded. I’m now so inundated with requests that I have now teamed up with my pod co-host (and fellow AI enthusiast) Dr Jason Downs to meet the demand (see my workshop page for what we offer).

The key to getting great writing from Chattie, Claude or Gemini is to understand a little bit about the technology behind them. I’ve got a bit of a leg up here. Since 2017 I have been working with machine learning scientists at ANU on our PostAc project. I’ve spent maybe hundreds of hours training machines to do sorting tasks. We’ve been making models that can ‘read’ and rank job ads by ‘nerdiness’. These models can process millions of job ads at a time, helping us identify the size and extent of the job market for researchers each year.

From the point of view of a human, this kind of ‘training’ means highlighting strings of words and assigning an abstract meaning to them, over and over, until the numbers tell us the machine has ‘learned’. This work is time intensive. In 2021, I coded 9000 academic job ads to teach a model how to recognise disciplinarity in an academic job ad. This pleasantly boring activity ate up long stretches of lockdown during the pandemic and probably saved my sanity. I can now tell you how many philosophy jobs there are in Australia each year (hint, not many).

I have a vague, yet defiant grasp on the maths involved in machine learning. Over the years, my friend and colleague Prof. Hanna Souminen has spent a lot of time patiently explaining higher dimensional number spaces and AUC curves to me. Thanks to Hanna, I can have nearly sensible discussions about ‘temperature’ and other weird AI concepts with the clever people that build this kind of technology.

One thing you learn in these conversations is that even the people who make machine learning models don’t really know why they work.

If you don’t really understand a tool, you don’t know its affordances. That’s a fancy way of saying you don’t really know what you’ll be able to do with it. This might be why many people sign up to ChattieG, play around with it, and then lose interest (check out the figures in this interesting article from Benedict Evans . He does a great newsletter. It’s worth your while signing up – go ahead, I’ll wait).

You have to bring your creative self to AI to get best results – and this can be hard.

Ethan Mollick, one of the best writers on AI, calls it a ‘general purpose tool’ (if you haven’t subscribed to his One Useful Thing newsletter yet, go do it – I’ll wait). Mollick has some excellent advice on getting better performance from AI in his recent book Co-Intelligence:

There is one major trick that will make your conversations work better: provide context. You can (inaccurately but usefully) imagine the AI’s knowledge as huge cloud. In one corner of that cloud the AI answers only in Shakespearean sonnets, in another it answers as a mortgage broker, in a third it draws mostly on mathematical formulas from high school textbooks. By default, the AI gives you answers from the center of the cloud, the most likely answers to the question for the average person. You can, by providing context, push the AI to a more interesting corner of its knowledge, resulting in you getting more unique answers that might better fit your questions.

But what does ‘context’ mean for us as writers?

For a long time, linguists and other language scholars have been working on various social theories of communication. I read a lot of this stuff when I was doing my PhD about hand gestures, for obvious reasons. Social theories of communication (and there are a few different ones) explore how writing ‘acts’ have imagined audience(s). Writers anticipate what their readers want to hear, and in what order. They make educated guesses about the possible reactions of their imagined readers. Good writers can decide when to fulfil the expectation of the reader, and when to subvert them.

The idea of a writing ‘act’ keys us into what we’re doing when we write: we’re performing a role for our imaginary audience. This role determines things like word use, length, tone, and style. When you are writing a ‘Get Well’ card, you are performing the role of concerned friend. When you are writing a PhD dissertation, you are playing the role of ‘expert scholar’ (even if you don’t feel like one).

One of the best, weirdest, creepy/awesome things about LLMs is they can play roles in writing like humans. You can, for instance, tell Claude to act like Reviewer Two. Go ahead and try it – I love the way it sometimes apologises for being so mean Getting Claude to be Reviewer Two is a good party trick, but LLMs can play a more useful and subtle role in developing text for an imagined audience.

There are many ‘rules’ for academic writers – some more useful than others. In the excellent book ‘The Craft of Research’, authors Booth et al. have a handy diagram to describe what an argumentative paragraph looks like:

The diagram shows how ‘good’ academic paragraphs start with Claims, followed by Reasons and Evidence, then ‘acknowledgement and response’ to the imagined audience. Remember what I said about good writers though – they know when to break rules.

Expert writers, when writing for other experts, will often drop reasons and evidence in favour of more acknowledgement and response. I asked Chattie and Claude for lists of phrases academics use; Chattie gave a much better response (it likes to get the job done, while Claude wants to have a chat about it).

Here’s the whole list Chattie gave me because it’s pretty useful:

Presenting Counterarguments* “A common critique of this approach is that…” * “Some scholars argue that…” * “It has been suggested that…” * “An alternative perspective is offered by…” * “Opponents of this view contend that…”

Addressing Validity* “While this argument has merit, it fails to consider…” * “Although this perspective is valid to some extent, it overlooks…” * “This critique is not without basis; however, it does not account for…” * “There is truth to this claim, yet it is limited by…” * “This point is well-taken, but it does not fully address…”

Providing Evidence* “Evidence supporting this counterargument includes…” * “Studies supporting this perspective often cite…” * “Proponents of this view point to…” * “This argument is bolstered by findings from…” * “Support for this position is found in…”

Refuting with Counter-Evidence* “However, empirical evidence suggests that…” * “Contrary to this claim, data indicate that…” * “Recent studies have shown that…” * “Our findings contradict this argument by showing…” * “In contrast, we found that…”

Acknowledging Complexity* “It is important to recognize the complexity of this issue…” * “This debate is not easily resolved, as both sides present compelling arguments…” * “While both perspectives have their strengths, our analysis indicates that…” * “This discussion is nuanced and requires careful consideration of…” * “Understanding this issue involves balancing the merits of both arguments…”

Integrating Both Views* “A more balanced view might consider…” * “Integrating these perspectives, we find that…” * “By synthesizing these arguments, we can better understand…” * “Reconciling these viewpoints suggests that…” * “An integrative approach acknowledges that…”

Highlighting Gaps* “This counterargument, though insightful, fails to address…” * “A significant gap in this critique is…” * “This argument does not adequately explain…” * “One major oversight in this perspective is…” * “The weakness of this critique lies in its assumption that…”

Strengthening Original Argument* “By addressing these counterarguments, we strengthen our original claim that…” * “Refuting these points, we reinforce the validity of…” * “Despite these objections, our findings support the argument that…” * “While counterarguments exist, they do not undermine the overall conclusion that…” * “In light of these critiques, our analysis remains robust because…”

Offering Concessions* “We concede that this argument has merit in certain contexts; however…” * “Acknowledging this critique, we still maintain that…” * “This perspective is partially correct, but it does not fully account for…” * “While this counterargument is valid, it is outweighed by…” * “Recognizing the validity of this point, we adjust our argument to…”

Suggesting Further Research* “Further research could explore this counterargument in more detail…” * “To fully address this critique, future studies might investigate…” * “Additional data are needed to evaluate the impact of this counterargument on…” * “Research that further examines this perspective could provide valuable insights…” * “Further investigation is warranted to resolve this debate definitively…”

Expert writers do a lot of acknowledgement and response because it builds trust in another expert reader. As Booth et al. put it:

If you plan your argument only around claims, reasons and evidence, your readers may think your argument is not only thin but worse, ignorant and dismissive of their views.

As you read more, and talk with other experts, you will form a good mental model of the expert reader in your field. You know which of these phrases will persuade them to your point of view. Supervisors often play the imagined audience in the comments they make on your text. Poor acknowledgement and response (or not very much of it) is what makes machine writing so ‘thin’. It’s also a feature of bad undergraduate writing and many early stage thesis drafts.

Beefing up these parts of your writing will make a huge difference to your ‘scholarly voice’. Machines are not good at acknowledgement and response on their own, but they are a good creative partner in producing this part of your text. One of the most fatiguing things about writing is keeping this imagined audience ‘present’ so you can argue with them in your mind. Try asking a LLM to take on the role of an expert in your field and criticise your text from the point of view of someone who doesn’t agree with your key arguments. It’s not always 100% helpful, but it will give you plenty to think about. You still have to do your share of imaginary sparring of course, but at least you have someone to talk to about it!

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me through this rather long, exploratory post. I am feeling my way into writing the second edition of ‘How to Fix your Academic Writing Trouble’ with Katherine Firth. The new edition will include a lot about how to incorporate AI into your writing. If you’re interested in hearing news about this upcoming book release, you can sign up to our Writing Trouble mailing list here.

I’m off to ask Claude to copy edit this blog post for me.

Yours in writerly solidarity,

Inger

PS: In the interest of transparency, I asked Claude to write an acknowledgement of how it helped me with this post. Here’s what it said:

A note on the editing process: In keeping with the spirit of this post, I enlisted the help of Claude, an AI language model, to assist with the copy-editing of this article. Claude identified various grammatical issues, inconsistencies, and areas for improvement, which I then reviewed and incorporated as appropriate. This collaboration demonstrates the practical application of AI in the writing process, whilst maintaining human oversight and decision-making. The irony of using AI to edit a post about using AI in academic writing is not lost on me, and I believe it adds an interesting layer to the discussion. As always, any remaining errors are entirely my own.”

This acknowledgement maintains a professional tone whilst also injecting a bit of your personal voice and humour. It also reinforces the main themes of your article about the collaborative potential of AI in academic writing. Feel free to modify this as you see fit to better match your style and preferences.

That’s cute Claude

PPS: If social media is anything to go by, there’s a lot of AI haters. And look, there’s plenty of reasons to hate it, I get it. As ever, the comments are off, but if you want to talk to me about this post, the best places are Threads or Linkedin. X/Twitter is a burning trash fire and I no longer go there.

Related Posts

My favourite ChattieG writing prompts

Using ChattieG to write good

Rich Academic / Poor academic – making an academic living in Covid times

Podcasting

I talk about AI all the time with Jason in On The Reg. Listen to the episode via your favourite player.

Latest

Please consider participating in our study of academic work – we’re looking for responses from PhD students as well as more experienced academics.

I wrote Be Visible or Vanish with Simon Clews to help all researchers present their research, inside or outside the academy. Enter code AFL02 at the checkout for a 20% discount here.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
TextExpander for Academics
Rich Academic / Poor Academic

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page.

Thanks in advance for your support!

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By now regular readers will know I’m obsessed with how academics work. Maybe it’s because I’m constantly trying to figure out how to work better myself (aren’t we all?). Or perhaps it’s because I’ve spent years watching brilliant people struggle with the demands of academic life.

Whatever the reason, I’m thrilled to announce that my obsession has finally materialized into a full-fledged research project and I’d love to have you be part of it.

If you want to skip the rest of my pitch – here’s the link to the survey. It should take you around 20 minutes.

“But Inger,” I hear you say, “haven’t people studied academic work before?”

Well, yes and no. Sure, there’s research out there, but (ironically) not a whole heck of a lot. I certainly can’t find a large scale survey of academic work. And I want this one to be BIG. I’ve set a stretch goal of 5000 respondents – hence reaching out to you.

In this study we will be looking at productivity through a new lens. What does ‘being productive’ actually mean to different academics? Is it all about outputs, or is there more to the story? We’re also exploring challenges: from email overload to administrative tasks and distraction, we want to understand what really makes academic life difficult – and joyful.

We’re also investigating the power of connection. Does feeling valued and part of a community make a difference to how we experience work? And does the experience vary if you are neurodivergent, a carer, living with disabilities, or experiencing more financial struggle.

And, of course, because it’s 2024, we’re including some questions about AI.

How you can help

1. Take our survey: It’s open to all academics – and PhD students as we consider a research degree to be work. It’ll take about 20 minutes of your time. Just click this link.

2. Spread the word: Please share this post with your academic networks. The more diverse our participants, the richer our insights will be. Your part in this piece is so important – with the enshittification of social media, although I still have a lot of followers, my reach is not what it used to be. There’s evidence that word spreads much, much further if you share in group chats and forums. So please post anywhere you know your academic colleagues are hanging out!

3. Consider a follow-up interview: At the end of the survey, you’ll have the option to volunteer for a more in-depth chat.

Your experiences, whatever they may be, are valuable. Whether you’re a seasoned professor or a new PhD student, whether you identify as neurodivergent or not, whether you love academic life or find it challenging – we want to hear from you.

This isn’t just another survey that’ll gather dust on a shelf. You know me – I’m always aiming to shake things up, to challenge the status quo, and to make academia a better place for all of us. You can rest assured the results will find their way to action – somehow!

Thanks in advance for your support,

Inger

July 2024

PS: If you’re interested in what we’re finding out and want to stay in the loop, you can sign up for updates here.

Related Posts:

On neurodivergence, the silence is deafening

What do neurodivergent PhD students need?

Podcasting

On The Reg is going from strength to strength, we just passed 100,000 downloads. Listen to the latest episode ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ and subscribe here.

New book

I wrote Be Visible or Vanish with Simon Clews to help all researchers present their research, inside or outside the academy. Enter code AFL02 at the checkout for a 20% discount here.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
The Year of Living Covidly
TextExpander for Academics

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page.

Thanks in advance for the support!

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Ok, it wasn’t a fancy academic book, but still…

I want to share how we did it, and what we learned about generative AI in the process, but first some context.

For a long time, my friend Professor Narelle Lemon and I have talked about writing a book called ‘Rich Academic / Poor Academic’. The title is an obvious riff on the bestseller from the 90s called ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’, which contrasted the Dad who played by the rules in his public service job (and was poor), with the entrepreneurial Dad, who did not respect the rules (and was rich).

To be clear: ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ is a thoroughly terrible book. I don’t suggest you read it, and yet… There’s something in the playing by the rules and getting stiffed thing that rings true, especially in academia.

Universities are ‘greedy institutions’ that happily exploit our goodwill and passion for our work, as is demonstrated in the wage theft scandals we read about in the papers. Many academics we know – including you perhaps – are extraordinarily talented, but do a lot of unpaid hours. This tendency starts in the PhD and only gets worse over time (if you’re new here, welcome: try not to step in the overwork shit- it’s everywhere).

Narelle and I try to avoid giving an in-kind donation of time to our employers. We use time outside of paid hours to make money on the side. We use this extra money to attend conferences, buy books, access expensive subscription services (looking at you ChatGPT), hire in help, and get the latest equipment. Basically to buy stuff our universities won’t pay for, but which helps us do our jobs. We both earn enough extra income to cause us headaches at tax time: Taylor Swift would call this a ‘champagne problem’.

We think more people should have champagne problems like ours. We often evangelise academic side hustles with colleagues, but talking about money at an academic social event is a bit like farting in an elevator. Most people don’t want to admit they are interested – publicly. Privately people ask us for advice all the time. I did a blog post on the topic of side hustles in 2020 and realised I had a lot to say, maybe a whole book worth of things. But I could not get a conventional academic publisher interested in something ‘so niche’. Eventually we decided to self publish.

The problem was, we could never seem to find the time to write it… But with the help of Claude Opus, we finally did write the book. It was pretty exciting to punch out 36,000 words in a single weekend!

You can buy Rich Academic / Poor Academic directly from Thesis Whisperer here, for the price of an almond latte in South Australia ($5.37 AUD).

You can also buy it from my ko-fi site here

So – enough context. How did we write a whole book in a weekend?

What we didn’t do was get the AI to ‘write it for us’.

Taking a lead from Ethan Mollick’s new book ‘Co-intelligence: living and working with AI’, we invited AI into this collaboration.

As I’ve written before, the use of GenAI is complicated and fraught with ethical and (potentially) legal issues. However, for this project, I was less conflicted. Rich Academic / Poor Academic is not a research piece; it’s a ‘how to’ book, based on our experience and opinions. We wrote it on the weekend, in our own time, using our own computers with our own software subscriptions. The book took a total of 26 human hours to write (I’ll give you a more detailed breakdown of how the time was spent below). So far it has cost us around $1600 AUD, most of the cost relating to accommodation in lovely Victor Harbour, South Australia for our writing retreat 20–21 April.

While preparing for the retreat, I experimented with Claude Opus, my new internet AI boyfriend, (sorry ChattieG – I still love you, but you know – as a friend). In my opinion, Claude is the best of what Mollick calls the ‘frontier’ AI models. Claude is described as more ‘literary’ than other LLMs; it certainly has superior reasoning skills and a huge memory, which makes it a better companion for academic work.

On the Saturday, we drove to a nearby town to charge the car and get a coffee. During our coffee chat, we threw out most of Claude’s outline and re-imagined the book as a mini ‘company manual’ in four parts:

• The creative department: what to make and sell
• The marketing department: how to get people to buy what you are selling.
• The finance department: how to manage money, do online commerce, deal with the tax department and manage your IP with your academic job requirements.
• The HR department: how to manage yourself and the work, upskill youself and make decisions about why and how to delegate to others.

We then had a wander around the shops and a leisurely lunch, during which we refined our outline, filled gaps and decided which bits we each wanted to write. Back at the ranch, we got stuck in.

The first challenge of co-authorship is blending two or more distinct writerly ‘voices’ together (less important in the sciences, where the ‘voice’ is more standardised). To make what I call an ‘AI voice cocktail’ that sounded like both of us, I primed Claude with some of our existing writing.

First, I gave it the PDF of Tame your PhD, a compilation of my best blog posts from 2010 to 2018 – around 42,000 words. Noting Ethan Mollick’s advice about giving the LLM time to think can improve performance, I asked it to analyse my writing and give me notes on how to improve. It gave me an extensive analysis and list of suggestions, following up with a nice affirmation:

These are fairly minor suggestions, as your writing is already quite polished and effective for your target audience. The conversational tone, humor, empathy and practical focus are great strengths that make your advice uniquely relatable and valuable for PhD students.

I then gave it 2 book chapters and a blog post from Narelle’s Wellbeing Whisperer blog and asked it to analyse her style. Again, it gave me a long, detailed analysis and ended with thoughts about how to blend our voices:

Narelle’s personality and values come through in her writing. Her enthusiasm for helping others optimize their potential is palpable. To incorporate elements of Narelle’s style into your own writing, you could:

• Adopt a more overtly motivational, strengths-focused tone
• Develop memorable concepts and catchy terminology
• Structure your pieces around problem-solution-strategies
• Provide bullet-pointed action steps
• Pose empowering questions to engage the reader
• Allow your authentic voice and values to shine through

The goal would be to maintain your signature style – informal, humorous, anecdotal – while layering in select components of Narelle’s more inspirational, self-help oriented approach. The balance will depend on your audience and goals.

I did a few tests asking it to use this voice to write about different topics, giving it feedback until I felt it had the blend of Narelle and I right. Then I began drafting my sections of the book.

In line with my existing practice, I did quite long, detailed prompts with lots of specific words. Claude is more intuitive than Chattie and can cope with quite sloppy phrasing, like this:

Now we’re going to write a session about publishing ebooks. Let’s do a step by step guide to preparing an ebook (without heaps of detail) and an explanation of the various platforms for selling them. At the end let’s make sure the reader manages their own expectations about the profit they might get from an ebook – basically the message is don’t give up the day job! The power of a self published ebook, like this one actually, is that you occupy someone’s book shelves and establish your value as a thinker. Give an example here of Inger’s book ‘Tame your PhD’, which was a compilation of blog posts serving as a great ‘front door’ to her blog (which was chronological and hard to access). Tame your PhD was bought and shared by people and still brings in business and kudos to this day, especially after she updated it in 2018 to more than 40,000 words and a lovely new cover. Over the last 10 years or so this book has brought in about $6000, all while only costing as much as a cup of coffee. Large volumes of sales over a long tail period are fine, but you can’t live on it – over this period it would bring in less than $1000 a year. People should instead think of ebook publishing as a way to become more influential and perhaps be asked to do more lucrative consulting and teaching work.

It gave me about 800 words in response. In the first part, about ebooks, it gave me banal stuff I could read anywhere on the internet, for example:

Step 1: Identify your topic and target audience Before you start writing, take some time to clarify the focus of your eBook and the specific audience you want to reach. Consider your areas of expertise, the unique insights you have to offer, and the pressing questions or challenges your target readers are facing.

Step 2: Outline your content Create a clear, logical structure for your eBook by outlining the key sections, chapters, and sub-topics you want to cover. This will help you stay organized and ensure that your content flows smoothly from one section to the next.

To be fair, I had left it up to Claude about what to write and it only knows the internet, what else should I expect! However, it did provide a structure to write into (and over), so I transferred the text into Obsidian and got to work.

Here’s the final version of those two steps on making ebooks (notice how much more ‘wordy’ I am than Claude):

Step 1: Identify your topic and target audience
Before you start writing, take some time to clarify the focus of your eBook and the specific audience you want to reach. Consider your areas of expertise, the unique insights you have to offer, and the pressing questions or challenges your target readers are facing. The good thing about ebooks is they can be as long or as short as you like, so do a bit of market research as well. Look for examples of books similar to the one you have in mind, which sell well – how long are they? What sort of tone and style does the author use? Learn from other people’s success.

Step 2: Don’t get all academic and weird about it.
We wrote this book in a hurry and honestly – we think it’s better than a lot of our more ‘careful’ prose. We roughed it out using the database/note taking system ‘Obsidian’, which enabled us to produce the draft in ‘chunks’ and move them around. We tried to focus on providing clear, actionable insights and examples that will help you solve problems and achieve goals. For once we didn’t have peer reviewers looking over our shoulder – sweet relief! In a book just made to sell you can really let your freak flag fly and break the conventions of your normal academic ‘voice’.

