Alongside the move to definitive writing, there continues to be a place for more tentative writing about work in progress: work that is incomplete or inconclusive, for the moment. This is the subject of writing for the con- siderable time that the doctorate lasts. This is recognized by the existence of work-in-progress seminars at most universities.
Work-in-progress presentations are not always comfortable, but they are important for getting feedback on your work. Make it explicit that the work you are presenting is ongoing, that you are not claiming that it is complete and that you can plot directions for future work.
The shift from definitive to tentative – and perhaps back again? – has to be signalled in the styles you use and the words you choose, otherwise your writ- ing might seem confused or contradictory. Your writing may be more tenta- tive; you will have less support to offer for your arguments. It might be as well to acknowledge as much, since this is to be expected. It is not a weakness still to be working out what your strongest arguments are. If you were still doing that in the last quarter of your doctorate, that would be a worry.
Closure may not be achievable, or only for a portion of the work done. Your writing may have to be open-ended. If you are giving a presentation, you may want to make sure that the opening minute is spent clarifying the scope and purpose of your talk. You should see yourself, in this opening minute, as adjusting your audience’s expectations: they are used to sitting down to listen to researchers reporting on completed pieces of work. You will have to help them adjust their listening behaviours.
Writing for publication: types of paper
• The ‘state of the art’ paper
• The ‘emerging trends’ paper
• The ‘how did things get like this?’ paper
• The ‘review’ paper
Review journals are highly ranked in some fields
If some of your audience seem to be pinning you down on aspects of the research that have not yet been developed, then you can agree, yes, those aspects have not yet been developed. I have seen too many student presenta- tions where both staff and students grilled the presenter on why Chapter 3 was not more developed, when, in fact, he or she had only got as far as Chapter 2, for example. However well you prepare, and however clearly you forecast and justify the text of your work-in-progress presentation, do not be shocked if this happens to you. Be ready to remind the audience what you did – and did not – set out to do in your presentation.
If members of your audience persist in probing areas that you have not yet developed, or not yet fully worked up, you can use this as practice for the viva, when the probing of your work, even when it is completed, is inevitable.
What type of structure – or story – is appropriate for work-in-progress presentations?
Whatever you choose as the story for your presentation, you should signal that explicitly at the start, and more than once in the course of your talk and then again at the end.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty? You may be well aware of the work that remains to be done, but can you give an account of the work that you have done, so as to make it seem like reasonable progress for the time you have spent on it . . . if that is your purpose in the presentation?
What style and language are appropriate for each phase of work-in-progress speaking and writing?
Work-in-progress ‘stories’
• The story of your learning so far?
• The story of the development of the thesis?
• The story of your understanding of the literature?
• The story of your project so far?
• Your assessment of your research so far?
• The story of the extent to which you have begun to achieve your project goals/aims/objectives at this point?
Definitive Tentative
• Work done Work ongoing
• Past tense Present and conditional
• Showing (analysis/outcome) Proposing
• Outcomes Potential outcomes
• Questions answered Questions remaining
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In most work-in-progress presentations there are features that we might expect to see, signalled by an appropriate style. You might, for example, use more tentative language. You might explicitly state what you are and are not sure about yet. You might find it useful to make more than one interpretation of your interim ‘findings’ – in any sense – or to make more than one statement of your next step. You could consider the pros and cons of these and ask your audience to do so also. This dialogue will help you to develop your ideas – and possibly your confidence – further.
Your supervisor(s) may, of course, have a similar set of expectations of how your writing will look, or they may not have thought about it in this way. (Do you know?) They may even find such attention to word choice a bit superficial;
they may worry about you, since they might see you as not fixed on the content, but fixating on how to present it.
However, the style you choose will shape your presentation. Your writing will be stronger and clearer if the style has been a matter of choice – your choice – rather than just left to chance. You may have seen postgraduate pre- sentations in which the researchers had not made a conscious choice about style and address, resulting in either understating – being too modest – or overstating – being unrealistic – about progress and plans. You will have to choose what proportion of your writing is to be definitive and what proportion tentative: will it be 50:50? Or some other proportion? Why? How will you signal this in your writing? How will other aspects of your writing about your work be changed by the ‘in-progress’ status? Should you also brush up your presentation skills?
One way of forcing yourself to create temporary or mini-closure in your work is to give a poster presentation either in your department, if this is appropriate, or at a conference. Many conferences, not just in the sciences, have designated sections for graduate student presentations of work in pro- gress. An advantage of presenting a poster is that you can often have more face-to-face, one-to-one discussion with participants than with a paper presen- tation. It is a good way of networking. The aim is to give a snapshot – no more – of your research at a certain moment in time.
Towards a typology of styles
Definitive Tentative
• The analysis shows . . . I am not sure how to interpret this, but . . .
• This suggests . . . This seems to suggest . . .
• This confirms . . . This appears similar to a study in which . . .
• The aims were achieved The first aim has been achieved . . .
• Future research . . . The next likely step would be to . . .
This takes a bit of forward planning: identifying an appropriate conference, relating your work to the conference theme, submitting an abstract, preparing your poster and so on. Your supervisor or peers can suggest conferences, if you do not already know which ones are most relevant. For guidance on best prac- tice in designing posters, there is a website on graphical and verbal elements:
Preparing and Presenting a Poster
http://www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/CAPLE/poster/
In the same series there is a site on best practice in slide presentations:
Slide Presentations
http://www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/CAPLE/slides/
The sites are designed to increase your skills of presenting your research in these formats.
Your writing has to change for a poster presentation. A style shift is required:
the poster requires more ‘visual writing’ than the thesis. Specific features of style must change as the reader becomes the viewer. Your writing will be read – if it is ‘read’ at all – at a distance of between one and four/five metres/yards.
