What They Forgot to Teach You
Issue #11
đź‘‹ Welcome
It has been a few weeks. I would love to blame Bingo entirely (he is very cute and very bitey and very much a part-time job), but I have also developed a slightly unhealthy obsession with making Instagram Reels. I am pretty sensitive to the cringe and talking to my phone has turned out to be much harder than talking to a room full of real students.
It is thesis season, so I have also been doing lots of Writing Reviews and heaps of 1:1 and small group coaching, and nearly all of it has been about the General Discussion. Submission is weeks away, not months, and the last few weeks come with their own hidden curriculum. Nobody tells you that the reference list will eat a whole weekend, that you will stop being able to see your own typos, or that the section your examiner puts the most weight in is the one you are writing when you are running out of steam.
So this issue is a survival guide for the last few weeks. Glad you're (still) here.
đź“– This week I read
'It's a PhD, not a Nobel Prize': How experienced examiners assess research theses — Gerry Mullins & Margaret Kiley (2002), Studies in Higher Education. Read it here →​
Not hot off the press, but it is the paper I think of every October. Gerry and Margaret interviewed 30 experienced thesis examiners from a range of disciplines at five universities about what they actually do when a thesis lands on their desk.
The headline is that first impressions count. Examiners decide early whether a thesis is going to be "hard work" or "an enjoyable read," and many start by reading the abstract, the introduction and the conclusion before circling back to the details of methodology and results.
The bit that I think about most is how easily examiners can be irritated. One examiner described typos and careless mistakes as the thing that can "flip" her from reasonable to unreasonable. Examiners said that sloppy presentation tends to go hand in hand with sloppy science. So how do you impress your marker? Write with confidence, independence, and creativity, infusing a little “sparkle”... apparently.
These are PhD examiners, not honours markers. But I think the main difference between the two is that honours markers have a stack of theses to mark and so they are approaching it more like a ranking process. Your job is to make yours stand out.
⏳ The last few weeks
Your reference list will take ages. Longer than you think (planning fallacy, issue #5). It is NOT too late to switch to Zotero. It is free, and you can add most papers just by pasting in the DOI (the magic wand button).
You won't be able to see your typos anymore. You have read your thesis so many times that you are not reading it, you are remembering it. Your brain knows what you meant to say, so that is what you see. The classic advice is to change the font or print a hard copy, anything to make the page look unfamiliar.
But the best evidence is for reading it out loud. Cushing and Bodner (2022) had people proofread short texts silently, out loud, or in Sans Forgetica (a deliberately hard-to-read font). Reading aloud helped people catch more typos AND more grammar and word-choice errors. The weird font didn't help at all. Reading aloud slows you down, stops you skimming, and makes you hear every word. My favourite part is that participants didn't believe it had helped, even after it did (the Learning Scientists have a lovely summary).
If your voice gives out after the first few paragraphs, there are lots of text to speech tools around these days (Word will also read it for you). This is also why my Writing Reviews are audio. I read your work out loud, so you hear exactly where a naive reader stumbles (and I give you tips on what you might do to avoid the stumble). My calendar is always open; book a Discovery call to chat about how it might work for your thesis.
Over the word limit? Cut from your intro and method, not your discussion. The introduction is where the extra words hide (the study you described in five sentences when one would do, the background context your marker already knows about). You can often relegate some methodological detail to an appendix. Your discussion is where you show that you really know your shit, so protect it. And check your program's guidelines for what actually counts toward the limit before you start hacking.
Be consistent. Ctrl-F is your friend. Your hypotheses should be numbered and worded the same way in your intro, your results and your discussion. Define each key term and abbreviation once, then use it the same way every time (don't use "wellbeing", "wellness", and “resilience” to mean the same thing). And build your table of contents automatically from Word's heading styles, so it updates itself when your page numbers move at 11pm the night before your deadline. .
Protect your work. Back up in two places, the cloud plus somewhere local. And give your files names that will make sense to a panicked version of you. thesis_FINAL_final_v3_REAL.docx is going to get you into trouble.