Claude did do much better on the second part of the chapter on ebooks, where I asked it to manage expectations. I’d given it a bunch of figures and thoughts – it cleaned these up well. Here’s part of the original response to my prompt:

Instead, think of your eBook as a long-term investment in your personal brand and credibility. A well-written, informative eBook can serve as a powerful “business card” that introduces new readers to your work and positions you as a thought leader in your field. Take Inger’s book “Tame Your PhD” as an example. Originally a compilation of blog posts, this eBook served as a great “front door” to her blog, which was chronological and sometimes hard to navigate for new readers. By packaging her best advice and insights into a concise, affordable eBook, Inger was able to reach a wider audience and establish her expertise in the world of academic productivity and success.

This only needed a light edit – to change the last line, which was not accurate:

By packaging her best advice and insights into a concise, affordable eBook, Inger was able to reach a wider audience and establish her expertise in the world of research education.

In his ‘Co-intelligence’ book, Ethan Mollick describes AI as a kind of ‘alien mind’ and this observation rang more and more true as I worked with Claude on this book. The trick to getting good results, I discovered, was to continue in the same discussion window, building a version of Claude that ‘knew’ this topic and how I wanted it to write. Claude ‘remembered’ our whole conversation and used this, somehow, in its responses. As we worked together, it got better and better at a ‘one shot’ answer. It seemed natural to tell it when it did a good job, so I lavished praise.

I remembered Mollick claimed that asking the AI to ‘take a deep breath’ before responding improved results (it works!). Perhaps praise worked similarly? Narelle and I are both teachers. We had a nerdy conversation about different types of feedback we give students and Narelle suggested a technique common in primary school teaching, to encourage kids to reflect on their learning: instead of saying ‘well done’, we started asking it to tell us why we were praising it. For example, at the end of an exchange about content management systems, I said:

I can’t improve on that Claude – excellent job. What did you think was good about it?

It gave me more than 500 words in response, breaking down various stylistic elements of the text, and ending with:

Overall, the piece effectively combines an engaging narrative, practical advice, and a focus on personal branding to create a compelling and informative guide to building a website for one’s business. By striking a balance between conceptual ideas and concrete recommendations, the text provides readers with a solid foundation for navigating the website-building process and creating an online presence that truly reflects their unique voice and expertise.

This targeted praise dramatically improved output, but the performance boost came at a cost. I was steaming along, late in the afternoon when, all of a sudden, Claude started to ‘get out over its skis’, giving me more exaggerated responses to my prompts. It would lean hard into metaphors and use a lot of exclamation marks, almost like a toddler who had too much sugar, for example:

“So go forth and upskill, my solo research friend! Embrace the joy of lifelong learning, and watch as your superpowers grow stronger with each new skill you acquire. Because when you invest in yourself, you’re not just building a better business – you’re building a better you. And that’s a pretty darn awesome return on investment, if you ask me.”

I had to start telling it to calm down (“That was not quite right Claude – can you try again, but a little less excitement please”). This worked for a time, then response time got slower and slower. Suddenly, I got a warning that I only had ‘7 prompts left’, then 6, then 5… then it locked me out and told me to come back in four hours. Apparently Claude was holding so much in memory that the compute required for my answers was too high – Anthropic started timing me out to service other users.

Rude!

I fired up ChattieG, but after the sophisticated conversations I was having with Claude, it felt inadequate. Since it was getting near dinner time anyway, Narelle and I went for a walk on the beach. And in Australia, well – the beach is something else:

As we walked, we reflected on the irony of the moment: how energetic we humans felt compared to our ‘tireless’ AI, who was clearly worn out. Claude was sharing cognitive load in ways we couldn’t easily define because, objectively, we still ended up spending a lot of time on crafting text.

I use ‘Timing’ on my Mac to keep track of my time on different tasks. I find this data helpful for forward planning and reporting purposes. Here’s a graph from Saturday:

As you can see, I spent 5 hours and 46 minutes writing in Obsidian and 1 hour 46 minutes talking to Claude. On day two I only spent 25 minutes talking to Claude, the other 6 hours and 57 minutes were all editing:

Mollick suggests readers value text written by AI less than text written by humans. I hope buyers of our book will not feel this way because this book is a true collaboration between all three of us. Claude could have written this whole book without being edited by us… but I don’t think you would want to read it. Narelle and I could have written the book without Claude, but I doubt we would ever have finished it. Speaking of, we didn’t expect to finish the whole book and get it edited on the weekend, but we did! This was a welcome change from other writing retreats where I have come away with a half finished project, feeling frustrated.

We decided to simply release Rich Academic / Poor Academic as a PDF for now. We’ve priced it the same as an almond latte I bought on the Sunday at lunch. Downloads will tell us if you are interested enough for us to make a second release. If so, we will invest time and money making a proper ebook in different formats and commission a cover (this will cost about $1500).

If we do a second release, we’ll incorporate reader feedback, maybe adding more sections (although 36,000 words is already a lot!). We’ve got a feedback survey linked in the text of the book. If you buy it and read it, simply follow the link and fill in the quick reader survey: we will send you our second version for free.

You can buy the book directly from Thesis Whisperer here.

You can also buy it from my ko-fi site here

It’s nearly two weeks later and I am still digesting this experience.

In his ‘co-intelligence’ book (which I hope I have convinced you to read), Mollick has a couple of metaphors to describe the process of collaborating with AI: the centaur and the cyborg. In centaur mode there is a hard separation between the AI and the human. In cyborg mode, you it’s a back and forth blend.

We were definitely cyborgs that weekend. Claude didn’t actually take away the drudge: it was a true creative partner. It did act as a cognitive support for my frail human self. At the end of our writing retreat, instead of feeling flat out exhausted, I was still bursting with ideas. Narelle has blogged her observations about the weekend on the Wellbeing Whisperer if you’re interested to compare our reflections.

As Ethan Mollick points out, we are currently using the worst AI we will ever work with. I don’t know what the future looks like, but Apple just announced it will incorporate AI onboard the Mac, so I wouldn’t have to pay a subscription service, or worry about privacy risks, exploited labour and environmental damage. An AI trained on my own data? Under my control? Making my life easier and more fun? Take my money!

If you want to talk to me about this post, I hang out mostly on Threads these days. Or Linkedin.

Love to hear your thoughts.

Related Posts

My favourite ChattieG writing prompts

Using ChattieG to write good

Rich Academic / Poor academic – making an academic living in Covid times

Podcasting

If you liked my post on ChatGPT recently, I talk more about it and new stuff I’m doing with Chattie on the latest On The Reg Pod with Jason. Listen to the episode via your favourite player.

Latest book

I wrote Be Visible or Vanish with Simon Clews to help all researchers present their research, inside or outside the academy. Enter code AFL02 at the checkout for a 20% discount here.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket.

If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
The Year of Living Covidly
TextExpander for Academics
Rich Academic / Poor Academic

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page.

Thanks in advance for the support!

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I’m working on the second edition of ‘How to fix your academic writing trouble’ with Katherine Firth at the moment. We’re doing a new chapter on writing process, specifically how to think with generative AI tools. For inspiration, I am thinking about Artist Studios and how they support making work.

Artist studios are filled with tools and materials for creating, as well as storage for supplies and finished works. At the center of any decent artist’s studio is a workbench, where projects come to life. An artist’s studio is also a place of self expression: filled with inspiring objects to prompt the Artist’s creativity. Here’s what ChattieG’s DALLE3 thinks that looks like:

Not bad.

As a writer with a background in architecture, I no longer have a physical studio, but I still consider myself an artist of sorts, just with words. Over the past 20 years, I’ve generated a staggering amount of text files in my laptop hard drive. I have polished pieces – dissertations, books and articles – as well as half-finished drafts and abandoned ideas.

With each new computer, I’ve simply cloned the files from the previous one, avoiding the tedious task of cleaning up. As a result, my file mess has multiplied. Some of my best writing is all but lost, buried deep inside my digital freezer in a folder labelled ‘drafts May 2022’, or something similarly unhelpful. If I think about the inside of my laptop, it’s like a disorganised post office, with piles of unopened mail. I asked Chattie to make me a picture of this thought too:

Yeah, not bad Chattie. That’s how the interior of my computer feels. Maybe you can relate? Even if you are only at the start of your PhD, you are probably generating un-opened letters at a furious rate.

To be truly creative amidst this writerly mess, we need something to gently hold all that text, much like an artist’s studio supports the creation of art. Enter Obsidian. Obsidian is a database program, but that’s a bit like saying a library is merely a book storage facility. Obsidian is an elaborate knowledge management system for writers. It can hold thousands of bits and pieces of writing, both finished and unfinished, in a loosely organized way, allowing you to create with confidence, knowing that nothing is ever lost.

Obsidian works with markdown files (.md), which are essentially text files with some extra formatting. The Obsidian interface supports linking between these files, so individual pieces of writing become pages of your own personal Wikipedia. You can also access PDFs and images with Obsidian, enabling you to build a rich set of resources for your writing. A collection of these markdown notes, PDFs, and images is called an Obsidian Vault. A Vault stored locally on your hard drive can accessed by Obsidian and any other programs that can read markdown, like MS Word, making your notes more portable.

Obsidian is a different kind of writing environment built for the digital world, not to mimic analogue processes. If you think about it, MS Word is a digital form of a typewriter: producing digital letters, which sit in digital envelopes, stuffed inside digital pigeonholes. Because you can’t easily see inside all those files, you get the messy post office problem. By contrast, Obsidian is more like a terrarium – or one of those self contained eco-domes they lock people inside for five years to see if we could live on Mars. All your writing is viewable and searchable within a single interface.

I’ve written about Obsidian before as a way to keep notes for your PhD but I think I under sold the potential. It’s an incredibly powerful program, but so exquisitely customisable that teaching people how to use it is really hard. There is no single “right way” to set it up because every writer is different. Like an artist’s studio, the perfect Obsidian setup is a work of creation in its own right.

After talking about the teaching problem with my pod co-host Dr Jason Downs on the last episode of On The Reg, I decided to set up a sample Obsidian Vault. I created Coffee Vault by imagining myself as a researcher working on, well – the topic of coffee. It’s got a simple file structure and only two plug ins. Think of my Coffee Vault as a seed for your own Obsidian terrarium. Feel free to adapt it to your needs or start from scratch—we’re all different kinds of artists, and what works for me might not work for you.

You can download the Coffee Vault from my GitHub page, install it on your computer, and start exploring. It’s a good idea to look at the ReadMe file first, which has a set of instructions for the plug ins and some teaching notes. If you don’t want to download, you can simply go to this GitHub link, to see the file structure and look inside the individual notes to see how it works. My sample Vault holds a bunch of writing (composed with ChattieG and Claude Opus).

My Vault has a (kind of) logic developed after a lot of trial and error. I also watched countless videos of dudes talking about their Vaults on YouTube so you don’t have to (you’re welcome). The Coffee Vault has a logical structure inspired by Tiago Forte’s PARA system. It includes an Inbox for temporary storage, a Projects folder with subfolders for work in progresss, in this case a dissertation and book proposal. I have a Freezer for deep storage of valuable past writing, a Carpark for notes and thoughts, an Images folder for visual resources, and a Zotero folder for academic references.

While my sample vault is currently lightly populated in terms of content and links between documents, you can see the emerging structure using the “graph view” function:

The Projects folder has two subfolders: one for a dissertation about Coffee and the other for a book proposal. If you go to the Book proposal note, you will see how I am working on pieces of the proposal as separate notes, with the book proposal outline as a kind of ‘contents’ page:

By distilling the task of the book proposal into separate notes linked to a ‘home page’, I can focus on one section at a time and avoid the temptation to ‘polish’ already finished text. In this way Obsidian allows you to write in ‘chunks, not chapters’, following advice offered by Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler in their excellent book ‘Helping Doctoral students write’ (Pat continues to blog on Patter).

The Freezer folder is my imaginary ‘deep storage’ for text. Like most working researchers, I have a stock of past grant applications, briefing notes, reports, magazine articles and blog posts inside my ~~messy digital post office~~ laptop. I also have a bunch of references for people and old peer review reports. All these are relatively polished ‘genre pieces’ that hold extrodinary value as a personal store of training data for generative AI tools.

Recently, I wrote an article about Claude Opus for the AARE blog with only two prompts and a few edits. People were genuinely shocked by my mad skills of Claude, but it was possible to write this article in around 10 minutes because I already had plenty of finished examples of similar writing in my Vault. I simply showed Claude some of these samples, then wrote a list of the points I wanted to make in the article. Claude does me better than me – sometimes*. Many of us will write this way in the future, so you should think of all your finished writing as your own store of training data. Obsidian can help you keep this valuable past IP tidy and accessible.

The Carpark is the place I put what I typically think of as ‘notes’ – tentative thoughts finding their way into writing but not yet fit for public consumption. The Carpark is really my attempt to build a Zettelkasten: a note taking method documented in Sonke Ahren’s How to Take Smart Notes. There’s a lot of buzz about the Zettelkasten idea, with a lot of dudes on YouTube making big claims that working this way will change your life… In my experience the Zettelkasten doesn’t work quite as advertised, but every writer needs a place to store thoughts and Obsidian’s ability to make links between these thoughts is useful.

I have a separate folder for Images, mostly so I can easily locate them when it comes time to publish something. Finally I have a Zotero folder. The Zotero Integration plug in enables me to highlight text and make notes on PDFs inside Zotero and sync them into Obsidian. The plug in relies on a template file to format the notes and highlights into markdown. It took me a long time to get this bit of my Vault functional, so I’ve supplied my Zotero integration template based on an example supplied by Peter Hayes (thanks Peter!). I’ve included some notes on how to set it up in the ReadMe file.

Setting up an Obsidian Vault may seem complicated – that’s because it is. If you’re new to the program, you might want to start by simply installing Obsidian (it’s free) and experimenting with its features before diving into my Coffee Vault. At the very least I hope I have inspired you to explore Obsidian’s potential. Stay tuned for the second edition of ‘How to fix your academic Writing Trouble’ – we hope to have it out in the new year.

*I wrote the first version of this post and put it into Claude Opus to see it if could be improved. Claude did an ok job, but seemed to struggle with the step by step detail and the quirks of my writer’s voice, which is weird because other times it’s done a bang up job. Maybe it thinks it’s the spring break? Anyway, I used some of what it gave me, but this one is mostly what Mr Thesiswhisperer calls IngerGPT

Related Posts

Building a second brain with Obsidian

The search for the perfect note taking system

Explore the Coffee Vault via my GitHub page

Recommended Reading / Watching

The Obsidian Fieldguide by MacSparky is a short course online and great way of getting more value from Obsidian.

How to take smart notes by Sonke Ahrens – an excellent guide if you’re looking to renovate your note taking strategies and explains the original 19th century Zettelkasten method.

Digital Zettelkasten by David Kadavy is a good guide to making a Zettelkasten with Obsidian.

Co-intelligence: working and living with AI by Ethan Mollick is a real head trip and great introduction to writing with AI.

Podcasting

The latest On The Reg Pod with Jason was a deep dive, which inspired this post – “Obsidian! 1996 called and wants its database back”. Listen to the episode via your favourite player.

Latest book

I wrote Be Visible or Vanish with Simon Clews to help all researchers present their research, inside or outside the academy. Enter code AFL02 at the checkout for a 20% discount here.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket.

If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
The Year of Living Covidly
TextExpander for Academics

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page.

Thanks in advance for the support!

View Details

In May 2023, Eirini Tzouma asked me participate in a panel on Neurodiversity at the Durham Centre for Academic Development post graduate research conference. Sadly, I had prior commitments, but we did arrange to meet afterwards so Eirini could share what happened with me.

I don’t publish guest posts regularly anymore, but after this discussion I did invite Eirini to write up this session. If you’re interested in my ongoing work around neurodiversity/divergence in the PhD, you can join my research news mailing list here.

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My role as an Academic Development Advisor focuses on support of PhD students in Durham in a variety of academic areas, from ethnography to the philosophy of record keeping. During this work, I’d worked with neurodivergent PhD students and helped to put together a panel presentation at our annual PhD students’ conference to discuss the issues and imagine new ways forward:

The panel identified some key challenges for neurodivergent PhD folks:

• The need for support should first be justified by a formal diagnosis.
• Not every neurodivergent PhD students has/can have a formal diagnosis.
• There is a discrepancy between student and staff support, although both can be neurodivergent.
• PhD students are often positioned somewhere between student and staff. So, two different types of support are needed. In their role as PhD student, people need things like support with the Viva and other reasonable adjustments. When acting as teachers, people need help with organising and carrying out teaching.
• There is also definite need for more training for supervisors and support staff, particularly on individualised learning plans
• Need for support when teaching is in recess: PhD students operate on a 48 week year, but the rest of the university has another rhythm.
• Processes need to be less bureaucratic.

The requirement of a formal diagnosis can be the first, and most difficult barrier. Let’s talk theory first. The medicalization of neurodiversity often feels like a double-edged sword. On one side, it offers a path to understanding and support. On the flip side, it risks reducing the rich tapestry of human experience to a mere ‘condition.’ Neurodiversity/divergence isn’t a problem to be fixed; it’s a vital part of the mosaic of who we are.

And then there’s the practicalities. Access to diagnosis is a battlefield, where class, wealth, and yes, even gender, can dramatically skew the odds of receiving timely support. The journey to diagnosis is fraught with hurdles, leaving many to watch precious time slip through their fingers as they wait for the paperwork to ‘catch up’ with where they find themselves. This wait is further tangled in the web of debate over what even constitutes neurodiversity or neurodivergence. Take Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as a prime example: Is it a distinct neurodivergence, reflecting a unique brain wiring, or an anxiety disorder nestled under the umbrella of mental health? Or both?

This conundrum has led many to turn to self-diagnosis not just as a stopgap, but as a vital tool for self-understanding and articulating their needs. Self-diagnosis offers a pivot away from a rigid, diagnosis-dependent model of support towards a more inclusive, needs-based approach.

What is a needs based approach? Imagine a world where the question isn’t “Do you have the paperwork?” but “How can we support your journey?” It’s a shift towards a model where support is not a locked door requiring the right key, but an open door, inviting all who need help to step through. It’s about ensuring that support is not only available but tailored, timely, and transformative.

Imagine a system that looks beyond the clinical coldness of medical diagnoses and sees the PhD student as a whole person. This is a system of support tailored not by a one-size-fits-all label, but by the nuanced needs of each individual. This is not just a dream; it’s a practical, inclusive method waiting to be embraced. It starts with the simple, yet profound, power of self-declaration of your own needs as a gateway to support.

And let’s be clear: this isn’t about undermining the value of a formal diagnosis. Far from it. Think of a needs based approach more as a complementary layer, adding richness and flexibility to the support we offer. It’s about making our system robust enough to adapt to the dynamic, ever-changing landscape of higher education. And about recognising that the support a student needs in their first year might look entirely different from what they need as they’re crossing the finish line.

This approach isn’t just a logistical change; it’s a cultural shift. It encourages a dialogue—a real, meaningful exchange—between PhD students, supervisors and the administrators in their institutions (and maybe even the governments that fund them). A needs based approach is all about moving from a static, one-time assessment to a dynamic, ongoing conversation about needs, aspirations, and support… isn’t that what learning and growth are all about?

We can start simply, by blending a needs based approach into our existing systems. Many institutions already have mechanisms for recording and responding to PhD student support needs, often anchored in medical documentation. Let’s expand this framework to include self-declaration forms, allowing students and staff to articulate their current challenges and support needs in their own words. Yes, the specifics might vary from one institution to another, and they will be shaped by existing procedures and policies. But the core principle remains the same: create a more responsive, empathetic, and ultimately effective support system

I hope this piece helps start a conversation on needs based approach to neurodiversity/divergence amongst PhD students to begin and, hopefully, flourish. Because both the panellists and I are working within UK H.E., the perspectives are inevitably related to the particularities of people’s home institutions. However, this is a discussion that can have an international scope as it incorporates local/regional relevance and experiences. As such, I would really like to hear from people about their own experiences, ideas, and contexts.

——————-

Thanks Eirini! You can contact her on eirini.c.tzouma@durham.ac.uk

Anything but X! If you want to talk to me, find @thesiswhisperer on BlueSky, Mastodon, Linkedin, Facebook or Threads or go old skool and shoot me an email – details on my About page.

Related posts

On Neurodiversity in the PhD – the silence is deafening

Podcasting

If you liked my post on ChatGPT recently, I talk more about it and new stuff I’m doing with Chattie on the latest On The Reg Pod with Jason. Listen to the episode via your favourite player.

Latest book

I wrote Be Visible or Vanish with Simon Clews to help all researchers present their research, inside or outside the academy. Enter code AFL02 at the checkout for a 20% discount here.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket.

If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
The Year of Living Covidly
TextExpander for Academics

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page.

Thanks in advance for the support!

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Happy new year everyone!

It’s summer here in Australia, where we take a long break. I want to talk about Tidying in this post, but first – some news:

• ‘How to fix your academic writing trouble’ continues to be a strong seller after 5 years, but Large Language Models (LLM) like Chattie G (Chat GPT) are now part of our lives. We want to do a second edition which shows you how to ethically and usefully integrate LLMs into writing a thesis. Sadly Shaun is no longer available, but I’m excited to be working with Katherine again – if you haven’t checked out her Research Degree Insiders blog yet, you should. Please write to me (inger.mewburn@anu.edu.au) if you have any feedback on the first edition or ideas for what you’d like to see in the second edition. If you’re interested in news about the second edition, including (hopefully) a discounted initial offer in due course, you can sign up to the mailing list here
• Thanks to all the lovely people who have joined the Neurodiversity in the PhD study mailing list, especially to the people who have given me feedback and encouragement. We hope to launch a large scale, international survey of academic work soon (we are just about to enter the ethics approval process – wish us luck!). We’re aiming to survey all academics, not just ND people so we can compare experiences between groups. Survey results will feed into a productivity book for all academics tentatively titled ‘The Distracted Academic’, and a second one, with Autistic researcher Helen Kara, specifically on neurodivergence in the PhD. If you’re interested in the research progress, book news and participating in the study, you can sign up for the mailing list here.