Your writing will have to be highly ‘scan-able’ from this distance. The specifics of the style shift required include: .
Link words are the key to coherence – or ‘flow’ – in good writing. They show readers how you get from one idea to the next, or from one sentence to the next, so that they can follow your thinking rather than trying to read your mind. However, in a poster, relationships between ideas and sections are shown visually; we do not need link words. The idea is not to make readers read traditionally from line to line, but to get them to grasp the whole snapshot.
Style shift: example
Thesis Poster
1 Long sentences Short sentences
2 42 words 8 words
3 Elaboration of points Main point
4 Signalling links No link words
5 Main point last Main point first
6 Define and explain Show
7 The ‘thesis’ The message
8 To persuade To stimulate discussion
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For a poster, style shift starts with the title:
The change in title would depend on the conference audience and theme, but the options are likely to be shorter and more direct:
If the audience attending the conference were those interested in ‘style’, then option one would be the best choice. If the audience were those with an interest in Scottish literature – and therefore likely to tune in to the author’s name, George Mackay Brown – then option two would work best to get their attention. If the audience were postgraduate students – like yourself – who wanted to know more about the specifics of style shifts, then option three would be best. The choice, as always, is shaped by audience and purpose.
What is the purpose of your work-in-progress presentation:
• To inform?
• To persuade?
• To get feedback?
• To report?
• To raise questions?
Of these options, which is your main aim? How will that aim shape your poster?
For the writing in the main body of the poster, we have to make similar adjustments: cutting, listing, bullet pointing. For example, if we take a para- graph from a thesis – my own – we can show how it would be translated into a style suitable for a poster. This is the last paragraph of the abstract. It has many features of thesis writing:
Title of thesis
Style as Voice: A Reappraisal of George Mackay Brown’s Prose
Titles of poster
1 Style as Voice
2 George Mackay Brown: Voices in the Novels 3 Style Shift: How To Do It
Features of thesis writing used here include, among others, long sentences running over several lines, link words like ‘not only . . . but also’, and wordy striving for precision in ‘perceive the implications of intersections of . . .’.
These are acceptable features of thesis writing and the efforts to write clearly, strenuously avoiding ambiguity, and coherently, strenuously articulating links in the argument, are what we would expect to see in many completed theses.
For the poster, however, this has to change. It has to be cut from 100 words to, for example, 23:
These points, under the heading that is the title of the novel, Greenvoe, show features of the poster style. The first demonstrates the use of a short sentence, with the direct language of ‘show’, and words of one syllable, all of which would easily fit on one line. The second uses the technique of breaking the line – and perhaps the concept – into two stages, using a colon. Starting with the word ‘No’ is potentially quite dramatic in effect and is certainly stronger than, for example, ‘It is less likely that . . .’, which we would probably expect to see in a thesis. The third starts with the key words ‘style shifts’, as did the first, thus creating the impression of a series and making a visual pattern of the words.
Each element of this list of three points could be rewritten in parallel, so that each had the same form. Alternatively, the variation in form could be a conscious choice for a particular purpose.
Taking this approach of using words in a visual way further, we can show Example of thesis style
Chapter Five, ‘Prose as Voice’, analyses the mechanics of interactions of voice within a narrative, demonstrating how Brown’s lack of transitions from one voice to another requires the reader to make connections, to perceive the implications of intersections of points of view. Voices in Brown’s fiction not only convey the blends of internal and external experience which make up characters’ world-view, they are also markers of characters’ control over their own lives. In Brown’s novel Greenvoe the extent to which characters are able to voice their own views reveals the extent to which they are agents in their own experience.
Example of poster style
1 Style shifts show a range of perspectives.
2 No transitions: the reader has to make connections.
3 Style shifts represent characters as active or passive.
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what we are trying to say in an example, using the words themselves as illustrations:
These two extracts from the novel show – not just describe – the style shift that is featured in the above extract from my thesis. These extracts can be highlighted – and should be labelled – for the poster. A set of bullet points alongside each could indicate the main points.
This is particularly appropriate, of course, for a thesis on literature, where words are the subject of study. However, it should be possible to compare two short texts from other areas in the same way: to show contrast or similarity, gap or overlap, cause and effect and so on. This involves representing the key line of argument, perhaps mimicking the structure or mode of the thesis, or part of it, in the shape of text for the poster. The structure and logic of the text remain; they are simply revealed visually.
In order to achieve this effect, you have to make a careful – and difficult – selection of your material. What is your best illustration of your work at this stage? Does this fit the conference agenda and the predictable preoccupations of participants?
Timmy’s own voice
Timmy Folster emerged, as he always did since the burning, through the window. He ambled towards the pier. He bent down and picked up a cigarette end that Ivan Westray had dropped and put it in his pocket . . . He spoke amiably to himself all the time. ‘Timmy’s a good boy’ (p. 14).
The bureaucrat’s image of Timmy
[Written on an index card]
FOLSTER, Timothy John. b. 21/7/17. 5’4’ 104lb. Eyes blue. Hair dark brown.
Bachelor. Third (only surviving) issue of John and Mary-Ann (neé Linklater) Folster, Greenvoe: both deceased.
What can I write about now?
1 Summarize research completed (500 words in sentences).
2 Sketch of writing to do next (500 words in sentences).
3 List three problems: write 100 words on each.
4 Write 500 words on how original proposal has evolved.
Presenting a work-in-progress poster is an important interim activity in years two and three of the doctorate. It can prevent you from getting bogged down and can adjust your focus in important ways at this key point. It can keep you moving – and make you feel that you are, finally, moving – towards the final ‘clarification’ of the project as a whole.