Submit a day early. Portals crash, when you go to insert your figures Word gets angry, and then the formatting doesn’t stay consistent when you export to PDF. Treat the day before the deadline as your real deadline, and use the extra day to fix whatever goes wrong.
Be kind to yourself. A tired brain is even worse at spotting errors than a rested one. Sleep, eat something that isn't from a vending machine, and let the people around you help. Then plan something fun for the day after you submit, and put it in the calendar now. Finishing something this big can feel strangely flat, and it helps to have something to look forward to.
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🎓 The hidden curriculum
Make your General Discussion the section they remember
Remember that marker who starts with the introduction and the conclusion? Your General Discussion might be the second thing they read, and it is almost always the section written last, in a rush, with the least energy left in the tank.
Here is what makes a discussion stand out.
Lead with the answer. Your first paragraph should restate your question and tell me, in plain words, what you found. No test statistics.
Talk to your introduction. The papers you set up in your intro should come back here. Does your finding agree with Smith, contradict Jones, or explain why they disagreed? Use the same terms you used in the intro, so your marker can see the loop close.
Be honest about the mess. A null result, clearly explained, is a result (issue #10). "I predicted X, found nothing, and here is what I think that means" shows more understanding than pretending everything worked.
Make your limitations specific. Lets be honest, we are not conducting research under ideal conditions, and there so are many limitations that apply to all honours projects conducted ever. Don’t rely on those ones.
Make future directions a study. Not "more research is needed," but the next study you would actually run and why.
End where you started. Don’t leave your reader hanging. Go back to the hook from your first paragraph of the introduction and tell your reader what they now know that they didn't before.
If your discussion has you flummoxed and you want to work through this for your own thesis, I have been running my Keep Calm and Write Your General Discussion session as 1:1 coaching. We work through the discussion moves together, using your results, and you leave with an outline for your General Discussion. It usually takes about 90 minutes, but I only charge you for 1 hour ($200). Book your 1:1 here.
đź’ˇ What I'm into
Making Instagram reels, apparently. I'm running my own Tiny Experiment (issue #9) posting a couple of times a day and collecting data about which formats people actually watch. There are a LOT of variables so the data is hard to make sense of but I would love you to come and find me on Instagram at @revealresearchcoach.
đź“… Join me
Small group coaching — N = 5, two hours, Zoom session, A$49
- Keep Calm and Write Your General Discussion —TOMORROW, 12–2pm AEST. I think there might be 1 seat left in this session. Arrive confused, leave with an outline for your Discussion
- Plotting for survey research — Friday October 2, 1–3pm AEST. Survey data needs more looking, not less. Bring your data and I'll help you build the figures that make your thesis stand out.
- The Messy Middle — Friday October 9, 12–2pm AEST. For those of you earlier in the journey. Bring your mess and leave with a folder structure that makes sense and a plan that works backwards from your deadline.
1:1 coaching
- Keep Calm and Write Your General Discussion (1:1) — book a time that suits you. You have your results (even the ones that didn't behave), you just don't know where to start. About 90 minutes, charged as 60 ($200), and you leave with an outline for your General Discussion. Book here
Register for the workshops at www.revealresearch.org/events.
🛠️ For your toolkit
​The Polish Checklist. Six tests to check you are holding your reader's hand and making your argument easy to follow from start to finish. All you need is a highlighter and Ctrl-F. Run it, then read the whole thing out loud. (BTW- I have a couple of insta posts where if you comment POLISH ill send you this for free)
đź‘‹ thanks!!
If you spot a small, bitey blur in the background of a reel, that's Bingo, angling for a promotion.
Until next time, Jen
P.S. If a friend is planning to "sort the references out at midnight before the deadline," forward this and suggest they subscribe to "What They Forgot To Teach You". It's free, and it might be exactly what they need.
P.P.S. If you thought I had given up on this newsletter, check your spam folder. Issues 1 through 10 might be sulking in there too.
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I'm Jen, a developmental psychologist and former UNSW A/Prof. I help new researchers go from feeling like they've missed something everyone else knows, to feeling like they genuinely belong in research, so they can get through their research degree and into the career they actually want.
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