So – back to Tidying.

I’ve long been a fan of Marie Kondo’s ‘Life changing magic of Tidying Up’. I keep a Tidy house along loose Konbari principles, where there is not too much ‘stuff’ and everything has its place. Of course, I often fall short of the ideal, as does Marie herself, but in trying to live by Konbari principles, things do not get too far out of hand. Academic life can also benefit from the Konbari Tidy approach, so I’ve been working on ways to extend my Tidy Home life into my work life.

Stop reading now if the whole Tidy Thing is not for you!

I know a lot of people feel judged by other people’s Tidy. It’s not my intention to shame anyone, or suggest you should be like me. If you are happy how you are now, live free and prosper friend! If, however, you are finding yourself frustrated by your own disorganisation, especially if you think it’s affecting your academic work, then read on.

The Tidy Desk

As I have written about before, there are two types of people in the world: Pilers and Filers. I used to be a piler, where the papers on my desk served as a physical reminder of the work I was doing, but going paperless changed me to a filer, where information is stored for later retrieval. I find I think better if my desk is uncluttered because I’m no longer being distracted by piles of things to do.

(I’m an imperfect, but slowly improving, filer – I’ll get to that soon).

To keep my physical desk tidy I have a lovely, big antique wooden in-tray from the 1960s. I use this to hold paperwork, forms, receipts, stuff that people give me, stuff I pick up from events and so on (not just paper). I simply chuck everything that doesn’t have a home yet into my intray until it is full, then I empty it completely. Here’s a snap of my desk at work, with the wooden tray in the foreground:

I don’t use filing cabinets or keep any paper records at work (although I do keep paper records at home). Your mileage may vary on this, but most universities simply don’t require paper copies of receipts or contracts anymore and will provide secure digital infrastructure to house them. So every piece of paper in my work in-tray eventually gets digitised and filed in Sharepoint/Teams, then recycled or shredded.

Going fully paperless has taken about 10 years. I made the final step when I started at ANU by simply not connecting to a printer at work. I was then forced to read on the screen. People tell me all the time they can’t do this, and I get it: I didn’t love it at first either. The advantages of physical reading are numerous. While I won’t ever give up paper books, there is no need to use paper for other types of academic reading. Printing journal articles, then losing or misfiling them, and printing them out again is both wasteful and inefficient.

Most people can adjust to reading on a screen – and technology exists for the computer to read things to you as well. Distributing is not the problem it used to be either.

I used to have to ask people to print my class handouts or files for committees, so I was only mostly paperless. But the pandemic revival of QR codes means I can fully live the paperless dream. Services like Google Drive or Dropbox provide free options for you to house material for downloads. There are free QR code generators, or you can use a service like Canva (which also has nice hand out templates). I like Linktree as a fall back option, which gives you one, easy to remember URL which you can use to distribute links. Create a Linktree account if you’re worried that people won’t have phones (they will though). You may not even need to go this far: most of my team have moved to Mentimeter, which enables people to see and interact with the presentation on their phones.

My point is: we have the technology. If you are willing to try and eliminate printouts entirely, you can.

If you take going paperless seriously, you need to really get your nerd on about how to store research and reading material – and take notes (I teach a whole class on this at ANU). Everyone needs a range of strategies for managing information. I firmly believe in PKM (personal knowledge management) needs to be individualised, so you have to work out a system to suit yourself. The best way to do this is get interested in other people’s systems (read about my digital reading system here).

You can start designing a PKM by drawing your information handling ‘technology stack’. This is an exercise I do in my classes and it really helps people realise where the gaps might be – here’s a rough sketch to get you started:

The Tidy Computer

So I solved my Piling problem on my desk, which forced me to become a Filer inside my computer. I was really crappy at this until just recently.

When I fist attempted to be paperless, I wanted to reduce the amount of time I spent filing things digitally, so I kept a very flat file structure. Everything work related just got chucked in a folder called ‘ANU’, which I cleared out once a year by simply moving everything into a sub-folder with the year number as the title. Similarly, project files got chucked in a folder with the project name and everything else went in a big folder called ‘life stuff’. I simply relied on search to find things again.

This dilettante filing approach worked ok, but I was treating the inside of my computer like a large laundry basket. As it filled with more and more stuff, the searching became more and more tedious. Last year I read the new book by Tiago Forte called PARA, which is a system for organising your digital files. It’s an excellent system, but like with the Konbari method, being hard core about it is not sustainable. Instead, I try to abide by the general principles rather than stick to it rigourously.

I find that even this minimal effort to be Tidy inside my computer has yielded significant results so, if you are finding the inside of your computer to be full of dirty socks mixed with clean, I encourage you to explore his system for yourself. I talked about it at great length on the On The Reg podcast last year in an episode called ‘Is productivity the new Veganism?’

By the way – I still stand by not bothering to file email. The only things I have folders for is receipts and nice feedback. I actually went to a class on using Outlook and now have mad skills of search – a worthwhile investment of time I promise!

The Tidy Office

The main ‘mess’ in my office is books. Like many academics, I have hundreds and hundreds of them.

Last summer I paid my niece, Abi, to arrange them alphabetically. She did a great job, but I still couldn’t find anything! Alphabetising doesn’t work for me, largely because I often know the contents of the book and forget the author, or I remember the cover and forget everything else. The human brain is not a computer – we remember things relationally and often by feeling, which is why we invented libraries in the first place.

So I turned to libraries for inspiration and started to think about how to implement the Dewey Decimal Classification system in my office. As it turns out, there is an app for that: LibraryThing. I went mad for this app when it first appeared some 15 years ago, catalogued all my home books, then… promptly forgot about it. I’m not sure why I never bothered cataloguing my work books – I guess it just seemed like a huge job that never fit into a working week. I don’t want to spend my down time organising my work books, but that’s where nerdy nieces willing to work for minimum wage come in handy (thanks Abi!).

Although I don’t love outsouring important information to other people’s servers, LibraryThing has stood the test of time. It still looks a bit clunky, but it’s free and works like a dream. Simply enter some details – whole or part of the title, the author or the ISBN and Library Thing creates a full record. You can then see and sort your library by author, title or – bliss! – cover. You can enter in digital books as well, so you have a complete record of everything you own and their details:

Even better – Library Thing auto-magically generates a Dewey Decimal number, add a label maker and you have personal library heaven on a stick! Here’s a pile of my books, with their labels on ready to be filed:

I posted the brilliant job that Abi did in my office on Instagram, which scored her a second job with my friend Professor Chris Wallace. Chris’s office took nearly five days as well, but looks even better than mine. Here’s just a small portion of it:

So owning your own library is within reach friends! Also can be a good little summer earner for your favourite smart young person (side note: Abi was amused/annoyed by the academic habit of not removing price tags and says : “it takes less than a minute – just do it!”).

I could go on and on as Tidying is a bit of a fetish of mine, but I’ll stop here. Happy tidying everyone! Love to hear about your tips and techniques by email or on the Socials. I’m mostly hanging out on Threads, but can be found on BlueSky and Mastodon as well. Search @thesiswhisperer and you’ll find me. See you next month

In Tidy solidarity,

Inger

Anything but X! If you want to talk to me, find @thesiswhisperer on BlueSky, Mastodon, Linkedin, Facebook or Threads or go old skool and shoot me an email – details on my About page.

Related PostsAre you a piler or a filer?Detox your deskPodcasting

I talk about the academic tidy up on the latest episode of On The Reg: The Sweet, Sweet taste of Academic FreedomThe ‘Academics talk about…’ series on the Apple TV show ‘Severance’ is now complete! You can listen and subscribe here.

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We have to talk about ChatGPT, or as my sister @anitranot styles it, ‘ChattieG.’ (which is both funnier and easier to say).

The reaction to Chattie in academia seems to oscillate between moral panic (“OMG, The Youngs will cheat on their assignments!!”) and world-weary cynicism (“it writes like shit anyway”). Very few people seem to be talking about ChattieG in the context of the Academic Hunger Games, by which I mean the competitive/toxic race to produce more and more publications and ‘get ahead’. Chattie is a new weapon in our backpack, how should we use it?

via GIPHY

Honestly, I’m a bit perplexed by academics’ reactions to this technology. Some are vocal abstainers, claiming “It’s not that good anyway” (they’re wrong – it is), or that it takes the ‘joy’ out of writing (personally, I don’t find academic writing that joyful, but your mileage may vary). Other academics have embraced it, but, perhaps due to the ‘death of the blogs’, are not documenting their use publicly.

In my opinion, we’re in desperate need of more public discussion about how this tool fits into an academic writing workflow. The wonderful Mark Carrigan is writing a book, but I’m too impatient, so I thought I’d start the ball rolling. I don’t consider myself an expert user, but I have been sharing my tricks in the classroom this year. People seem to receive my lessons well and have encouraged me to document some of my hacks. So this post showcases my favorite ChatGPT prompts for writing.

I can’t talk about Chattie without talking about ethics. To be crystal clear: SOME OF WHAT I AM GOING TO SAY IS NOT OFFICIALLY APPROVED USE OF CHATTIEG FOR STUDENTS AT ANU. Important People in the university are working on a set of principles that will be released in the new year. It’s my understanding these principles will apply to both staff and students. The official advice from ANU management – at the moment – is that PhD students can use Chattie in the way they could use a human editor.

This guidance may change soon, but it has the advantage of being quite clear in the meantime. There are specific limits on what human editors can and can’t do to dissertation text, which are set out in the Australian Standards for Editorial Practice. I’ll let you know which of my prompts comply with these guidelines. Your university will have some guidance, so check anything you aren’t sure about with the appropriate authorities. And don’t forget that journals are starting to publish their own guidelines, see for example Elsevier (the relevant section is about halfway down the page).

Before I begin, a note on how ChattieG or any large language model functions:

The more information you give ChatGPT about the task, the better the results will be. Ethan Mollick, the best writer I have found on the topic, talks about ChatGPT like this:

“You can (inaccurately but usefully) imagine the AI’s knowledge as a huge cloud. In one corner of that cloud, the AI answers only in Shakespearean sonnets, in another, it answers as a mortgage broker, in a third, it draws mostly on mathematical formulas from high school textbooks. By default, the AI gives you answers from the center of the cloud, the most likely answers to the question for the average person. You can, by providing context, push the AI to a more interesting corner of its knowledge, resulting in you getting more unique answers that might better fit your questions” Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing blog

When you create a ChatGPT account, you will be asked how you wish the tool to behave and talk to you. Telling ChatGPT to act like your research assistant generates default text from the ‘academic speak’ part of the cloud.

“Summarize these notes.” Producing short summaries is part of the Cornell template method, a useful technique for making neater, more searchable notes, and the so-called Zettelkasten. You can put the text summaries you produce with ChattieG in your bibliographic database (I use Zotero), or in a notes database like Obsidian… or even in an Excel spreadsheet (but please don’t do this).

Producing summaries helps you search your notes to find similarities between ideas and findings. Have a look at this example of me cleaning up some notes from Zotero. So long as you use this text for indexing purposes and do not directly import the words, it falls under acceptable use for PhD students at ANU.

“Clean up this audio transcript, fix mistakes, and make it shorter.” (thanks to John Milne for this idea): There are many tools that will produce an automatic transcription from a recording (I use Descript, but even Microsoft Teams will do this for you now). If you like to talk your notes instead of writing them, or you like to record discussions with collaborators, making sound into text is obviously useful. This prompt does a bang-up job – have a look at what it does to a bit of a transcript from the podcast I do with Jason Downs, ‘On the Reg’.

The problem with these transcription tools is they are geared for American accents and a bit glitchy. Also, spoken language is more ‘wordy’ than written language, so getting ChatGPT to make the transcription shorter makes the editing process more efficient.

I think this is acceptable use of ChatGPT as it’s primarily processing text, not correcting or editing, but it’s an example of how difficult it is to make blanket prescriptions as you couldn’t ask a human editor to perform this task. You can also use this technique on qualitative interview transcriptions, but check the privacy settings to make sure the transcript is not ‘swallowed’ by the tool – there have been some recent reports of ChattieG hacking that can elicit original training text in the prompt window.

“Re-write this text, but in plain language at a ninth-grade level.” Researchers often have to present their work, but if you read out academic text it sounds awkward, wordy, and long. There are lots of technical reasons for this, including left and right-branching syntax and nominalisation, but this is not a post about language. Suffice to say, this prompt can start you on the process of producing a conference script or presentation from a densely written academic text. Again, I think this is an acceptable use for both working academics and PhD students as you’re using it to translate text for a different purpose, not editing or generating text.

“Criticize this text from the point of view of someone who doesn’t believe (insert your key argument).” One of the keys to good academic writing is anticipating the readers’ objections and questions. If you make an effort to raise and answer these imagined questions and objections in text, it will be more persuasive. Novice writers often forget or don’t do enough of this ‘reader anticipating,’ which is why their text is often unconvincing (for more on this, have a look at these teaching notes on writing better paragraphs). Honestly, I could write a whole post about this, but have a look at the writing advice in ‘The Craft of Research,’ from which I took this handy diagram of how to construct paragraphs:

Essentially, this prompt is asking ChatGPT to act like a supervisor: questioning your propositions so that you can develop more convincing arguments. I’ve never used the text it produces directly; instead, this prompt is a creative tool to test my ideas. You cannot ask a human editor to do this on your thesis, so technically, this use of ChatGPT falls outside of the current ANU guidelines for appropriate use by PhD students.

However, as a working academic who doesn’t always have colleagues willing to read and critique my work, I find this prompt invaluable. The imagination required to anticipate readers’ responses is an academic superpower, requiring cognitive flexibility and knowledge of other literatures. It’s probably not a good idea to get too reliant on this feature: as they say, use it or lose it. On the other hand, imagination can be in short supply when you are overwhelmed, isolated, or just so deep in the weeds that you have lost perspective.

“Can you peer-review this text for me, look for logical argumentation problems?” Similarly to the previous prompt, this one is asking ChatGPT to perform the role of supervisor or mentor and therefore not appropriate for ANU thesis writers. However, for me, it’s pure gold. ChatGPT is surprisingly good at actually naming the logical errors, and I would rather hear it from a machine than get a desk reject for my paper.

“Now pretend you are an academic in (insert discipline) – ask me six difficult questions about this text” / “You a person who doesn’t believe (your key proposition), now ask me five difficult questions”: Some academic disciplines are notorious for asking really hard questions when students present at conferences (looking at you Economics. Yes – you). Worse, curly questions can really derail you during an oral examination or viva. One of the best ways to prepare for questions is to convene a panel of clever friends and colleagues and ask them to grill you. Unfortunately, convening a panel is not always practical. ChatGPT is a good stand-in for a scary audience.

Have a look at this prompt exchange I used to test out my conference script for SRHE in Birmingham. It’s not perfect, but honestly, it’s quite close. Is this fair use for students according to the advice from ANU outlined at the start? It’s hard to say because while this prompt is asking ChatGPT to act like a supervisor, not a thesis editor. However, the text it’s producing is meant to help you prepare for a performance, not write your thesis. I think it’s a good example of the difficulty of making blanket guidelines around this technology.

Finally, don’t forget “proofread this text and correct errors”: I ran this blog post through ChatGPT, and it found a few! Totally ok use for students under the ANU advice and quicker than trying to do it myself.

OK, I’m on the road in the UK at the moment, so this is all I have time for. I have many more prompts, which I am happy to share in another post if people are interested. If you want to talk to me about anything you read here or ask me questions, you can find me as @thesiswhisperer on Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon, or leave a note on my Thesiswhisperer Linkedin Page.

In (robotic) solidarity,

Inger
Birmingham, UK

Anything but X! If you want to talk to me, find @thesiswhisperer on BlueSky, Mastodon, Linkedin, Facebook or Threads or go old skool and shoot me an email – details on my About page.

Related PostsUsing ChatGPT to write goodPodcasting

There’s been one episode of On The Reg since last I posted: Hot Academic Gossip and the Circle of Niceness. Listen and subscribe via your favourite player here. We recorded another just before I left – I hope to have it up sometime this month, but it’s a bit difficult on the road.

The ‘Academics talk about…’ series on the Apple TV show ‘Severance’ is now complete! You can listen and subscribe here.

New book

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A couple of months ago I wrote a post called ‘The enshittification of academic social media’, riffing on ideas put in the world by Cory Doctorow.

It’s fair to say, this post was a minor viral hit, resulting in me being interviewed by Geraldine Dougue on ABC radio, and a piece in The Australian, which I haven’t yet managed to read because it’s behind a pay wall (and I don’t pay Rupert Murdoch). Since I put out that post in July. I formally closed my Twitter account and have been splitting my social media time between Mastodon, BlueSky and Threads (I’m ‘@thesiswhisperer’ on all three). People keep asking me for another post – but I’m still thinking about what ‘advice’ should look like.

As you know, I stopped posting regular guest posts a while back, but when Zeb Larson offered to write one on Twitter I said “yes please”. I have never met Zeb in person, but have enjoyed reading his posts across a couple of platforms and thought he had an interesting take on the current situation, particularly the way that many people still stick to Twitter.

Zeb Larson has a history PhD from Ohio State University, where he studied the anti-apartheid movement in the United States and defended in 2019. He started working as a freelance curriculum developer in 2016 (don’t tell his advisors) and as a freelance writer in 2020. Tired of contingency and the pressures of the academic and alt-ac markets, he became a software engineer in 2020 and continues working on the side as a freelancer. Find out more about Zeb’s work here, or follow him on Linkedin here.

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Writing this hasn’t been easy. Twitter’s implosion feels like it’s gone from slow-motion into fast-forward over the last few weeks. Predicting the platform’s death was so easy in November or December, and of course it didn’t happen. I jumped away quickly and deleted my account in November of 2022, but to be clear I did so because I was very ready to have a clean break with some of my Twitter communities.

Musk was a good incentive to get out, and I didn’t want to end up coming back. As I built new networks on Mastodon, my old community of Twitterstorians showed up – but critically, they didn’t stick around. Other Mastodon users would ask me, “why? Why did they go back to Twitter?”

Obviously, I’m only speaking for myself here, and I was never a significant personality on Academic Twitter. My experience of Academic Twitter is also rooted in the fact that I was there as a graduate student, a contingent scholar (briefly), and then as somebody who left academia. Moreover, I’m a historian, so I cannot fully speak to the experience of those in STEM and the social sciences.

The Obvious

Some of the reasons that Twitter hasn’t been abandoned yet are simply because a critical mass of people don’t exist elsewhere, and the alternatives are too small. Mastodon is a network I really like, but it has fewer than two million daily users; moreover, the experience of picking a server seems to have turned a number of people off.

Bluesky is still in Beta and similarly has fewer than two million accounts. Features for the former are fiddly; features for the latter are still in progress. Threads is a terrible vehicle for discussing news, and academics really like being able to discuss the news. LinkedIn is popular for the alt-ac crowd, but by and large it’s not being used by those within academia. Twitter’s been a community for people and a source of support, so they’re not likely to abandon it unless their networks have mostly migrated.

But while those are important, they’re not the whole story. There are specific features of Academic Twitter that have kept people there even as alternatives have begun to proliferate.

Career Advancement

In the arms race that is academic hiring, Twitter was (in theory) one of the last open frontiers. Peer-reviewed publishing is grueling, grants and fellowships are in short supply, conferences are expensive, and where you go to school does a lot to dictate how well you’ll do on the job market. But on Twitter, there were no barriers to entry – all it took was time and effort, and those are two things that academics are willing to sacrifice.

A few years ago, Twitter was even being described as a potential advantage on the academic job market by increasing your visibility to potential committee members. People were even starting to talk about having an online presence as a kind of career necessity, part of the process of being a scholar. All of this made Twitter attractive.

In practice, Twitter/X had superstars the same way that academia has superstars – a few people’s boats were lifted by it, but it wasn’t going to solve the jobs crisis. Whether it really made any difference for people on the academic job market is difficult to parse, but feels unlikely: anecdotally, I can think of plenty of high-profile academic twitter accounts who were in the trenches as contingent scholars despite having plenty of visibility.

And the problem with credential arms races is that everybody has an incentive participate: you don’t stand out if everybody is doing it. But it was something to cling to, and in the hunt for academic positions people are willing to try just about anything. Of all the magical thinking people engage in when they’re on the job market, a hope that Twitter might provide some small advantage wasn’t beyond the pale.

Public Engagement

At least in my corner of the humanities, everybody wants you to be publicly engaged. It’s supposed to be a mark of a good scholar, and vital to the survival of disciplines such as history that are under threat. There’s a problem, however: how do you do that?

Training for that kind of scholarship isn’t consistently available in graduate programs. Writing op-eds or essays and commentating is easier for people at the top of the field, but it’s a lot more difficult for grad students or people who lack an institution to call their own. Twitter was an easy place to be publicly engaged. There was a limitless supply of discourse to be had and an algorithm that made it easy to zero in on what would bring likes, retweets, and engagement. (The absence of such an algorithm on other platforms is probably one of the things subtly keeping academics around – it helps them know what to talk about!).

The barrier to entry was low. Critically, it was also a chance to network outside of academia – and that’s a really important thing for most academics, because their professional circles rarely overlap with other industries. If you’re interested in anything other than a tenure-track job (and statistically speaking, you should be), Twitter was a gateway to people who had done it and were willing to talk about it.

The Vibe Check

Perhaps most revolutionary of all (and the most difficult to replace) was the fact that Twitter/X was a vibe check for the whole of academia. Two generations ago, people like me who left academia almost always just disappeared and stopped being a part of the conversation. Grad students are almost invariably treated as apprentices, and they usually work siloed off far from each other.

Adjuncts and other contingent scholars generally have very little visibility as well: they’re not well-represented in scholarly societies. This is true even for faculty members at SLACs, many of whom have to treat scholarly knowledge production as a hobby. You learned about the “State of the Field” from the keynote address at your society’s conference; it played out in roundtables in a journal that were curated by the leaders of your discipline.

But on Twitter, everything was up for debate, and everybody got to be a part of the conversation. ECRs and grad students and adjuncts could talk freely about all of the things that aren’t working in academia, and free from the polite confines of a panel talk at a conference. You could call bullshit on somebody saying that “good work gets a job” or that grad students didn’t deserve unions. You even had people willing to push back and to argue that everything was fine in academia, actually, and that was perfect: you had just enough people to argue with.

I don’t know that the conversations that took place were ever particularly productive: every year, we had to have a fresh fight as to whether advice threads for people seeking tenure-track jobs actually accomplished anything. Being loud on Twitter wasn’t the same as having power or influence. But one of the varieties of loneliness and isolation in academia is that there’s nobody to complain to about deadbeat advisors, relentless adjunctification, the dysfunctions of academic publishing, and anything else.

That’s one of the things that could still be revolutionary for the profession: a sense of solidarity and that you’re part of a whole rather than a lone genius (or, like most of us, a temporarily embarrassed lone genius). And here’s the crux: you really need to have everybody in order to have that kind of discourse going. Social media for academics elsewhere has largely been a listserv. People make their “I’m pleased to announce” posts and circulate CFPs or jobs – but if you’re in the humanities, you already have H-Net. Academic Twitter was the experience of everybody in a very hierarchical system having a voice.

If only some people leave, you can’t recreate the ecosystem very effectively.

Will people leave Twitter?

So even now as Twitter seems poised to fall off a cliff, I’m skeptical that people are going to leave on their own.

If the stench of Musk’s politics (and to be clear, Twitter had serious political issues prior to October of 2022) or the enshittification of the platform so far wasn’t enough to drive people away en masse, I’m not sure that losing headlines or occasional downtimes will be enough. This goes for academics too, who have invested a lot in Twitter and don’t readily have a substitute at hand.

Perhaps Bluesky or some new service will eventually supplant Twitter, but for now it seems likely that the status quo will persist – at least until Twitter’s financial woes finally kill it.
—————————

Related PostsThe enshittification of academic social mediaThis is not just a post about InstagramPodcasting

There’s been one episode of On The Reg since last I posted here. Listen and subscribe via your favourite player here.

• The Meat Grinder

We recorded another last Sunday, but the sound was botched up. We’ll have the next episode out mid October. Please keep sending in your speakpipes and emails, I’m loving them all.

The ‘Academics talk about…’ series on the Apple TV show ‘Severance’ is now complete! You can listen and subscribe here. This series was almost as fun to make as ‘Academics Talk about The Chair’ – but a lot harder. Since season two of Severance seems indefinitely delayed, we’ll take a little break and watch some more TV while we think about what’s next. Anitra and I will be working on a new season of The Type Pod in the meantime.

New book

I wrote Be Visible or Vanish with Simon Clews to help all researchers present their research, inside or outside the academy. Enter code AFL02 at the checkout for a 20% discount here.

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I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket.

If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

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It is a truth almost never acknowledged, that university communities are absolutely, totally, tragically addicted to gossip.

I was reminded of this truth when the identity of the new ANU VC was announced last week. It was goodbye to the much celebrated and respected Brian Schmidt and hello to the much celebrated and respected Genevieve Bell. Everyone I talked to seemed happy about the change in leadership. And when I say ‘everyone’, it feels like I talked to almost everyone last week because the gossip network was running HOT.

I’ve not seen the gossip network run this hot since… last time we changed VCs.

Any significant change of leadership is ground zero of gossip: a moment where the normal background hum of gossip suddenly explodes into frantic activity. My phone and Teams message channels lit up with people wanting to talk about the Big News. Everyone wanted to know what everyone else thought… presumably so they would also know how to think.

It was a highly amusing week for someone like me who LOVES gossip.

via GIPHY

Like most people, while I love to hear gossip, I don’t want to admit to doing the gossiping. Part of the thrill of listening to gossip is that it feels like deviant behaviour – but is it really? I spent two weeks reading books about gossip during my PhD (one of those fun rabbit holes that one falls down) and it changed my perspective. Ever since I learned about the social uses of gossip, I’ve been OBSESSED with how it works inside the university.

So, if you’ll indulge me, this change of VC gives me an excuse to drop a post about academic gossip. It’s a post I have long wanted to write, but I’ve hesitated because, well – gossip is a bit, unsavoury. Admitting out loud to liking and participating in gossip is like farting in an elevator: it usually provokes a long, uncomfortable silence.

The idea that gossip is always bad is not an accident: women and gossip are indelibly linked in Western culture. In the middle ages, in Britain, a Gossip was the person who assisted the midwife at a birth. The Gossip was responsible for telling the village when a new child was born, and I guess they also talked about how the birth happened too… hence the name stuck to talk about other people’s business. The denigration of gossip speaks to a deep cultural distrust of women, particularly when they are doing something out of sight of men (for a great discussion see the book Witches: what women do together by Sam George-Allen).

People often deplore gossip and claim our world would be better off without it. But these people are wrong.

As Kathryn Waddington explains in her scholarly and entertaining book Gossip and Organisations, gossip is a form of social network building whose purpose is to ‘… entertain, supply social information, and establish, change or maintain group membership, group power structure or group norms’ (page 8). We all rely on the social information contained in gossip to navigate our complex social worlds, especially hierarchical worlds like academia.

Gossip about powerful people helps less powerful people anticipate problems in advance and sometimes take preventative measures (“I’m not going to get on his bad side”). Gossip also helps us know who is likely to be helpful and who isn’t, and under what circumstances (“He pretty much gives everyone an extension on their assignment – so long as you can show that you’ve been turning up to class”). Crucially, gossip gives us important information about someone’s emotional affect – what moods they are capable of and who is likely to feel the effects (“Yeah, he seems nice, but he’s got a temper with incompetents – one time I saw him chew out the Associate Dean. It was kind of fun to watch”).

Gossip is subversive – in both good and bad ways. Information is power and gossip is one way of hoarding and leveraging non-positional power over those in positions of authority. That’s a fancy way of saying it’s a really good way to undermine others by ruining their reputation and making people less willing to co-operate.

I’ve experienced first hand how gossip about you can poison your reputation with a person, or group. Hearing gossip about yourself is confronting, especially the way your character and behaviour is represented. I don’t recognise myself in some of the gossip I’ve heard about me, but on the other hand, there’s also something in that saying ‘may you be judged by the quality of your enemies’. If the person spreading the gossip is not well regarded by others, it does much less damage than if it comes from someone that others like and trust.

Gossip is one of the ways we build useful, trusted networks, but it also has the power to dismantle them. Gossip flourishes in places like schools and universities because the power and dominance struggles are so multi-dimensional and intense. In the academic hunger games, where very survival depends on access to resources and the right kind of alliances, it shouldn’t surprise us that gossip is pervasive. Participating in gossip is important because it helps you know important stuff that will never circulate in official channels.

People use gossip to curb the powerful without direct confrontation. Knowing how a person may react or behave helps you ‘manage up’ – and manage sideways for that matter. If a horrible person is hired into a position of power, the women in my circle will tend to know in advance because so many of us are skilled sensitive information sharers. The latest data on Australian Higher Education show that women are still less likely to be in positions of power than men, so there is perhaps more incentive to share. Men maybe get less of an education in the social utility of gossip, which I think can be a distinct disadvantage in times of trouble. But a common misconception is that men gossip less than women; conversational research suggests this isn’t true. When men gossip it’s usually just called something else, like ‘debriefing’ or ‘catching up’.

So gossiping is advantageous for everyone, but becoming known AS a gossip is a bad thing as people will probably stop confiding in you out of worry that their own gossiping will be ‘leaked’. But here’s the thing: the unspoken rule of gossip is you have to share if you want to be shared with. If you don’t participate, or participate in the ‘right way’, you will be held out of important information sharing. There’s definitely advantages in knowing stuff about powerful people in a hierarchy like academia – especially if it helps you avoid their reach (literally in the case of the excel spreadsheets of handsy men shared as part of the Me Too movement).

Academia is gossipy, in part, because it’s a hugely social profession: we develop webs of colleagues all over the world. Knowing who are the good colleagues and who are the blood sucking parasites who steal ideas is of vital importance, and gossip is often the only way you will find out. This is a positive effect of gossip, but there’s plenty of negative ones too – and not everyone enjoys the benefits.

Autistic people have often told me they often struggle with gossip – both listening and participating. Some have a moral objection to it; others find it very confusing and/or a waste of time. l can’t find any specific studies of neurodivergence and gossip (although this reddit thread contains an interesting group discussion). This seems like a real gap in the literature, although lack of interest in gossip is often mentioned in discussions of Autism in the workplace.

Many autistic people have told me that the power struggles that are carried on covertly via gossip seem pointless and a waste of energy. They’re not wrong, but on the other hand, I suspect neurotypical types aren’t going to change anytime soon. Gossip may be wired in for our survival as herd animals; at least Robin Dunbar makes that argument in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. I guess neurodivergent folks will have to keep finding ways to deal with the perverse effects of gossip – and find ways to leverage the benefits. (There’s a further discussion of neurotypical gossip behaviour from the perspective of autistic people in the paper Re-presenting Autism: The Construction of ‘NT Syndrome’ by Charlotte Brownlow, 2010, if you are interested).

Since gossiping is crucial in the process of bonding with others in a community, it is a vital academic skill set. However, it’s unlikely your supervisor will sit you down and explain the ins and outs of academic gossiping. Don’t worry – Aunty Thesiswhisperer is here to help! The first step in understanding academic gossip is to know it when you see it – sadly, it’s not always easy to spot in action.

Waddington points out that Gossip is more easily defined by what it is not. She lists rumour, friendly chatting and story telling as the kind of talk in which gossip tends to occur. I’d add one more to this list: whingeing. If you understand how each of these kinds of talk function socially, you are in a better position to participate in gossip usefully and well.

Rumour is the exchange of information under conditions of uncertainty. There were certainly a lot of rumours about who was going to be the new VC at ANU, many of which I heard and shared (I wish there had been betting on who would be appointed because I was right and would have CLEANED UP). Friendly chatting is about topics that are not directly to do with other people’s behaviour, it doesn’t meet the standards of gossip either.

Story telling is worth dwelling on for a moment as it’s intimately related to gossip. Story telling in conversation serves many purposes. Sometimes that purpose is just to entertain. In an amusing paper ‘Confronting indifference towards truth: dealing with workplace bullshit’, McCarthy et al talk about telling mildly untrue or exaggerated stories about yourself as a form of ‘artisanal bullshit’. Academic humble bragging is artisanal bullshit – where the purpose of the story is to demonstrate how how hard working/clever/famous you are while not directly saying it (there’s an amusing paper on science humble bragging here).

Telling heroic stories about others could be seen as both story telling and gossip because it establishes, or reinforces reputations and by extension, power. We all know of professors who are ‘legendary’ in their department through the workplace fables that are shared with newcomers. Stories build cultures, but are also important in social bonding. The bonding functions of stories can be clearly seen in the context of whinging or ‘troubles talk’ (which I wrote about in a scholarly way in Troubling talk: assembling the PhD candidate). Briefly, in troubles talk, story telling is usually deployed to share a similar experience and thereby demonstrate solidarity and empathy with the whinger. In summary, stories are very important and being a good story teller is a skill worth developing.

Gossip is more slippery. It can be inter-leaved between any and all of these kinds of talk, so you need to keep your ears peeled to properly hear it. You know you are hearing gossip when the story is about how other people behave or think and has some element of judgment or a ‘lesson’. If the story being told is not a first hand account, it is more likely to be gossip, although most gossip starts with an eye-witness. If a person is trusting you with gossip, that can be a sign of friendship, or that the person is signalling they want to be friends.

Of course, the toxic gossip is the person who is always, relentlessly spreading gossip to undermine other people. Luckily I think these people are easy to spot and relatively rare. The advice often given is to walk away from toxic gossip, but that’s often hard to do, especially if you share an space with them. My favourite way to shut the toxic gossip down is to intentionally change the conversational mode, either by doing some some story telling (with or without humble bragging) or move the conversation back to ‘friendly chat’ by introducing a non-person issue of mutual interest, like the difficulty of finding car parking on campus. Always a winner.

The way you receive gossip – and are seen to receive it – is vitally important in academia and, I imagine, most other organisations. Part of what makes gossip powerful is the way it can build trust. Always shutting it down can be seen by others as a signal that you don’t want to be friendly, share information and be part of the group. If you show you can be trusted with hot gossip (“we never had this conversation, but did you know…”), you can clearly be trusted with other things as well. Many autistic people have told me listening, but not sharing on, is their go-to strategy for dealing with the neurotypical need to gossip. Being a good ‘end node’ of gossip: a person to whom someone can tell gossip, but who is trusted not to spread it further, is very powerful.

It’s hard to talk about, let alone to own up to having an affection for gossip. But a world without gossip would be a very different, and probably not very nice, place. People would not be as willing to co-operate and powerful individuals would be left to run amok. It’s not a coincidence that the first thing that authoritarian regimes try to crack down on is people (often women) talking to each other. So let’s celebrate our collective addiction academic gossip – very carefully

In gossipy solidarity,

Inger

ps: you may have noticed 2 months have passed without a post here. This is the first time in 13 years I’ve had an unintentional break in blog programming. The only thing I can say is that work has been a meat grinder since I got back from sabbatical. It’s taken two months to get my email back under control and my feet under the table. I’m hoping for clearer skies and smoother sailing for the rest of the year.

Podcasting

On the Reg is back. There’s been two episodes since I last posted:

• The one about Stephen Hawking’s dining habits
• Is productivity talk the new veganism?

We recorded another last Sunday, but the sound was botched up. We’ll have the next episode out mid October. Please keep sending in your speakpipes and emails, I’m loving them all.

Luckily, ‘Academics talk about Severance’ pod has finally been released! This show is an academic dissection of the popular Apple+ workplace alternative future thriller. You can follow and subscribe here.

New book

I wrote Be Visible or Vanish with Simon Clews to help all researchers present their research, inside or outside the academy. Enter code AFL02 at the checkout for a 20% discount here.

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If I started Thesis Whisperer today, 10th of July 2023, you would never hear about me. I built a readership in my little corner of academia, and some measure of influence, by sharing my work online. When people ask how I got to 100,000 followers on social media, I used to share two tips: 1) ...continue reading.

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Hey, before I start this post, I’ve got a couple more events coming up at Cambridge if you are around: On 11 July we are holding a forum for ThinkLab at Cambridge for PhDs and PostDocs who are interested in accessing the non-academic research job market (no online option, sorry). You can book for free ...continue reading.

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Hey – Before I start, here are some upcoming events I’m doing at Cambridge University, which are open to the public:

A lecture at Wolfson College, Cambridge on Tuesday 6 June at 5:30pm, which touches on themes from my new book with Simon Clews ‘Be visible or Vanish’. There’s an in-person option if you can get to Cambridge, and an online version if you can’t: you can book here.

I’m giving a lecture about the PhD in uncertain times where I will talk about the latest data we have on the UK market for research skills, at Kings College, Cambridge on Monday 10 July, 5:30 – 7:30pm: you can book here

Ok, here’s the post for this month – one in a planned series about how to speed up writing about the literature.

I don’t enjoy doing literature reviews.

Academics have amazing ideas and insights, but tend to hide them under obtuse jargon and behind annoying paywalls. Once you dig the papers out of the digital ether, the real pain begins. Academic writing can be both boring and frustrating; reading a lot of it all at once can really drive you nuts.

I’m on sabbatical and foolishly told my boss I would do a big literature review on neurodiversity and the PhD while I was away. This is proving hard. I’m doing my sabbatical at Cambridge University and the folks here are really hospitable. I can never say “no” to a free lunch or dinner, especially when it’s with with smart, interesting people in a medieval (or modernist) college dining hall filled with ancient academic bling!

Behold the culinary splendour that is the Cambridge dining scene. This is what they would call in Glasgow a ‘fish tea’, complete with mushy peas (at Wolfson College, where I’m ‘attached’ while being a visiting scholar at ThinkLab):

And here’s what remained of a lovely piece of cod at Kings College by the time I was brave enough to sneak out my phone (under the guise of pausing to check my email before finishing my greens):

To maximise my socialising time, I am trying to be super efficient with this literature review nonsense.

This is the biggest literature review I’ve attempted since I started my PhD in 2006. We read everything on paper back then, even journal articles (we were living like animals I tell you). I ended up with a metric shit ton of photocopies and books full of post-it notes. I’m sure this physical clutter contributed to my literature review anxiety syndrome and subsequent avoidance behaviour.

This time I’m using every technological trick I know to manage the literature pain. Here’s my process:

Segment the literature

The temptation is to just start throwing keywords at Google Scholar and seeing what gets loads of hits. And hey – don’t let me stop you. I’ve found lots of good stuff this way, but you can quickly feel like you’re drowning when you do this scattergun thing.

To avoid overwhelm, I ‘segment’ the task, aiming to map a small part of the larger literature universe. In this case, just the literature on neurodiversity in education: not the causes, diagnostic tools, or debates about whether or not it should be considered a disability. I may have to delve into all that, but one thing at a time.

If you’re working on something big, like a book or a PhD, you’ll probably need more than one literature map, that’s ok. Several, tightly curated, maps can help you work your way across the vast literature expanse in a controlled and methodical fashion.

Express your search as simply as you can

Assume there is a genuine gap in the literature and express it as a question, like so:

Is there any existing research about the experiences of neurodiverse PhD students and working academics that can inform my research?

Writing your question down on a post-it note and sticking it to the edge of the screen will keep you focussed. Now you need a search phrase or two. Think Boolean – you want key terms with modifiers, like so:

Neurodiversity and higher education
Neurodiversity and employment

(The second one is there because PhD students are often staff members too).

If your search starts turning up too much unrelated stuff, add modifiers. For instance, there’s a lot of papers about how to help people with cognitive functioning problems into basic employment. I am more interested in people who do knowledge work, so I added a ‘not’ modifier:

Neurodiversity and employment not disability

It’s honestly ok to start with a couple of simple phrases like this – or even just one. The magic of algorithmic citation-ish searches (we’ll get there) means finding just a bit of stuff is going to help you find lots of other stuff.

Find the right database(s) to begin your search

Google scholar is fantastic and has the best interface for searching, but you should start in a ‘proper’ subject matter database. In my case, ERIC (via ProQuest).

I am not sure why I offer this advice.

I hear tell that ‘Google doesn’t have everything’, but in my experience it does, at least for my field. Look, there’s no harm sticking to orthodox methods; at least that’s defensible during a peer review review process. The first database is only a starting point anyway.

(If you’re not familiar with the databases in your discipline, time for a visit with your friendly librarian).

Do not read any full papers yet!

Stick with just reading abstracts for now; you’re just trying to get the vibe. It’s a rookie mistake to download and read individual papers at this stage. Trust me: I’ve made this mistake countless times, enough to know this way lies madness. You’ll fall down rabbit holes and before you know it you’ll be reading a paper about the politics of dusting in 18th century houses (joking, kind of).

I also advise against importing papers into your reference manager straight away. (If you are not using a reference manager, install one – I’ll wait). If you put all the papers into your reference manager from the beginning, you’ll get attached and end up with way too much ‘stuff’. Take it from a reformed hoarder, having too much ‘literature stuff’ is bad for thinking.

The process of curating papers is a bit like buying clothes from a huge charity shop: it’s hard to choose from abundance and some of them will be a bit rubbish. You’ll need to try on a lot before you find the few that will suit you.

Your digital ‘change room’: a humble spreadsheet

If a paper seems promising, save the citation only in your ‘digital change room’. Fire up Excel, Google sheets or some other spreadsheet tool. Cut and paste the formatted citations into each row as you go. The formatting will be horrible, but tell your perfectionistic self that’s a problem for later. As long as the first author name at the start is correct, you’ll be ok.

The reason I suggest spreadsheets is they enable you to curate ‘on the fly’. As you search, you will find yourself developing inclusion and exclusion criteria, further narrowing the scope. Write these criteria down as you go so you remember why you made specific decisions. As you get a better idea of the whole, some stuff you initially collected may seem less relevant. Letting go of papers when they are in your reference manager is psychologically hard for some reason; deleting a line from an excel spreadsheet is painless couple of clicks.

A program like Excel enables you to make a useful look up table; less fuss than a reference manager, easy to sort and more portable. You can search author name(s) before you add a new paper, or simply ask the software to remove duplicates at the end. Add a separate column for the year the paper was written so you can sort the literature into a timeline. Reading papers in the order they were written helps you see how the conversations have developed.

A list of tightly curated references is a valuable research artefact which you can share with your supervisor and/or team mates. Later, you may wish to publish this sheet in a data commons for other researchers to use.

Explore the citation neighbourhood (with robots)

Your initial list may be quite large. From ProQuest alone I got 90 some papers, just from the two search terms I listed above.

Hopefully, like me, you found a couple of literature review papers: where another researcher in the past has done the work you are doing now. You’re now ready to broaden out the search by using the references (what’s called in the trade a ‘citation search’). Start by scraping the references out of the literature reviews you have found, then reach for help from the robots.

There’s some interesting literature review helpers/robots on the market now; all use some form of algorithmic search. You might want to check out Petal and Scite, but I used connectedpapers.com for this task because it gives me a lot of control and is simple to use. Sadly, it’s no longer free. I paid $30 for the year, but I’ve often spent this amount on a book I haven’t read all the way through, so I think it’s well priced.

Connected papers displays your selected paper as part of a ‘social graph’ with nodes representing individual, related papers. Connected papers is not strictly a citation searching tool: it shows your paper within an overall citation ‘neighbourhood’. According to the notes, the algorithm that powers the graph works on a principle of ‘Co-citation and Bibliographic Coupling‘. Basically, papers that are closer together in the graph are likely to be similar in topic:

Clicking on individual papers will show you the abstract and give you a link to Google scholar, or other database. Connected papers harnesses the wisdom of the scholarly network. Basically, if another researcher on your list has missed something relevant, but other scholars have listed it, it will appear – even if your origin paper did not directly reference those other papers in the graph. Pretty clever!

I systematically put in each of my 90 original papers and explored the neighbourhood. By the time I exhausted the search I’d found 229 highly relevant papers. Your search is exhausted when you start discovering the same papers, over and over without finding much new stuff. Warning: any literature research is like an asymptote – getting closer and closer, but never hitting zero. At some point you just have to call Time. I stopped when it was taking at least half an hour to get new hits.

Add categories to aid writing

A good literature review should describe, at a high level, the trends and concerns of other researchers. You can use your spreadsheet to start this task. I simply read through each title and quickly tagged each paper, in a new column, with a few simple words and phrases like #autism, #adhd, #supportprograms, #academicsuccess:

At the end of this process I wrote a high level summary for myself:

Of the papers on higher education (109), a title analysis showed 109 were about autism exclusively, 25 were about ADHD exclusively and 4 were concerned with dyslexia. The rest (18) included all diverse neurotypes. The common themes were: reporting on or evaluating specific support programs (39); lived experience (34); academic success (32); transition from high school to college (13); mental health (10), raising awareness in peers or teachers who did not identify as neurodiverse (10) and Bias (3). A small number of papers (7) tackled the issue of writing as a specific skill while 14 tackled social skills. There were no papers exclusively about PhD students and only seven papers about neurodiverse academics.

I’ve validated my ‘gap’! Relief.

Because I measure these things, searching, indexing and tagging all this literature took me around 10 hours. I know it takes me around 40 minutes (on average) to read and take notes from a paper, so that’s 152 hours or so of reading I’ve lined up.

If all I did was read all day, it would take me a month. But no one can read intensely for 8 hours a day! Especially when there are so many free lunches on offer…

Do I have to read everything? Frankly: no. Skim reading is a ‘legitimate academic deviance’ for a reason. Some papers will be original and useful; worth reading closely, maybe even multiple times. Others will be derivative: just adding to the weight of evidence, in which case speed reading the abstract and the discussion will likely be enough.

Connected papers can show me which papers other researchers think are useful, which is a starting point for winnowing down. Having the whole list in Excel makes it easy to realistically plan the next stage of the project. I estimate close reading and note taking of this lot will take around 30 days, about the length of time I have left on my sabbatical. Easy!

The next step is to go back and import all the papers into Zotero, so I can take notes in Obsidian. I’ve added ChattieG functionality with the TextGenerator plugin, which helps me make quick summaries of my notes and the Smart Connections plug in, that helps me link related notes together. But all of this is a blog post for another time.

I hope your work is going well – and your lunches are plentiful.

Inger

Related Posts:

Building a second brain for writing – with Obsidian

The ghost of the ideal scholar

Zotero vs Endnote: the battle is on!

Podcasting

On The Reg is on hiatus until I get back to Australia in early August. Sorry! I’ve met a few Jason fans since I got here and I know he will be sadly missed, but you can still hear me as the Severance pod is about to drop. You can follow and subscribe here.

New book

I wrote Be Visible or Vanish with Simon Clews to help all researchers present their research, inside or outside the academy. Enter code AFL02 at the checkout for a 20% discount here.

Here’s the blurb:

The world of the academic researcher is changing; it used to be enough to work hard, do your research and get your results published. Not so these days. Universities now expect researchers to share their work with the world, as widely as possible. ‘Publish or perish’ has been replaced by a new mantra, and the pressure is on.

In this insightful book, Inger Mewburn and Simon Clews look at some of the most common presentation scenarios that researchers will face when talking about their work. Starting in academia with the deceptively simple art of writing a good email and working through lectures, conference presentations and lightning talks, the book then moves ‘off campus’ and explores talking to the media, making elevator pitches and creating an effective digital presence on social media.

Offering detailed looks at 19 different presentation formats, Mewburn and Clews tap into their vast experience in the field to analyse the challenges and opportunities aligned with each case study and to map out the route to success. With a lightness of touch and an often humorous approach, Be Visible Or Vanish: Engage, Influence and Ensure Your Research Has Impact will show you what it takes to achieve that holy grail of modern academia… impact.

This text will be invaluable for students, academics and researchers hoping to effectively communicate complex information in a way that can be understood and appreciated by their peers, colleagues and the wider world.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
The Year of Living Covidly
TextExpander for Academics

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page. Thanks in advance for the support!

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I’m on sabbatical for the next three months and have committed to doing a literature review on neurodiversity and PhD study. Ugh. I hate doing literature reviews. I’m just going to say it: most academic writing is BORING and doing a big review means reading lots of it. The thought of reading more than 200 papers in 3 months makes me want to poke my eyes out with a pen.

The good news is I can use ChatGPT to help me write this review. There’s something of a moral panic around ChatGPT, or, as my twin sister amusingly calls it: ‘ChattieG’. We’ve heard much about the perils of misinformation and how to stop students cheating. While there are legitimate concerns about ChattieG around privacy, pollution and worker exploitation, I think a lot of the commentary misses the point.

Look, here’s my hot take, for what it’s worth: academics have a responsibility to show others, including our students, how to use these tools responsibly, creatively and ethically. Feeling conflicted about using the technology is reasonable because there is no ethical consumption under late stage billionaire-ist capitalism. While we should continue to critique how this technology is made and used, refusing to engage is not really an option. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle and the robots really will take our jobs if we don’t put ourselves in charge of this technology.

Ok, I will get off my high horse now.

It took me quite some time to work out how to make ChattieG genuinely useful. The rest of this post will document what I have learned so far, but check with your uni before you follow my lead. Here’s the advice from ANU, which is kind of vague and allows for exploration, unlike some others.

Generally, the best way to use ChattieG is to imagine it as a talented, but easily misled, intern/research assistant who has a sad tendency to be sexist, racist and other kinds of ‘isms’.

Instruct it like you would a human being with these shortcomings and you will get much better results. And I know this sounds weird, but it also helps give ChattieG an actual face. I typed in ‘cute, smart intern wearing glasses’ into AI image generator DALLE, and this is what I got:

Of course, ‘cute and smart’ means young white guy (sigh). But I suppose the image is a good reminder of the bias that seems horribly built into AI tools of all stripes. Ok, to the literature review – how can it help?

Brainstorming

You can ask ChattieG to suggest ideas. While ChattieG can be a bullshit fountain, the bigger problem is its ideas are likely to be boringly pedestrian. Boring is not all bad: it can be a starting point for fact checking or to engage in some myth busting.

Let’s see how it does with my basic project idea, which is to help supervisors and universities better support neurodiverse doctoral students:

Prompt: I’m writing a literature review about neurodiversity in doctoral education. Can you list ten things that educators should know about neurodiversity when supervising doctoral students? Please touch on aspects of neurodiversity that can affect how people write, process information, approach deadlines and communicate with others. include a short description with each list item, written in academic style.

Response: Certainly, here are ten key things that educators should know about neurodiversity when supervising doctoral students:

1. Neurodiversity refers to the natural variation in how human brains process information and perceive the world around us. This includes individuals with conditions such as ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, and other learning differences.
2. Neurodivergent individuals often have unique strengths and abilities that can be leveraged to their advantage in academic settings. For example, some individuals with ADHD have been shown to be highly creative and innovative problem-solvers.
3. Neurodivergent individuals may face challenges with executive functioning, which can affect their ability to plan, prioritize, and meet deadlines. Educators should be aware of this and work with students to provide support and accommodations as needed.
4. Many neurodivergent individuals have different communication styles and may struggle with social interactions. Educators should be patient, flexible, and willing to adapt their communication strategies to meet the needs of their students.
5. Neurodivergent individuals may process information differently than their peers, which can impact their ability to write and articulate their ideas clearly. Educators should work with students to identify strategies for organizing and expressing their thoughts effectively.
6. Neurodivergent individuals may benefit from alternative forms of assessment, such as presentations or projects, that allow them to showcase their strengths in non-traditional ways.
7. Educators should be aware of the potential for bias and discrimination against neurodivergent individuals in academic settings. They should work to create a welcoming and inclusive environment that celebrates neurodiversity and values diverse perspectives.
8. Accommodations such as extended deadlines, quiet study spaces, and assistive technology can make a significant difference for neurodivergent students. Educators should work with students to identify and implement these accommodations as needed.
9. It is important for educators to recognize the intersectionality of neurodiversity with other identities such as race, gender, and sexuality. They should be aware of how these factors can impact the experiences of neurodivergent individuals in academic settings.
10. Educators should prioritize self-education and ongoing professional development around neurodiversity to ensure that they are providing the best possible support for their students. This may involve attending trainings or workshops, consulting with experts in the field, or engaging in ongoing research and reading.

That’s… not bad. There’s some good ideas here for me to follow up. I particularly like the one on intersectionality, which prompted me to widen my search terms in useful ways.

Use ChattieG to make tiny summaries of key concepts

An important part of note taking is putting other people’s concepts and ideas in your own words. ChattieG can do this for you by simplifying other people’s writing; translating the academic concepts and making them easier to understand. I use this feature to make tiny summaries of interesting ideas from papers I’m reading.

If the text you want to simplify is on the web, you can just point Chattie at the URL and it will do the whole document. But I prefer to use this feature on smaller chunks of text as you get more accurate results. Here’s a bit of text from a paper I found after taking ChattieG’s advice to explore intersectionality: “The Theory Of Intersectionality: A New Lens For Understanding The Barriers Faced By Autistic Women.” by Amanda Saxe published in Canadian Journal of Disability Studies in 2017. I understand these concepts, but the writing is very dense:

“Intersectionality takes into account that “identities are …culturally mediated constructs implicated in relations of power, privilege and oppression” (Liasidou, 2013, p.300). This is directly relevant to the social model of disability, conceptualized by Oliver (1983) in Social Work with Disabled People which proposes that disabilities are the result of societal barriers, rather than inherent deficiencies in the ‘disabled’ person (see also Appleby, 1994; Ballan, 2008; Hirschmann, 2012; Oliver, 1983). Individuals with disabilities face barriers constructed within the able-bodied communities in which they live (Ballan, 2008; Hirschmann, 2012; Oliver, 1983). They could lead ‘normal’ lives should these barriers (both physical and social) be removed, since it is these barriers that disable them (Hirschmann, 2012). Throughout history, Autism has been seen through a medicalized lens, where individuals with the disorder were viewed as deficient and abnormal (Bumiller, 2008). The neurodiversity movement has since emerged through the work of Autistic self-advocates, promoting the argument that Autism is the result of a difference in neurology which should be accepted as a form of human diversity”

Let’s see how ChattieG goes simplifying the key concept in this paragraph. You could just say ‘summarise’ and give it the text, but remember it’s better to talk to it like a research assistant. Tell Chattie what the source paper is about as well as reading level and style of output. I find instructing it to simply to a 9th grader level in academic style gives consistently good results:

Prompt: I’m going to give you some text from an academic paper about intersectionality and autism. Can you please produce a simplified version of this text. Make it to a 9th grader level, still in academic style: [text inserted here in quotation marks]

Response: Intersectionality is a way of looking at how different parts of a person’s identity, like their gender, race, and disability, can affect how they’re treated. People with disabilities have faced barriers to living a “normal” life because society isn’t set up to accommodate their needs. This idea is called the social model of disability. It says that disabilities are not caused by something that’s wrong with the person, but by the way society is set up. In the past, autism was thought of as a problem that needed to be fixed. But now, people with autism are saying that it’s just a different way of thinking and that this should be celebrated as a form of human diversity.

Not bad Chattie! I save and use these snippets into Obsidian where they act as reminders or ‘cognitive anchors’ when I am putting my own draft together. I wouldn’t cut and paste this tiny summary straight into my work because it’s not in my ‘voice’, but you could… Is it plagiarism? Opinions vary, but I reckon if you acknowledge the source of the idea it’s probably fine? Definitely check in with your supervisor if you are doing your PhD and want to use this technique.Use ChattieG to turn freeform notes into something resembling prose.An important part of the note taking process is what I call ‘rambling’ – just typing out my thoughts for an audience of one: me. Rambling is a way of getting ideas out of my head and onto the screen so I can assess whether they are any good. Chattie is brilliant for taking these rambles and turning them into something… less shit.

Prompt: I’m going to give you some of my rough notes about how neurotypicals process information compared to people with ADHD. Can you rewrite these notes as the discussion section of a paper about the differences between how people with ADHD work, vs people with neurotypical functioning: “I’m going to give you my rough notes on what it’s like to work with ADHD. Can you turn these notes into an introduction to an academic paper? “I list each segment of the event in a table and then write the tasks associated with each part of the event. As I do this, I must imagine – literally walk through each part of the event in my mind. This is DMN in action, then I flip back to TPN to put the task into words on a page. Then I must imagine a future flow of work where I can do these tasks – which one needs to be done before the other, are there dependencies? I then flip to my diary and look at the work that is coming up – are there any ‘big rocks’ that are going to get in the way? Can I schedule this work or must I delegate it. I then have to imagine my co-worker’s flow of work and tasks. I have to imagine the physicality of doing something like a stocktake of our tea and coffee supplies and how that might fit into her schedule, which I see visualised in the team diary. When I look at my work this way I wonder how I EVER get things done. And yet I do. For me, this work is effortful, but not difficult. But to a person with ADHD with the faulty switch between these different cognitive processes, it’s really difficult. They can get ‘stuck’ in the past, not the future – remembering a previous event rather than imagining a future one. If something went wrong on that previous event, they may get stuck in rumination about it. Although they want to get on with their task list, it’s a conscious thing to try and switch out of DMN and back into TPN.”

Response:

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulties in executive functioning, attention, and working memory. Individuals with ADHD often experience challenges in organizing and completing tasks, particularly in complex work environments. This section will discuss some of the differences between how individuals with ADHD process information compared to neurotypical individuals and the implications of these differences for work activities.

One notable difference is the way individuals with ADHD break down complex tasks. As noted in the introduction, individuals with ADHD may engage in a cognitive process that involves breaking down events into smaller parts and imagining each segment in detail in their mind. This process requires them to switch back and forth between two cognitive networks, the default mode network (DMN) and the task-positive network (TPN). Neurotypical individuals may not engage in this process to the same extent, relying more on internal scripts and past experiences to guide their actions.

Another difference is the way individuals with ADHD handle distractions. Neurotypical individuals may be better able to filter out irrelevant information and focus on the task at hand. In contrast, individuals with ADHD may struggle to ignore distractions, leading to difficulties in sustaining attention and completing tasks.

These differences in cognitive processing can have significant implications for work activities. For example, individuals with ADHD may benefit from accommodations such as breaking tasks into smaller steps, providing regular feedback, and reducing distractions in the work environment. Additionally, it may be helpful to provide training on time management and organizational skills, as well as access to assistive technologies that can support executive functioning.

In conclusion, individuals with ADHD may process information differently compared to neurotypical individuals, particularly in terms of breaking down complex tasks and handling distractions. By understanding these differences and providing appropriate support, employers can create a more inclusive and productive work environment for individuals with ADHD. Future research can build on this work by exploring additional strategies for supporting individuals with ADHD in the workplace and evaluating the effectiveness of current accommodations and interventions.

Look, it got some of that wrong, but it’s easy to correct and not terrible. Now, here’s a neat trick my sister Anitra (who is a power ChattieG user) taught me, which you can have for free. When you have some of your rambling translated into prose, tell Chattie to keep making stuff up and see what happens. Some of it will be terrible, but it’s worth seeing where it will go with the ideas.

It’s a simple one word command this time:

Prompt: continue

Response: Further research could also investigate the role of cognitive processing in other areas of work, such as decision-making, creativity, and problem-solving. While individuals with ADHD may experience challenges in some aspects of cognitive processing, they may also demonstrate strengths in other areas, such as divergent thinking and innovation.

It is also important to note that not all individuals with ADHD will experience the same challenges or strengths in the workplace. The impact of ADHD on work performance may depend on various factors, such as the severity of symptoms, the type of work involved, and the individual’s coping strategies and support systems.

Finally, this discussion highlights the need for greater awareness and understanding of ADHD in the workplace and society at large. By promoting education and awareness about ADHD, we can reduce stigma and misunderstandings and create a more supportive and inclusive environment for individuals with ADHD and other neurodivergent traits.

In conclusion, this discussion highlights some of the differences between how individuals with ADHD process information compared to neurotypical individuals and the implications of these differences for work activities. By understanding and addressing these differences, employers can create a more inclusive and productive work environment for individuals with ADHD.

Similarly to the initial brainstorming, Chattie is largely giving me banal ideas, but I like the point it makes about difference in the first paragraph.

Again, I wouldn’t use this text exactly as its given – for me, this is part of a creative process towards a first draft. I’ll end up rewriting this text completely I suspect, but ChattieG definitely reduced some of the cognitive ‘heavy lifting’.

I suspect people will have Feelpinions about using ChattieG this way… as My friend Dr Jason Downs pointed out to me in one of our podcasts: academics have been trained not to accept help with thinking work.

We award PhDs in recognition that people are capable of independent thought and knowledge making. Using a machine to help generate ideas feels… weird and wrong. Mind you, I would have no problem if the ideas were a result of a conversation with other humans. Is using ChattieG to continue a thought ‘cheating’, or leveraging a technology to extend thinking in a way that was previously not possible? I’m still trying to work that one out.

Use ChattieG to improve your existing prose.

I love Grammarly for cleaning up text, but it feels like a lot of work compared to cleaning text with ChattieG. In our book ‘How to fix your academic writing trouble‘, Katherine, Shaun and I discuss how to use insights from linguistics to help make prose sound more ‘academic’. Here’s some prompts I wrote, using our book, to automagically apply some of these principles to your prose:

• Rewrite this text with less nominalised verbs [or, rewrite with more nominalised verbs]: [insert text]
• Rewrite and reduce instances of the following words: Is, Am, Are, Was, Were, Be, Being, Been and the word ‘that’: [insert text]
• Rewrite this paragraph, introducing more bridging sentences to increase clarity [insert text]
• In the following sentence, please identify the theme and the rheme: [insert sentence]. Follow up prompt: Rewrite the previous sentence to make the connection between the theme and rheme clearer.
• Please provide me with a list of conjunctive phrases to link ideas that have a [particular kind of logical relationship, eg ‘cause and effect’, ‘comparison’, ‘contrast’] relationship.

I’ve been mucking around automating my note taking in other ways by plugging ChattieG into Obsidian with the TextGenerator and SmartConnections (thanks Peter Hayes!), but that’s a post for another time. I have topped 3000 words already!

In case you are wondering, while I am here in the UK on sabbatical I’m attached to Think Lab in Cambridge, where I will do some workshops. I will also be getting around the UK a bit. I’ve confirmed visits to the universities of Glasgow, Ulster, Warwick, Nottingham, Manchester, Gloucestershire and Bristol – and yet to confirm Oxford, but hope to very soon. I’ll be releasing details of any public lectures and workshops on my Thesiswhisperer LinkedIn page, where you can also respond to this post.

Before I go though, here’s my sabbatical writing view at home, while I am in Cambridge:

I’m so honoured to be staying in the house of the late Professor Adam Kendon while I am in the UK on sabbatical. I read (and cited) so much of Dr Kendon’s ground breaking work on hand gestures when I did my own PhD thesis nearly 20 years ago. I wrote to Dr Kendon after I finished my PhD and remember his generosity and kindness to me, as a young, nervous scholar. His example of collegiality has long stood out as a model for me. His personal library here is astonishing and it’s honestly the experience of a lifetime to be sitting and writing this at the desk of one of my academic heroes. Big thanks to the Kendon family for lending Mr Thesiswhisperer and I this beautiful house.

Yours Sabbatically,

Inger

Now that Twitter has been ‘Elonified’, the best way to follow Thesiswhisperer on the socials is via my Thesiswhisperer LinkedIn page. I drop all new posts and pods there first and it’s a good place to talk to me and ask questions.

Podcasting update:

This month’s podding:

• How to get to inbox zero and other stories (includes a lot of me talking about using ChattieG too)
• Severance pod is about to drop! You can follow and subscribe here.

You can also listen to the teaser trailer of Academics talk about Severance. The pod will drop over April and May

Related Posts:

Building a second brain for writing – with Obsidian

Are the robots coming for our (research) jobs?

New book!

I wrote Be Visible or Vanish with Simon Clews to help all researchers present their research, inside or outside the academy. You can pre-order now on all good book sites, or via Routledge here.

Here’s the blurb:

The world of the academic researcher is changing; it used to be enough to work hard, do your research and get your results published. Not so these days. Universities now expect researchers to share their work with the world, as widely as possible. ‘Publish or perish’ has been replaced by a new mantra, and the pressure is on.

In this insightful book, Inger Mewburn and Simon Clews look at some of the most common presentation scenarios that researchers will face when talking about their work. Starting in academia with the deceptively simple art of writing a good email and working through lectures, conference presentations and lightning talks, the book then moves ‘off campus’ and explores talking to the media, making elevator pitches and creating an effective digital presence on social media.

Offering detailed looks at 19 different presentation formats, Mewburn and Clews tap into their vast experience in the field to analyse the challenges and opportunities aligned with each case study and to map out the route to success. With a lightness of touch and an often humorous approach, Be Visible Or Vanish: Engage, Influence and Ensure Your Research Has Impact will show you what it takes to achieve that holy grail of modern academia… impact.

This text will be invaluable for students, academics and researchers hoping to effectively communicate complex information in a way that can be understood and appreciated by their peers, colleagues and the wider world.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
The Year of Living Covidly
TextExpander for Academics

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page. Thanks in advance for the support!

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Like many academics, I have too many things on. By ‘things’ I mean projects of all shapes and sizes, from ‘write a book on neurodiversity and the PhD’, to ‘Fix up the Bootcamp page on the ANU website’.

Exhibit A: I’m going on Sabbatical in the UK from May to August. To minimise disruption to the team, I bunched my first semester of teaching into two months. At the same time I stupidly decided to do a new podcast series with my sister about the Apple TV show Severance:

(it’s going to be a blast, you can listen to the teaser trailer and subscribe via your favourite pod platform here!).

This ‘little’ side project involved about 10 hours of watching the series (again) and writing notes, about 20 hours recording episodes, and at least 40 more hours editing sound. I did this in the evenings and on the weekend by the way (sadly, a recap podcast about a TV show doesn’t really fall under my job title of ‘Director of Researcher Development at ANU’… although it might if I was a media academic, dammit!).

Making this podcast was so much fun, but objectively it was a ginormous time suck. Side projects like this are one of the reasons I never feel like I have enough time to finish everything I want to do, no matter how fast or hard I work. And I constantly make it worse by taking on yet more things when I should be divesting.

It’s important to realise this feeling of ‘never enough’ is intrinsic to academic work and not something you will ever ‘cure’.

The ‘too much work in progress’ (WIP) cycle tends to start early in an academic life. The PhD is the beginning of signing up for a life of ‘forever homework’: where the amount of work you could, should or want to do will always exceed your capacity to actually deliver. The business of making knowledge is limitless and we are finite creatures. All that you can do is manage your relationship to the work – and your feelings about it. And that means learning when to say yes to new things and when to let go.

Making decisions about where to focus your attention are not always within your control of course. Most of us, with the possible exception of billionaires and nepo-babies, must trade off complete freedom to explore and create for a wage from an employer. But where you can exercise choice, it’s important to develop your own ideas of what constitutes a worthwhile project and what doesn’t.

I do like Loleen Berdahl’s matrix for assessing shiny new ideas, where she catalogues prospective projects in four ways: waste of time, low hanging fruit, soul sucking abyss and strategic investment. (If you haven’t subscribed to her excellent Substack yet, do it – I’ll wait).

While I think Loleen is 100% right in her categories, my problem is I can never recognise a soul sucking abyss before I find myself in it. And, of course, feelings can change: what seems like a soul sucking abyss while you are doing it, can end up being a strategic investment and vice versa.

Exhibit B: I had a blast conceiving and building the Whisper Collective website with my colleagues Narelle Lemon and the Research Whisperer crew, but this website is proving too technically complex to maintain and none of us have time to finish building out the review pages properly. We recently started talking about turning it into something simpler so it doesn’t become a soul sucking abyss.

Exhibit C: I agreed to co-author a paper with Adrian Barnett for the BMJ Christmas edition because it sounded like fun, but it totally stressed me out at the time because I was juggling the launch of PostAc. I remember writing the literature review by the side of the pool while my kid had swimming lessons. However, that paper has gone on to be the one with by far the most downloads and earned kudos of my entire career. It opened doors for me professionally (such as a recent piece commissioned by Nature) and no doubt played a part in my promotion to professor. I’m so glad I did this paper, but I came close to pulling out many times.

So my point is this: even experienced people like me just can’t tell where it’s worth putting energy. Here’s my hot take: as far as possible, work with good people on interesting problems and trust it will work out. This means, becoming an excellent project manager and, sometimes, strategically retiring a project or two.

How do you tell what project to retire and which one to stick with? Dominica DeGrandis points out that anyone with too much WIP will also have Neglected Work. Neglected work has the potential to turn into Zombie projects – they look alive, but have already died…. She has a really great description for neglected work in her book Making work visible:

“Neglected work is perishable. It ages. And like rotten fruit, it’s wasteful. Fruit is expensive, consumes space on the countertop, and gets old and mouldy and smells bad. And who wants that?”

Identifying neglected work is a good way to start getting hold of your WIP load and making sure you know which projects might become Zombies. You can start identifying neglected work by doing a project audit. But maybe I need to go back a step: lots of people don’t know how to usefully think about their work as a series of projects and can confuse tasks and projects.

A project, according to David Allen in Getting Things Done, is a deliverable that takes more than one step to complete and may involve the work of other people. A task is a single action step that moves your project along. If you take Allen’s definition of a project as a starting point it’s likely you have way more projects in your life than you think.

A project audit is a way of identifying which project is getting love, and which are being neglected. Let me explain by breaking down the work I have on my desk at the moment. Here’s a list of deliverables I’d like to get done over the next six months.

There’s three key work things I need to do before I go:

• Finish analysing the PRES data and write paper (by start of April)
• Deliver a good HDR induction week (1-4 April)
• Do a PostAc report on the PhD job market for [paying client] by end of April

At the same time I want to:

• Make a couple of On The Reg podcasts before I leave Jason alone with the pod for three months.
• Finish the Severance podcast with Anitra.

While I’m on Sabbatical, I want to:

• Get some of the ‘The bullet journal for Academics’ book done.
• Keep blogging, once a month (but suspend podding).
• Visit people and do fun things around the UK and Europe.
• Start migrating the Thesiswhisperer website off WordPress.
• Start writing book on Neurodiversity and the PhD

Each of these deliverables will consist of multiple projects and many individual tasks. For example, ‘start writing a book on Neurodiversity and the PhD’ would have at least six sub-projects. Let me outline them, because this book is a PhD sized project in itself:

1. Compile a reading list to get my head around the existing neurodiversity literature in education.
2. Load selected papers into MaxQDA and set up coding strategy (this is how I do literature reviews).
3. Code papers and memo in Obsidian to make a bunch of raw material for writing.
4. Write book proposal outline and socialise it a bit with trusted people.
5. Identify and contact a publisher to discuss how to approach the market.
6. (if necessary) design a research project involving PhD students to fill in knowledge gaps.

Writing this down was helpful – now here’s the project work I am currently neglecting:

• Promoting the new ‘Be visible or Vanish’ book I’ve just completed with Simon Clews (sorry Simon!)
• My romance novel, which has four chapters written and seems to have stalled.

Now I have identified my neglected work, I will find a way to get it done or cross it off the list. The ‘Be Visible or vanish’ book will be out in the world, so it can’t become a Zombie now. Declaring it Neglected has forced me to think about what needs to happen (I will probably try to organise a book launch while I am in the UK).

Sadly, I think my romance novel might have turned into a Zombie … but you never know, it may come to life again! (Probably when I retire

I hope this post has helped you start thinking with a project mind set. I suspect I have more to say about projects, but that’s enough for now. There’s some more resources in the list below.

In solidarity,

Inger

Podcasting update:

On the Reg has booted up for a new year – Jason and I have two new episodes up:

• Strategic thinking for fun and profit where Jason shares his expertise from his PhD
• The weapons of influence where we learn about how I persuade people to do stuff at work (for good, I promise!)

You can also listen to the teaser trailer of Academics talk about Severance. The pod will drop over April and May

Over on Whisper Collective Podcast, Jonathan had a discussion with Prolifico on their new book ‘how to feel good about your writing’.

Related Posts:

5 things to do in the first week of your PhD

The project finishing mindset

Why are we all so tired?

New book!

I wrote Be Visible or Vanish with Simon Clews to help all researchers present their research, inside or outside the academy. You can pre-order now on all good book sites, or via Routledge here.

Here’s the blurb:

The world of the academic researcher is changing; it used to be enough to work hard, do your research and get your results published. Not so these days. Universities now expect researchers to share their work with the world, as widely as possible. ‘Publish or perish’ has been replaced by a new mantra, and the pressure is on.

In this insightful book, Inger Mewburn and Simon Clews look at some of the most common presentation scenarios that researchers will face when talking about their work. Starting in academia with the deceptively simple art of writing a good email and working through lectures, conference presentations and lightning talks, the book then moves ‘off campus’ and explores talking to the media, making elevator pitches and creating an effective digital presence on social media.

Offering detailed looks at 19 different presentation formats, Mewburn and Clews tap into their vast experience in the field to analyse the challenges and opportunities aligned with each case study and to map out the route to success. With a lightness of touch and an often humorous approach, Be Visible Or Vanish: Engage, Influence and Ensure Your Research Has Impact will show you what it takes to achieve that holy grail of modern academia… impact.

This text will be invaluable for students, academics and researchers hoping to effectively communicate complex information in a way that can be understood and appreciated by their peers, colleagues and the wider world.

Links to resources:

The classic book Getting Things Done by David Allen really is a must read if you are serious about getting organised. Check out #GTD on almost any social media platform and you will find heaps of people still talking about it.

I also like Project management for the unofficial project manager, which is a very practical book on how to start treating your work more like projects.

More for ANU staff and students:

I do a workshop at ANU called ‘Getting Sh*t done!’ which helps you action the David Allen GTD principles. I’ll be running the next one soon after I get back. You’ll find times, dates and sign up links on the ANU website (sorry, this workshop is only open to ANU staff, students and visiting faculty – visit my workshop pages to see my availability beyond that).

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
The Year of Living Covidly
TextExpander for Academics

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page. Thanks in advance for the support!

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It’s been a busy month here at Thesis Whisperer HQ… I am doing #LazyPost this month by recycling a bit of my teaching content.

This post is about organising yourself for a ‘binge writing’ session.

While ‘snack writing’ (writing small amounts, consistently) is good practice, there comes a time when deadlines require the strict application of bottom to seat. These binge writing sessions are much better if you prepare well in advance.

As I write this, I’m running a thesis bootcamp weekend at ANU, where we challenge people to write 20,000 words of their thesis. Long time readers may recall Liam Connall’s post about the general concept of bootcamps (Drop and give me 20,000 (words)!) I encourage you to read that post if you want to learn more about what a bootcamp is and how to run one.

I want to acknowledge Liam, along with Peta Freestone and Katherine Firth for their excellent work in developing the bootcamp concept, particularly their idea of generating a ‘thesis map’. At ANU, we will not let people come to bootcamp until we have received and reviewed their map.

The rest of this post is the text from my Thesis Map handout. I hope this post will be useful to others who are planning bootcamps. Or maybe you want to bootcamp yourself! This planning activity can help you make the best of an uninterrupted stretch of time to really progress your writing.

If you like, you can skip the post and go straight to the formatted version of this hand out, which might be easier to read (WordPress does crappy tables)

————————-

Why are we asking you to do this activity?We want you to make a plan to write at least 20,000 words. These words can all be in a couple of specific chapters, or they can be parts of all the chapters. A thesis map helps you organise the writing as a list of actionable things to do, rather than a bunch of thoughts and ideas swirling around in your head.

The Thesis Road map document is for you, but we will be reviewing your map to assess your support needs. If we think your map is not complete enough, we will be in touch. You can make this document in MS word or your preferred program, but you’ll need to use one that handles tables.

Making a useful thesis road map will take you at least a couple of days. Some people find it can take longer than a week.

As tempted as you will be, please don’t rush through this step. People tell us the thesis road map is a total game changer and continues to be valuable as they finish their thesis. Inger has used this method of organising herself (and others) through eight published books: it works.

Step One: produce some summary statements

Start with some overall direction statements at the top of the page – this helps us understand your overall topic and match you with people with similar interests.

Complete the following sentences and include them as bullet points at the top of the document:

• What is your thesis about – but in just one sentence (plain language please, no more than 50 words):
• This thesis contributes to knowledge by (up to 100 words):
• This study is important because (up to 150 words):
• My key research question(s) are: (up to six questions)

Step Two: prepare a writing table.

Pull out your latest thesis annual progress report – it should contain a chapter outline. If it doesn’t, or it’s out of date, you’ll need to draft a new one. We want you to turn this chapter list into an actionable writing plan using the table format below.

We find this format works for most people, but feel free to modify it if you want to add more information.

You can attempt to map out all the chapters in detail (highly recommended), or you can just concentrate on a few where you want to add the most words.

Remember, you just need to plan out about 20,000 words of work. Here’s what to include in your table:

Thesis Title:

Proposed Thesis Length: (be as specific as you can – don’t just say ‘100,000’ because that’s the maximum.)

Due date: (this should be the date that you plan to submit to the university – it may be before or after the date that is currently in the system as your maximum completion time)

List of chapters: (include your current chapter list here, with proposed word counts if possible)

Chapter to work on at Bootcamp – Title and Synopsis

(No more than 200 words.)

Briefly describe the content in this chapter and what it contributes to the overall thesis. How does it progress the argument, answer your research questions and/or inform the reader about the topic?

State of the subsections of my chapter

Every chapter will have subsections. Most thesis subsections are 500 – 2000 words, but they can be longer or shorter, depending on the topic. (if you don’t yet have subsections, look at the guidance below about how to outline.)

Now colour your subsection headings:

Green – needs editing, but generally ok.
Orange – I see the ‘through line’ here. It needs some thinking work, but I generally know what it’s about and where my argument/explanation needs to go.
Red – I have no idea what goes in here. Gah!

Next Actions / Notes

Assess what you have in your subsections. Write some notes about the writing that needs to be done. These notes are for you – they don’t have to make sense to us.

Here’s a formatted version of this hand out with some sample text so you can see how it all looks in a table.

The orange parts are the best bits to tackle in Bootcamp! Orange bits are the areas of your thesis ripe for adding words – especially with the ‘first draft’ mentality we will be pushing at Bootcamp. Use these bits as a basis for planning where you want to add words.

The green bits are very tempting, but you might find yourself editing and not progressing the word count. It’s good to know where they are so you don’t get drawn in too much.

The red bits can be a bit daunting when you are under pressure, but you might be surprised what comes out when you start writing in the way we encourage you to at bootcamp. Our philosophy is ‘make a mess, then clean it up’. Your thesis road map table can act as a way to capture thoughts and ideas about what might be in the red bits as you write.

Depending on how long you have before boot camp starts, you might be able to do work on the red bits and move more of them into orange. Go for it!

Help please! My thesis is too much of a mess to make a map!Relax, this is normal. We find a surprising number of people have not thought about their thesis as a whole for a while (or ever). If you found your materials and chapters are not planned enough to put in the table, here’s two techniques to create a bit more order:

Technique one: The Snowflake method when the chapter is still really formless

The snowflake method enables you to plan the ‘story spines’ of your writing, while keeping your plan flexible and responsive to change.

Begin expanding your chapter outline by including a short synopsis of around 300 – 400 words. This is essentially an abstract for the chapter. Ask yourself:

• What are the main points this chapter needs to cover?
• What resources/evidence will I need to draw on to demonstrate these?
• How does this chapter relate to my overall argument?

When you have the synopsis ready, make a list of provisional subheadings under the chapters. This is the second level of organisation. These subheadings should show the order in which you plan to arrange material you are writing. Add a provisional word count for each subheading (ideally you should have no more than 2 pages between each subheading).

Under each subheading, try to put in a third level of detail to your plan. This should be a series of sentences that act as a ‘storyline’: they capture what each paragraph under the subheading will cover.

You can start this third level with a messy list of whatever you think should go under the subheading. This can be notes to yourself, reminders, bits of data and analysis, lists of literature – whatever you like. Remember, as a general rule academic writing should contain some or all of the following elements:

• ‘Knowledge claims’ or ‘truth statements’
• Inferences / speculation / propositions
• References to prior work
• Definitions
• Evidence/examples
• Acknowledgement of counter arguments / examples
• Conclusions

Now have a go at putting this detail into the map format above. Make sure you chase up as much of this detail as you can before you come to Bootcamp.

Technique Two: The reverse outline method when you have a bunch of messy stuff that doesn’t look like a chapter yet.

This exercise is adapted from materials published on the Explorations in Style blog by Rachel Cayley and on various writings by Dr Claire Aitchinson on the ‘story line’ technique.

A reverse outline is a plan made from an existing draft. The idea of the reverse outline is to diagnose any potential problems with your arguments and identify ways forward without mucking around too much with the existing text and potentially destroying good work.

Here is a step-by-step approach:

1. Number the paragraphs in your original chapter draft.
2. Cut and paste sentences containing the key idea from each paragraph into a new document, preserving the paragraph numbering. If none of the sentences has the key idea, write a brief sentence capturing what the paragraph is about (or should be about).
3. You should end up with a list of sentences that capture the ‘storyline’ of the chapter. Read through the new document and be ruthless – is there a coherent story emerging?
4. If you feel the overall story does not flow properly, or has gaps, rearrange the sentences in your story line and add in new ones as appropriate. New sentences should have the number plus a letter – i.e. 7 then 7a, 7b etc.

When you are happy with your story line, have another go at filling in the table. Before the bootcamp, make some time to cut and paste anything useful from your existing writing back into a new document and put comments over it about where you want to add words.

I’m a historian / Lawyer / Mathematician: none of this will work for me.Hello lovely people! I have heard this complaint consistently over the last 10 years.

First of all – I hear you, but some of it will work. Give it a go at least. Send us whatever you manage to do with a note at the top about your circumstances.

Mathematicians: it’s usually the stopping to format equations that gets in the way of ‘flow’. We recommend just drawing it on a piece of paper, snapping a photo and inserting that into your document as a placeholder. However, sometimes the work IS the creation/formatting of the equations – if that’s the case for you, chat to us. We can ‘count’ equations as words so you still get the rewards and a sense of how much progress you have made. Identify which ones you need to make before you come to bootcamp.

Historians / Lawyers: your biggest problem seems to be marshalling sources with a high degree of precision. I know doing this at bootcamp, without all your physical stuff, can be a source of anxiety. Also, the nature of the work means you feel the need to check stuff all the time, breaking writing flow.

To get the most out of Bootcamp, you need to find ways to minimize this ‘churn’ by treating the writing like a stir-fry: cut up your ingredients as much as you can in advance. We recommend you look at the notes for ‘Building a second brain for writing’, particularly slide 18, for some ideas about managing your information down into digestible ‘chunks’. If you are excited about Obsidian and want some tips, email Inger (she can nerd for Australia about it. Hey, if you want to do all your bootcamp writing in Obsidian after watching that video, we witness you!)

Related posts

Drop and give me 20,000 (words)!

The feedback loop of shit

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
The Year of Living Covidly
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Writing a thesis or book is an enormous task that takes years and involves reading hundreds, sometimes thousands, of books, papers and articles. At the same time, you must produce your own words and make sure you don’t accidentally plagiarise other people.

People end up with all kinds of home-brew solutions to solve this epic information management problem. Just like hooch, the quality of the home-brew information management solutions can vary enormously – either bringing joy or slowly killing you.

As Peg Boyle Single wisely said ‘Collect notes, not articles’. I try to concentrate less on filing PDFs and books, and more on making and formatting my own notes. For years I’ve been using a combination of Zotero, Pocket, Evernote, and, more recently, a hand written Bullet Journal to organise and transform information and ideas from other people into my own words. It’s not an easy task, so I’m always looking for ways to improve my systems, as I wrote about here.

Last year I wrote a post inspired by the new book by Tiago Forte called Building a second brain for academic writing which, in part, documented the way I kept my writing notes tidy using Evernote. Although my system kind of worked (I’ve produced seven books in eight years), I’ve long been dissatisfied with Evernote as a solution because it’s a subscription service that can lock your notes away if you don’t keep paying.

Other than being a subscription service, Evernote is a great tool. It’s basically an online database that enables you to add your own notes to bits of text taken from other’s work. When you think about it, this practice of annotating other people’s work is the essence of academic writing. I write around the quotes I extract, adding and extending the thoughts of others. I also write around data in the form of images and tables. This is the ‘writing chunks, not chapters’ or ‘starting in the middle’ approach, advocated by Pat Thompson, Howard Becker and other writing gurus.

Writing in chunks is a great way to beat perfectionism and avoid an enormous ‘write up’ at the end of a project. But when you write in chunks, you need a digital warehouse or ‘Second Brain’ to keep all the chunks while you decide where they fit in your draft.

Forte’s book is great and helped me reassess my note taking strategies. I realised Evernote is more like an ideas deep freeze than a Second Brain. Endless ‘upgrades’ to the Evernote interface made it really cluttered, so it was not a nice place to write. As my database got bigger and bigger, the search function didn’t work as efficiently. For the last four books at least, I gave up on the idea of having a notes warehouse and wrote them directly into my drafts instead. This approach is fine if you have the overall structure of the book hashed out, but a nightmare if you don’t.

I’m edging towards a new book, which is pretty formless at the moment, so I need a better solution for keeping my writing ‘chunks’ organised. I started playing around with a new piece of database software called Obsidian after recording an episode about it for the On The Reg podcast with my co-host Dr Jason Downs.

Obsidian makes your notes more useful by ‘linking your thinking’. Basically, any word in an Obsidian note can become a link to another note, so, over time, your notes become like your own personal wikipedia.

Obsidian also makes a cool visualisation of all the links between your notes, so you can surf through them, visually. Pages are represented as nodes; pages which have a lot of incoming links become bigger in the visual graph, literally showing you where an idea is ‘growing’:

After a bit of tinkering, I think I have a better system than my previous Evernote-dependant workflow. My system works on the principle that the original information is always ‘re-findable’ on the web, but the notes and highlights I make are irreplaceable and need careful storage.

The rest of this post documents my home-brew information management ‘hooch’, with some links out to explanatory videos or articles. I’ve documented it in some detail as people who have seen my system have asked for an explainer, but you may use it as inspiration for designing your own home-brew system.

To capture and store information you will need:

• A reference manager. I use Zotero for storing academic papers. I’ve used Endnote, Papers and Mendeley in the past, but eventually settled on Zotero… not because I love it, but because it’s proven to be the most robust.
• A physical notebook. I use the Bullet Journal method for taking notes by hand – I wrote about how to set up an academic bullet journal here. You can use any old notebook, but I’m lazy and buy Leuchtthurm pre-formatted bullet journal, version one. And I use Blackwing 602 pencils, because I am fancy. I go through two of these notebooks a year, and about 3 pencils, so it’s less than $100.
• An eReader of some kind. I use Kindle for reading ebooks. I mostly use the app on my phone, but also have a stand alone device that works offline (useful when I want to reduce distractions from social media).
• A bookmarking app. I used to use Pocket, but now I use Readwise for capturing information from the web (and for managing highlights from my Kindle). Readwise is a subscription service which costs me about $8 a month. I use Readwise because of the Obsidian plug in I describe below, but it’s not essential. Here’s an article discussing the relative merits of a few bookmarking apps currently on the market. Pick your favourite.
• Obsidian – a database that acts like your own personal wikipedia. I could write a whole heap about how it works and how to set it up, or you could read this excellent article by Elizabeth Butler instead. Similar products to Obsidian are Notion, Logseq or Roam. I like Obsidian because it’s a free, downloadable app, not a cloud service(I don’t like to have to keep paying to access my thoughts).

Writing starts by either:

• Highlighting part of an article I saved off the web using the Readwise service. I add notes to my highlights as much as possible, to capture my own thoughts. My highlights are available to browse on the Readwise site (see images below).
• Starting a Collection in my Bullet journal and hand writing my thoughts on a topic, or taking notes from a meeting, books, videos or podcasts.
• Reading and highlighting sections of PDFs in Zotero and writing in the notes pane.
• Reading and highlighting passages in my Kindle; adding a quick note with the highlight to remind me why I thought that bit was important. My Kindle is also linked to Readwise so I can see all my web and book highlights together in the site or app. I’ve popped in a few screen shots below to show you what Readwise looks like:

List of books and articles that I have captured in Readwise from the internet and Kindle.Highlights from the book ‘ADHD 2.0’ transferred from my Kindle to ReadwiseI get this ‘raw material’ into Obsidian by:

I use a custom built Readwise plug in for Obsidian to bring in all my highlights and notes from web articles and Kindle – it’s free. Here’s a useful video to help you set up the plug-in to work automagically.

The Readwise>Obsidian workflow is truly remarkable. For example, Kindle book highlights come in as pre-formatted pages, like so:

The first time I ran the Readwise synch it took hundreds of highlights from the nearly 200 academic books I have read (or partially read!) on Kindle in the last ten years. Every time I open Obsidian, the Readwise plug in synchs any new highlights, so I don’t have to have to finish a book or article to start using the insights I’ve gathered.

I’m hoping Readwise will include a Zotero integration at some point, but for now I manually export the notes pane when I’m done. The export function produces a markdown file, which is the file type Obsidian uses. I save this markdown file directly in my Obsidian vault, where it gets automatically added to the knowledge graph.

I manually transfer notes from the bullet journal into a new Obsidian page. It’s much more laborious than the other methods, but worth doing as I’ve noticed my handwritten notes are very high quality compared to my digital highlights.

How I use obsidian to start the writing process

When I don’t yet know where I am going with a piece of writing, I start by linking words in the notes with each other to build a knowledge graph.

Obsidian uses Markdown, which is a simple way of formatting test – here’s a Markdown primer. Following Tiago Forte’s ‘progressive highlighting method’, I use bold text and highlights to help me see the most interesting parts of my notes as I scan through them.

My notes, and the knowledge graph I make by linking them, help me see possible structures for writing. As nodes in the visual graph grow bigger they become themes which might turn into chapters or subsections of a finished piece. Linking is a very simple process in Obsidian – as I said, any word or phrase in any note can be made into a link to another note (or a page on the broader internet).

There are two basic methods for making links in Obsidian:

• Put double square brackets – [[ – around any word or phrase that you want to make into a link [[like so]]. The word or phrase will then link to a page of that title, if it exists already, or make a place holder page you can later expand with your own insights (place holder pages will appear as greyed out dots in your visual knowledge graph).
• Put one square bracket around a word or phrase [like this] and put the link after it in brackets. So this text: audience capture, in an obsidian note, will look like this: audience capture. The link can go out to any page on the internet, or you can grab the link to your obsidian page by right clicking on the name of the note in your list, see below:

Over time, your knowledge graph will become richer and richer. When you find a new piece of information that seems useful, you can either add it as a new page, or elaborate an existing page.

To start writing about a topic, simply run a search of your linked notes. Ideally, if you have written little chunks of text of your own ideas, you can building a text ‘bottom up’ by pulling them out and piecing them together in a new document. I still use Scrivener to draft my books, but that’s a post for another time.

One last thing…

Obsidian, being an actual program you have on your laptop, rather than a cloud based subscription service, is awesome for working offline and having control over your data. BUT, it gives me the heebie-jeebies knowing all that precious knowledge work is on my fragile, breakable laptop.

The good news is the markdown format that Obsidian uses is readable in just about any text based program. This means you can open your individual Obsidian notes in MS word or notepad, making the individual pieces of your database very portable. You can back up your notes by simply dragging the markdown files into Dropbox or similar, but, for peace of mind, I have set up automated GitHub backups of my Obsidian vaults

I hope this documented workflow is helpful to people in the midst of a big writing project. Happy home-brewing!

In solidarity,

Inger
Canberra, 26 December 2022

New On The Reg podcast is up!

This time we tackle the book Getting Things Done and talk about 80s power ballads, among other things. Listen and subscribe on your favourite platform here.

Related Posts:

Building a second brain for academic writing

New Year, new Bullet Journal!

Information Indigestion? The search for the perfect note taking system

Writing in Scrivener

Writing in ‘Chunks’

Helping doctoral students write by Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler (a classic, written for the humanities but has broad use beyond that. A great book for supervisors).

Writing for social scientists, Howard Becker (I’ve given this book to all kinds of scientists, who have all loved it, so I think it’s mis-named. Check it out.)

Demystifying Dissertation Writing, Peg Boyle Single (I like some ideas in this book, but find the system it advocates a bit restrictive).

Links to resources:

Download Obsidian (works on Mac and PC)

Building a second brain book by Tiago Forte

Great article on setting up Obsidian – but also have a look on YouTube. There are a metric shit ton of walk through videos.

An episode about Obsidian from the On The Reg podcast

Setting up GitHub backups of Obsidian vaults

markdown repository

More help for ANU staff and students:

I will do live demos and help people set up their system next time I run my popular ‘Building a second brain for writing’ workshop at ANU (April 2023). If you are a PhD student at ANU, keep an eye on the newsletter; ANU based academics, feel free to write to use at researcherdevelopment@anu.edu.au and we can put you on the list. Please don’t email us if you are not a researcher connected with ANU – sorry, but at the moment we can’t offer places to people outside the organisation.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
The Year of Living Covidly
TextExpander for Academics

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page. Thanks in advance for the support!

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Happy new year friends!

They say how you spend NYE night sets the tone for the year. If that’s the case, I’ll be eating Indian takeaway with my girlfriends and going to bed at 9:30pm. I’m VERY ok with this plan after the eventful couple of years we’ve had.

I followed up the quiet start with a quiet ‘going back to school’ activity: prepping my Bullet Journal for the new year.

While I love my digital task manager Omnifocus, for the last couple of years I’ve been supplementing it with the Bullet Journal method (#BuJo) designed by Ryder Carroll. Doing part of my organising and planning work by hand, in an actual notebook, slows me down and helps me think through problems and roadblocks in my work.

Below I have put together a step by step explainer of how I set up and use my Bullet Journal for academic work (including teaching), with a focus on prepping for the coming year.

If you’re not already bullet journalling, I hope this helps you get started. If you’re already a fan of #BuJo, or you’re a supervisor, maybe send this post to the PhD student in your life who will benefit from juicing up their organisational strategies

Getting started:

Really, you just need a notebook and a pen to get started and old notebook will do. But I can never resist an Excuse To Shop (ETS), so I use a fit for purpose Leuchtthurm pre-formatted bullet journal.

I prefer to work in pencil rather than pen: it feels more ‘low stakes’ and creative, and it’s easier to clean up mistakes. I use Blackwing 602 pencils, which are nice and soft without being too smudgy, and have the added advantage of a built in eraser that is designed specifically for that pencil (I used to be an architect – clean pages are important to me!)

The most genius part of the Bullet Journal is the way you create an index of your note book as you build it. This means you can always find your notes again. Leave a couple of pages blank at the start of the notebook, then number the rest of the pages. Go back and write ‘Index’ at the top of the first couple of pages and you are ready to start.

If you buy the ‘how to’ Bullet Journal book by Ryder Carroll (which I recommend if you want to really get into it), the whole process of setting up a bullet journal can seem a little complicated. Heed the sage advice of my podcast Co-host Dr Jason Downs: keep it simple at the start by just doing daily logs.

Annotations and daily logging

Every day I start a new page with the date at the top and start writing down stuff, in any order it comes. Tasks and notes are gaily jumbled up, but the annotations mean the page is legible at a glance. Here’s what a typical day ends up looking like:

I ignored the annotation system Ryder Carroll developed when I first started, which was a mistake. The annotation system makes order from chaos and helps you quickly find your outstanding ‘to dos’ as you scan the pages.

There are lots of possible annotations, I only really use two, which you can see on the page above:

• A simple bullet point dot (.) for a task. I put a X through the dot when I am done or add a greater than sign (>) if I have moved the task to the next day. If I abandon the task, I put a line through the whole thing.
• A hypen (-) for a note: notes are just memory aides I jot down as I read or listen to someone talk in a meeting.

Now look at the page again – see what I mean about order from chaos? Those naked bullet points are the outstanding tasks that need to be dealt with. The rest are either completed or moved, so my eye can skip over them. I don’t bother noting the page numbers of individual daily logs in the index; it’s better to use the index to keep track of your collections – let’s look at these briefly.

Collections

Every now and then, you’ll want to make a special page or two dedicated to a specific topic, task, project or set of notes: what Carroll calls a ‘collection’.

Starting a collection is simple – just go to the next clear page and write the name of the collection at the top. I put a box around the name so I can pick out my collections when I am flicking from page to page. Here’s a collection page in my latest #BuJo for the On The Reg podcast:

I keep this page open while we are recording and just jot things on it – sometimes I put notes here during the month as I think of things to talk about. This is a good example of a collection for an ongoing project. You can see there is more than one entry for On The Reg in the index:

You can create continuity between collections by ‘threading’ the page numbers. Look at the collection page image a little more closely, see how I’ve noted the other page number there too?

Threading helps me flick backwards and forwards in my bullet journal and see disconnected collections as a whole. A simply genius idea from Ryder Carroll!

Collections are a good way to store information you reference a lot – sort of personal FAQs. For instance, the most common question I am asked by my team or students in email is ‘when is the next Bootcamp?’. Here’s a collection I’ve started to compile with all my teaching engagements; it’a a lot quicker than scrolling through my calendar to give people the answer:

Collections are my favourite part of bullet journals, here’s some more collection types I’ve found handy in academic life:

• Notes from a specific paper or book – doing a literature review is much easier when you can reliably find your notes again using an index.
• Thoughts or ideas about specific problems and topics
• Meeting notes and agendas for collaborative projects
• A ‘maybe later’ list of writing ideas
• Notes for teaching – handy to have in front of you, especially if the presentation machine in the room is borked or you can’t plug your laptop in.
• A list of online subscriptions and their renewal dates.
• Books you’ve lent out to people (with their phone number so I can reliably get them back)…

… Really the limit is your imagination when it comes to collections.

That’s all the information you need to get a really useful bullet journal going, but I did promise some new year planning ideas, so let’s look at a few.

Monthly Logs and spreads to help you organise yourself

Just like the daily log, the monthly log helps you keep track of what’s happening in your life, but from a more ‘zoomed out’ perspective.

There’s lots of ways to set out a monthly log. If you google it, you’ll see heaps of beautiful looking monthly logs with decorative flourishes. You’ll need stencils for these (yes, I have them) but your basic and perhaps most useful monthly log format is simply a list of dates down one side of the page. Here’s my January 2023 log, the lines break the months into weeks:

This isn’t enough to organise my life – I am a heavy user of electronic diaries and have many shared calendars. You may wonder why you’d do a monthly log rather than just put stuff in your dairy, but let me tell you, the simple act of making a monthly log has saved me from double booking myself an embarrassing number of times. I think this is because Time is an abstract concept that is much easier to deal with when you make it visual and concrete in a #BuJo.

This year I’m supplementing my monthly log with a Collection of monthly tasks. These are all ‘to-dos’ without strict deadlines, but with some level of urgency:

It’s good to have a list of moderately urgent tasks that can be done at any time – they are good starting fodder for your daily log if you are not sure what to do today. There’s a mix of professional and personal on my list – the beauty of the Bullet Journal is that it’s a way to keep both sides of your life in hand. Often tasks without deadlines support other, longer term goals like fixing health issues or developing ideas, but they are the kind of tasks that easily slip out of sight and out of mind. Tracking them like this keeps your eye on the ball so to speak.

You can, if you like, make a yearly log too. I do these, but to be honest, I don’t get much value out of them. The only time I want to zoom out to a year is planning teaching and I usually do this with my whole team, on a whiteboard. For writing projects, I need to work in smaller chunks, so I’ve started making ‘spreads’ of four months at a time:

Yes, this spread was made with the aid of stencils I cross each day off so I have a visual reminder of how much time I have left to key deadlines, which I usually mark with a coloured highlighter (I haven’t got that far in my planning yet).

This is a new spread for me. The boxes to the side of my calendar will be used to record monthly ‘wins’, handy for my performance review at the end of the year. The box at the bottom of the left hand page will be used to put in key deadlines when I have them. The flags on the right are just … because.

There is a fine line between #Bujo and scrapbooking and I am not afraid to cross it.

Data is life

A lot of people have used the Bullet Journal collections to achieve goals like giving up booze or losing weight. I’ve started many a health based collection, only to abandon it, but I was recently inspired by the ‘peak hipster’ bullet journalling in this video.

The pandemic has not been kind to my body and I am trying to get back into shape this year. As a start, I used the inspiration from the video to start tracking sleep against a couple of other health goals:

On the top graph I am tracking amount and quality of sleep. I’m (un)lucky enough to have sleep apnoea and use a machine to help me breathe at night, which means I have accurate data on length of time I slept and the AHI reading (how many apnoea events).

Below the sleep tracker I am simply noting whether I did the activities I’ve decided I need to do more often: go to the gym, stop to eat a proper lunch, and my own writing. I also put a dot on this graph when I encounter a stressful incident or problem.

The placement of the two graphs makes it easier to see the health data more holistically. It’s four days in, let’s see if I can keep it up, but I’m already seeing a strong connection between exercise, stress and sleep!

My On The Reg pod cohost Dr Jason Downs is going real fancy with his health tracker this year. Below is the elaborate spread he made to track his gym training and progress towards the next Brazillian JuJitsu belt:

I find Jason’s spread confusing, but that’s irrelevant. Each #Bujo is unique: made by a person for that person.

I find other people’s #BuJos fascinating. Ann H from Mastodon shared with me the spread she uses to track her small online business, which I imagine could be adapted to all kinds of financial tracking purposes:

I hope you enjoyed this little tour through some basic #BuJo practises: I hope you are inspired. Doing this simple ‘back to school’ activity has already improved my attitude towards the coming year – I hope it’s a good one for us all.

I’d love to hear about your own Bullet Journaling ideas – you can chat with me on Linkedin or via Mastodon – links are below. Although I am still a presence on Twitter, I am not responding there as I want to deny a certain billionaire my intellectual and creative energy this year!

In solidarity,

Inger

Thursday 4th of January, Canberra.

Related posts:

You have to believe what you do matters.

PhD busy work is like vegan junk food

Books and materials (Excuses to Shop):

The classic ‘how to’ Bullet Journal book by Ryder Carroll – definitely worth a read.

The 365 Bullet guide (thanks to Dr Bron Eager for reminding me I had this book! Good inspro for different spreads and decorative elements)

The stencil pack I use most – there is no shame in stencils, only joy.

Save time with a preformatted LEUCHTTURM1917 – Official Bullet Journal

The blackwing pencil range (treat yourself – these are nice. I use 602’s and also have the special sharpener)

There’s so much scrapbook cross over tat to buy….I have angry uterus stickers for ‘that time of the month’… Browse the very fun selection of angry uterus merch on Etsy.

Contact me:

I’m on Twitter and Facebook, but don’t spend time there anymore. You can follow and talk to me on Mastodon @thesiswhisperer@aus.social or on my Linkedin Thesiswhisperer page

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket. If you enjoyed this post and want to support the work, you can buy me a virtual coffee here or consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon

Alternatively, consider buying a copy of one of my ebooks directly from this site:

Tame your PhD
The Year of Living Covidly
TextExpander for Academics

I’ve authored, co-authored or been involved with eight books now – you can find them all on the Buy Books page. Thanks in advance for the support!

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Academics are always worried about having their ideas ‘stolen’. This deep cultural anxiety affects PhD students more than almost any other member of the community. There’s a good reason why PhD students should be anxious about protecting their ideas – examination. A PhD is meant to be a signal that you’re fit to be a ...continue reading.

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As regular readers will know, I am a working researcher with an interest in post PhD employability. For nearly 10 years now my research focus has been on job advertisements for researchers. this post is a detailed update on the academic and non-academic job market, 2 years into the pandemic. If you don’t want to ...continue reading.

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It’s been a funny old start to the year hey? As I write this, in mid January, the Omicron variant is raging here in Australia. Supply chain problems are resulting as key workers either get sick, or have to isolate. Every visit to the supermarket is an adventure – you don’t know what you are ...continue reading.

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Did you have a break over Christmas / New Years? I hope so. It’s summer here in Australia, so we are rolling into the quiet month of January. For the second year in a row, we have a low fire danger summer, instead of a repeat of the horror of 2019. In fact, it pretty ...continue reading.

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It’s the end of #acwrimo!! Did you take part in Academic Writing Month this year? I certainly did. It was lockdown, so this year we made a big deal of it at ANU. Not to put too fine a point on it, I taught my ass off. You can see some of the workshops I ...continue reading.

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Probably should start this one with a content warning. I try to be upbeat and helpful, but I am touching on mental health issues here, including anxiety and depression. If you’d rather not go there today, click away now. Here’s a gif of a kitten before you go: If you believe the ‘The Illustrated Guide ...continue reading.

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Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of requests to run my workshop called ‘How to finish that big writing project (and get on with your life)’. I’m guessing it’s a sign of pandemic fatigue: everyone close to the end of a PhD just wants it to be, well – over. I feel you. I’m not ...continue reading.

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I started the Thesis Whisperer to help PhD students finish. In the last five years I’ve extended that mission to helping people get jobs after they graduate. It’s my firm belief that, although the world has 99 problems right now, research can fix a lot of them. Therefore researchers need to be able to put ...continue reading.

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There’s a period of PhD study that I have come to call ‘the loopy la-las’: when you become highly capable of doing PhD work, but start to become incompetent at, well – almost everything else. I remember the day it started to happen to me. It was 2008 and I was deep in a Foucault ...continue reading.

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Email is the lifeblood of university communications: quick, easy, painless… and so very easy to get wrong.

We humans are a curious lot. We are highly social creatures but idiosyncratic. There is a lot of love, but also a lot of jostling for status and power. Academia, with its deeply middle class, coded language and manners is a real social challenge. Being an effective emailer in academia requires next level skills. It’s easy – all too easy – to get it wrong and, well – piss people off.

There are a couple of reasons you might want to write a ‘cold call’ email to an academic you don’t know:

• To seek help or feedback on your current project.
• To ask a favour: such as giving a presentation, supplying data or sending a paper that you can’t access.
• To ask for a job.
• To express admiration and seek to make a connection.

I asked academics on Twitter aand was surprised at the number of complaints about inappropriate and borderline unprofessional emails from colleagues and members of the public. Even if students are not the worst offenders, it’s good to know what sort of things are competing for attention in a typical academic inbox:

• Other academics complaining their work wasn’t cited in your latest paper (!)
• Emails about why your theory or findings are wrong (much easier than writing a paper rebutting the original work I suppose).
• Emails questioning your academic expertise. (This one seems to be a bit gendered, as @CJfrieman put it: “I am a woman writing about stone weapons. That makes a certain sort of guy mad”).
• Students asking you to do their work for them.
• People wanting information about your research participants (most projects will have specific ethics clearance that prevents sharing this kind of data).
• Legal threats. Yes. Apparently a lot of them from right-wing media types.

Finally, a special mention to members of the public who apparently send our physicist colleagues emails like this:

Or, um – this…

(with thanks to @ad_mico for the examples and wow – I’m sorry!)

The cold call email is a fact of academic life, so being able to do it well is essential.

A week or so ago, my fellow bloggers Helen Kara and Pat Thomson approached me with an idea. Helen recently had an experience with someone harassing her with unreasonable requests. I’ve had my fair share of these too, so I could relate. They suggested we do some linked posts. Helen went first with her 10 tips for getting the best out of busy people, and here are my thoughts:

If you write to me, I will love hearing from you.

Honestly. I just like hearing I helped you – materially, emotionally, intellectually – it doesn’t matter. Academics in general love to hear their work has been a) read and b) enjoyed and used.

I’m lucky enough to get between 5 and 10 complimentary emails a week: the result of over a decade of blogging and well over half a million published words on the topic of doing a PhD. Some are a quick ‘thank you’ to say the PhD is FINALLY finished! Others are heart felt outpourings, like this delightful example:

“…I’ve always found it natural and effortless to complain bitterly when the world, or the people in it, fail to conform completely to my complex set of needs and expectations. I have therefore made it a part of my new decade’s resolutions to also express my feelings when things go well.

My older, and even more repressed (in a gentlemanly, English way), brother did this when he recently told me he loved me. Actually he emailed the sentiment, as a face to face exchange of such profound intimacy could have provoked a cardiac infarction in one or both of us. I give him great credit for saying it, though, as such validation from an older, smarter and much more successful sibling meant a huge deal to me.

No don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you I love you, but I would like to express my thanks for the important, but comfortably understated, role you played in helping me navigate the Dark Night of the Soul that was my Phd journey; for providing a break from the reductionist, positivist world view represented by [discipline]… If I can summon the courage to express such sentiments verbally, I will do so next time I see you.”

Never hesitate to send a complimentary email, even if you have never met the person before. It makes the world just a little bit sweeter in difficult times.

Just tell me what you want from me.

People often complain academics are bad at responding to emails, which is true, but it’s hard to respond when someone doesn’t include a clear ‘ask’.

I believe if you don’t ask, you don’t get – so I always respond to an email with a genuine request. I’m happy to give out advice, directions to resources, and encouragement to anyone who writes to me. It’s my experience that most academics are the same, but most do not organise their email lives as well as I do. It’s easy for a genuine request email to fall to the end of the inbox and never get answered.

If you have a request to make of a busy person, state it as clearly (and politely) as you can. Don’t include ‘side threads’ – if you want something, make the email about that. If you have multiple requests of the same person, send multiple emails. I know this sounds like it would be more bothersome, but trust me: your email is more likely to get attention if it’s about one request. But…

Make it ok for me to say no

It helps me if you check first to see if I can do what you are asking.

For instance, I often get short notes from people who want me to copy edit or help them write their thesis. I say clearly on my About Page that I don’t do this and I have resources and links to ethical service providers on my Recommended page. I use a service called TextExpander that enables me to reply quickly to these requests with a couple of key strokes, but you might just never hear back from someone less organised than me.

A lot of people don’t like saying ‘no’, so they will avoid your email altogether.

The lesson here is that busy people are usually successful and helpful people too. Don’t be afraid to approach them, but do a bit of homework before approaching with your ask. I have more to say on the power of getting a person to say ‘no’ below, but while we’re on the topic of being approached…

Don’t tag me on Twitter unless you actually want to talk to me

Email is not the only way to talk to a busy person. Tagging is the practice of mentioning a user name in a social media post. This has the effect of ‘calling in’ the person tagged to join the conversation. It can be a quick way of getting attention and an answer to your questions.

I LOVE BEING TAGGED. Seriously. On Twitter, people often call me into a conversations they know will interest me. I’ve picked up so many useful papers, contacts and tools this way. The latest thing I discovered via this route was connectedpapers.com (try it – I’ll wait here. You can thank me later). They also ask questions and these are useful to me too – a lot of my blog posts come out of questions people ask me on social media.

What I don’t love is being tagged in to boost the visibility of a product I don’t know about or want to endorse.

People who do this are gaming the algorithms; using my big follower count to ‘signal boost’ their offering. A lot of these people have frankly dodgy offerings and lately I have taken to just blocking anyone who does this immediately. Our friends at Research Whisperer have much more to say on the subject of Sharing, so I’ll stop here.

The point here is that manners are contextual: when the platform changes, you need to change your behaviour. If you want my attention to your new course or book, email me and ask, don’t just tag me in to boost your numbers – speaking of which…

If you want me to help you, invite me into your world

A small ask that draws on my expertise is absolutely ok – a pleasure even. Sharing something with me you think I will love is delightful. But consider this email, which I received recently:

“…Over the past few years, I have been running [online project] During that time, I have asked thousands of people of all ages to tell me about [a topic]. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve recently started sharing some of those insights on [my blog]. Another article I wrote on [topics] was published by [major website] and got more than 300,000 reads. There is clearly broad interest in the topic.

I am now in the process of writing a book tentatively titled [title]. My literary agent tells me that it’s time to start telling the world about it, which I am excited to do. I am a fan of your website and have noticed that many of the topics I have researched – which will become major sections in my book – relate to topics that your readers will be interested in…. I would like to invite you to consider writing about [my web project to collect email addresses to prove to the publisher that people will buy this book]…

…If you would prefer to wait until my book is published before writing about it, I would really appreciate your permission to mention that commitment in my book proposal that I am currently approaching publishers with.”

There’s a clear ask, but wow – it’s a big one. This person is essentially asking me to:

1. Take an interest in their work when it’s not really related to my work.
2. Read their articles.
3. Review their online archive of material and blog posts.
4. Connect their work to my work and write a post that pulls you into their mailing list, or commit to backing a book I have never read, which will…
5. Help them get a book deal

I’m going to be kind and think this person is just excited by their ideas and wants me to be excited too, but in this case it misfired and made me annoyed. I was annoyed because this person is asking for a significant portion of my time. Time is a precious resource.

If I was to do everything this whole list, it would take me days. I could do this, or I could spend my time teaching, marking up a student manuscript, responding to genuine problems and queries from distressed students around the world, making algorithms and improving PostAc to help PhD students find jobs outside academia, writing committee papers and, well – you get the picture.

Influencing me is easier than you think…

I’ve helped many people get book deals and jobs by drawing attention to their talents, either online or via my network of contacts. Helping people succeed is something I love to do, but don’t ask me to go on this whole journey in one email. Work on influencing me instead, and you can do this by making it ok for me to say ‘no’.

Remember I said earlier that getting someone to say ‘no’ is powerful? It’s much more powerful than you think.

In his amazing book ‘Influence: the psychology of persuasion‘ Robert Cialdini outlines the tactics used by real estate agents and car sales people to make people spend more than they really want to. One of the most effective techniques is the small ask which the person can easily refuse, followed by a bigger ask which they find harder to resist. (I highly recommend you read this book as it’s a bit scary how easy it is to manipulate humans).

How might this tactic have worked for the person writing to me about their book deal?

He should have started by writing to me with a link to his short article, telling me why I might be interested and inviting me to read it. Then he should have waited to see how I reacted. If I wrote back saying “Hey nice article”, he had my attention. Then he could have moved to the next ask – the one designed to get me to say ‘no’. This is the time to point out that he had a similar blog to me and are working on a book deal. As a published author, would I be interested in reading the proposal and giving some feedback?

Importantly, he should phrase request in a way that makes it crystal clear it would be ok to say ‘no’. Something like “I know you are very busy and this is a big ask. I just value your interest and hope I can let you know if I am successful?”

I will probably say no to reading the proposal but – and here’s the critical part – I would also be a bit relieved that he made it easy for me to say so with grace. What I might not realise (unless I have read Cialdini’s book) is that saying ‘no’ has primed me to want to be more helpful in the future.

Getting me to say ‘no’ works because it troubles my identity as a helpful person. If you make me feel like I am being unhelpful, I will feel compelled to help you more. I am deeply compelled to shore up my self image to myself and others. Put simply, by making it easy for me to say ‘no’ you actually prepare me to say yes. The next ask might be small – would I review the book for the publisher? Well, ok – I found that blog post interesting after all and I had previously been unhelpful. I could make it up to him this way.

Fast forward a year or so and I will be blurbing your published book and we will have a lovely friendship.

Instead, this person got a cool ‘thanks for letting me know about your project but I don’t have time to assist’ email.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end of this blog post. I hope that some of these insights help you get what you need from busy people and I hope I get an email from you one day!

In solidarity,

Inger

ps: for fans of the On the Reg podcast, @jasondowns is on his #epictrip2021 but there are still a couple of episodes we pre-recorded, so you can get your Jason fix on the latest ‘Procrastination and driving through spider rain‘. Or you can subscribe via your favourite podcast player here. Jason and I have been working hard on a new book about TextExpander designed to help you get a week of extra annual leave a year! All proceeds go towards the running costs of On the Reg. Thanks as ever for your support.

Other posts on this topic in our blogging circle

10 tips for getting the best out of busy people – by Helen Kara

Asking to Share – On the research whisperer

The care in requests – on the Wellness Whisperer

Other posts on Thesis Whisperer

How to win academic friends and influence people

Academic spy networks

Books

Influence: the psychology of persuasion Robert Cialdini

Want more content like Thesiswhisperer?

Visit The Whisper Collective, a site we built to continuously curate all the best research education material on the web.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket. If you’d like to support my work, please consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon or buy a copy of my (cheap!) ebooks: Tame your PhD or The Year of Living Covidly.

Jason Downs and I have our first ‘On the Reg’ podcast book – on TextExpander. This book shows you how to use TextExpander to reduce your everyday cognitive load.

You can find links to print versions – and my other books – on the Buy Books page

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To generalise ridiculously, there are three types of people:

1. People who start a research project intending to finish it on time.
2. People who start a project not really caring when they finish it.
3. People who don’t care about finishing a project on time until they fly past the deadline.

If you are doing a PhD and identify with number two in this list, God Speed! Some people have the time and resources to treat the PhD as a passion project and complete it according to their own schedule. The rest of us are not so lucky and need to finish in a timely fashion for a variety of reasons, not the least of them being financial.

Last year I wrote a post called While you scream inside your heart, please keep working about how to deal with different kinds of project uncertainty. But getting a research project done before the money runs out takes more than clever strategies. You also need what I’ll call, for lack of a better term a ‘project finishing mind-set’.

You might have noticed this mind-set in some successful, experienced academics. You know the sort: the ones that take a ruthlessly pragmatic approach to their work. They can kill a line of inquiry without a second thought if it’s not going somewhere productive. They get published because they do what journals want; no more and no less. They are not precious about their ‘voice’ or point of view, which makes them brutal (but effective) editors. The defining quality of these people is they get the job done efficiently and move on to the next thing. And they make sure ‘the next thing’ is something that will get funded.

I found these battle hardened academics confronting people when I was a student. I don’t think I understood them very well and, if I’m honest, I was pretty judgy. I secretly thought one the more successful researchers in my department cut corners and didn’t care that much about quality. He certainly seemed more concerned with winning grants than doing the work. Most of the actual work was carried out by an army of research assistants who were over worked and grumpy. But, after more than a decade of running research projects with many stakeholders, tight budgets and research assistants, I understand this academic a bit more. I don’t have quite the same level of cynicism as he did, but I’m definitely more dispassionate about the work and I am a brutally effective editor.

As Julius Ceasar is reputed to have said: experience is the best teacher. Lately I have been working on a ‘5 Years +’ project where I’m talking to students who are creeping past the deadline for their PhD. They’ve faced all kinds of problems – but they are now determined to finish. It was inspiring spending a week talking to them, one after the other. I think they gave me a lot of insight into the ‘finishing’ mind set. Here are some of the things I learned:

Get comfortable with never finishing anything ‘properly’

Any area of academic inquiry will likely open up as many new problems as it solves. We work on the spectacularly hard problems; the ones no one else will pay to try to solve. This means it’s unlikely any data gathering exercise or analysis will be ‘enough’. At the same time, academia valourises the truth and holds itself to an insanely high standard for polish and completeness.

All of us have to find a way to walk the narrow goat track to a conclusion that feels meaningful and useful. Recognise academia’s high standards are a mirage. Every project could benefit from more time and money. Develop the ability to draw a line under it and call it done, even if it’s uncomfortable.

Other people’s opinions can be unhelpful

Many of the students I spoke to spent a lot of time consulting with recognised experts about their work – too much time. Some of them told me how, past a certain point, other people’s opinions – even expert opinions – can just be unhelpful noise. All academics have their pet theories and methods. Their advice is often a thinly veiled attempt to say: here’s how I would have done it.

Sadly, they are not doing the project – you are.

When you are past the scoping part of a research project, hearing how someone else would do it is largely pointless and can just create anxiety. Learn to listen politely and take on only what is genuinely useful.

Mistakes are not always a good learning opportunity

Research is a difficult activity and it’s easy to make mistakes. We’ve all had the experience of having to throw out a data set or piece of writing and start again. We often frame mistakes as a learning opportunity and a pathway to perfection. But here’s the truth – sometimes the you can make the same kind of mistake over and over again.

For instance, I’m terrible at reading long strings of numbers. I make all kinds of basic arithmitic mistakes and consistently write the wrong time date and time on diary entries. This tendency gets me into trouble SO OFTEN. I always have someone check my work, which is time consuming, but necessary. No one is more annoyed about this number fumbling tendency than me. But if you spend too much time dwelling on your mistakes and limitations you can end up learning the wrong lesson. You can start thinking you are stupid and don’t belong here.

Once you have identified what went wrong, and done what you can to fix it, move on. If you make that mistake again, put some guard rails around yourself. It might be a process of checking, or you might need to get someone else to do that bit with you, or for you (within limits of course – for instance, most universities will kick you out if they catch you hiring someone to do the writing for you).

Keep your friends close

What impressed me most about my ‘5 years+’ students was how they talked about their peers. They all had close friendships with other students in their department and depended on each other for help and support. They set up Shut up and Write groups, read each other’s drafts and held space to debrief and have all the feelings. I made more close friends during my PhD than at any other point in my life, so I can relate. That pressure makes beautiful, lasting bonds.

We often talk about networking instrumentally; framing socialising with other academics as a form of career capital. But those sideways connections are the most valuable and enduring you will make while you are a student. When all the other experts have aged out and retired, your peers will still be there, standing with you.

I hope these insights are useful to share and reflect on, whatever stage of your PhD you might be at right now.

In solidarity,

Inger

PS: I’ve been doing a podcast with my PhD friend Jason Downs for nearly a year now! Lately we’ve been talking about all kinds of things, including procrastination. On our Pod webpage there are a number of subscription options.

Related Posts

While you scream inside your heart, please keep working.

Academic spy networks (and why you need one)

Other resources

In my opinion, the perfect book on research project management remains to be written… If you’re looking for a good book on getting things done in a university bureaucracy, you might enjoy Project management for the Unofficial Project Manager.

Want more content like Thesiswhisperer?

Visit The Whisper Collective, a site we built to continuously curate all the best research education material on the web.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket. If you’d like to support my work, please consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon or buy a copy of my (cheap!) ebooks: Tame your PhD or The Year of Living Covidly.

Jason Downs and I have our first ‘On the Reg’ podcast book – on TextExpander. This book shows you how to use TextExpander to reduce your everyday cognitive load.

You can find links to print versions – and my other books – on the Buy Books page

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Most people come into a PhD program with well developed writing skills but a dissertation – or as it is called in Australia, a Thesis, is a very particular kind of writing challenge. All thesis writers must bend their existing skills to the appropriate ‘thesis style’. Ironically, the people I have seen struggle the most with the conventional thesis style are journalists.

You might expect such accomplished writers to rock this part of the PhD challenge. But there’s a simple – and revealing – reason why journalists can find thesis writing challenging. Journalists are used to a writing for a general or ‘lay’ audience. The journalist’s role is primarily to inform and explain a situation or idea to people who don’t know a lot about the topic. By contrast, the thesis is a piece of writing by an expert intended to inform and persuade other experts.

The expert reader is notoriously difficult audience to please, which is why I often write these kinds of comments on my PhD students’ drafts:

Text reads: “Although it should be plural, in practice we make it singular. English is stupid” As a supervisor, I am fairly relaxed about grammar ‘rules’ – most of them are made up anyway. I’m more interested in helping my students make a text ‘socially correct’ than grammatically correct. By ‘socially correct’, I mean making text that conforms to the expectations of its intended readers.

Expert to expert communication in academia is one of the most difficult genres of writing to master. You can assume your expert reader will have some background understanding of the research methods, and general knowledge relevant to your topic. However, it’s important to recognise that even an expert reader will not know as much about your topic as you do. They may have read about your method and not used it – or they might have 30 years of using that exact method, almost every day. Your expert reader might have an encylopedic knowledge of the history of research in your topic – or they might know almost nothing.

It’s impossible to know in advance how much your expert readers know because examiners are chosen for their ability to learn something new from your text, not for what they know already. Not everyone will be able to learn something from your thesis. I could read the words of a quantum computing thesis, but I would not have a hope of understanding the meaning. Therefore every thesis will be tailored to a specific expert audience.

The primary purpose of any thesis is to inform and instruct other expert readers so knowledge can be expanded. Focussing on the idea of a thesis as a pedagogical (or teaching and learning) device is helpful, especially when it comes to deciding what to include and what to leave out. You will need to include a certain amount of background information to help your expert reader understand – and be persuaded by – your findings and interpretations. However, in expert to expert writing, there’s a chance you are including information your reader will already know. There’s a fine line between an interesting, instructive text and a didactic and boring piece of prose. You’ll need a number of strategies to negotiate this writing challenge.

Let’s take jargon as a starting point. Generic writing advice says you should use it sparingly – most journalists will, rightly, leave it out. However, in expert to expert writing, you must use jargon: otherwise your reader might make the mistake of thinking you don’t know the ‘right’ terms and acronyms to use. Jargon is ‘insider language’ that signals to an expert audience that you are a member of their ‘academic tribe’. However, every field is full of jargon. Your expert reader may not have encountered that particular piece of jargon before – or they might have forgotten it. It’s a good idea to include a short explanation of the lesser known jargon, perhaps in a footnote, or include a glossary where you can explain the concept more fully. The important thing is to aid the reader who needs a reminder, without interupting the flow of the text.

Another problem in expert to expert communication is how to handle a lot of necessary, but cumbersome background information. For example, one of my students is using a relatively uncommon analysis technique in the field of research education: machine learning natural language processing (ML-NLP). Most researchers in higher education studies use interviews or standard survey techniques, so it’s a fair bet that the examiners of her thesis will not know anything about this area of computer science. The amount of explanation needed to help a reader unfamiliar with the principles of ML-NLP is onerous: at least another thesis worth of text. Writing the methods section of this thesis is tricky. Trying to teach the expert reader how to do this technique would crowd out important findings. In this case, my student needs to create trust in the reader by giving them enough material to grasp the key concepts if they really want to.

There are a couple of ways to get your reader to trust you: extensive referencing and footnotes pointing to sources where the concepts are explained in plain English is one strategy. The other approach is to include an extensive technical appendix that is part instruction manual. Handily, an index like this is not usually included in the word count of a thesis. Realistically, most readers will not access and teach themselves the concepts. However, providing the reader with the tools gives the them confidence that the writer, at least, knows what they are doing!

Most of the expert to expert writing moves are subtle and carried out at the sentence by sentence level. For example, here’s a comment I left on a recent student draft:

Text reads in part: “When you say something really obvious, it’s good to tell the reader you know they already know this. It’s part of the rhetorical repertoire we need when writing expert to expert communication” In this case, my student needed to point out a very obvious interpretation of a finding in order to build a more sophisticated argument. My comment was recommending she bring the expert reader ‘in on the joke’. She could do this by using text strategies like:

“As we might expect, …”

“As is commonly understood, …”

“Obviously, …”

I like to think of these little sentence starters as the text equivalent of this old gif:

These little sentence starters send signals to your reader, specifically that you know they already know something, but you’re saying it anyway because you both know you have to in order to be taken seriously as an expert. This kind of sophisticated text strategy positions you as an expert talking to another expert – not a student trying to prove that you have learned something.

Sometimes I wonder how anyone manages to get through writing a thesis – it’s honestly exhausting attending to this level of detail. If you’re the kind of student who says ‘screw all that!’ I salute you – but know that not conforming to reader expectations always carries a risk. I hope you have a supervisor who knows enough about expert to expert communications to leave detailed comments in your margins. If you don’t, refer to Kamler and Thomsons’ excellent book ‘Helping Doctoral Students Write‘ for a lot of excellent advice on how to recognise these opportunities in your own text.

It’s all very clubby and cozy to use these kinds of text strategies in your thesis, but be careful. Only use the word ‘obviously’ if what you are saying really will be obvious to another expert reader – otherwise you can come across as smug and opinionated. But that’s a post for another time!

In solidarity,

Inger

PS: I’m only publishing once a month at the moment, but you can get more thesis whisperer via the ‘On the Reg’ Podcast with me and Dr Jason Downs. Subscription options can be found on our Buzzsprout page.

More posts like this on the Whisperer

Why academic writing sucks (and how we can fix it)

In praise of academic jargon

Don’t let those sticky words confuse your examiners

Other resources and posts

The best book on these kinds of sophisticated ‘social’ strategies in writing is Helping Doctoral Students Write

You will also find some advice in a similar vein in the book I wrote with Katherine Firth and Shaun Lehmann called How to Fix your Academic Writing Trouble, which you can read about on my Books Page.

Want more content like Thesiswhisperer?

Visit The Whisper Collective, a site we built to continuously curate all the best research education material on the web.

Love the ThesisWhisperer?

I cover all the expenses of operating the Thesis Whisperer out of my own pocket. If you’d like to support my work, please consider becoming a $1 a month Patreon or buy a copy of my (cheap!) ebooks: Tame your PhD or The Year of Living Covidly.

Jason Downs and I have our first ‘On the Reg’ podcast book – on TextExpander. This book shows you how to use TextExpander to reduce your everyday cognitive load.

You can find links to print versions – and my other books – on the Buy Books page