What They Forgot to Teach You

Issue #2

👋 Welcome

It is my birthday tomorrow and we are moving house next week so things have been a bit busy around here. Moving is horrible but there is value in looking at everything in your cupboards every now and then and deciding “do I need this in my life?”

You can ask the same question about words in your thesis. When you work on a thesis document for many months, you can get a bit attached to words because they were SO painful to put on the page. But just like packing, it is useful to step back from your document every now and then and ask whether each word is earning its place.

Read through a paragraph and ask: if I deleted this sentence, would my reader miss anything? If the answer is no, just cut it. Then ask the same question about every word in every sentence that survives. How many words can you remove and still retain the meaning? And of the ones that remain, how many can you replace with shorter, more concrete versions?

You can find a link to this and 47 other tips for academic writing in the Toolkit section below.

📖 This week I read

​Your eyes are bad at math by Kirsten Lee Hill Ph.D.

Kirsten is a researcher turned CEO/founder who has started a tech company called Bisque. Bisque is a survey platform that is designed to fill the gap between Qualtrics and Google Forms and help real people collect good data. She also writes a Substack called “Kirsten’s Got Questions” and this week she was writing about statistics, but not in a boring way. This post was one of the clearest descriptions of what t-test and ANOVA are actually doing that I have read in a long time. So if stats are a bit scary to you, have a read.

🎓 The hidden curriculum

The curse of knowledge is your worst enemy.

I have done a Writing Review for 12 students this month and here is a piece of advice I have given all of them.

“Assume your reader knows nothing”.

But that is easier said than done right? The more we learn the stronger the “curse of knowledge” becomes and the more difficult it is to even imagine that your reader doesn’t know all that you know. Research shows that the more we learn the worse we get at estimating how much other people know about the thing we are learning. This means that the further you get into your thesis journey, the MORE likely you are to make assumptions, to skip steps in the logic, and to write in a way that has little empathy for your reader. You probably don’t even notice that you are doing it.

So what does "assume your reader knows nothing" actually look like in practice? It means defining terms the first time you use them, even if they feel obvious to you, and using the same terms consistently throughout your thesis. It means explaining what a study did, what they measured, and why it matters, not just what the study found. It means writing a sentence that explicitly connects two ideas, instead of leaving your reader to make the leap themselves. And using topic sentences to hark back to what you have just said as well as giving away the idea that the current paragraph is about to convey.

I have bad news though. Research shows that simply warning you about the “curse of knowledge” is not enough for you to avoid it. It is a persistent cognitive bias.

The good news? You can book a Try it Tuesday review and have me highlight where your work is landing, and where you need to be holding the reader’s hand more firmly.

Slots available throughout July https://www.revealresearch.org/try-it-tuesday​

💡 What I'm into

I had to go on a road trip with my 12-year old last week and we listened to the 13 Minutes Presents: Artemis II podcast by the BBC. All the inside info about what the astronauts were up to each day and what the crew were worried about going wrong along the way. Nice to listen to after the fact, when you know that everyone came back down safely.

📅 Join me

Small group coaching, N = 10, mini-masterclass followed by Ask Me Anything

Getting what you need from your supervisor — July 3 12-130pm AEST

• The supervisory relationship is unlike anything you've encountered before. It's not quite boss and employee, not quite mentor and mentee, and not quite teacher and student. And because nobody explains what it actually is, most students don't know how to get what they need out of it.

Managing your time when no one is telling you what to do — July 17 12-130pm AEST

• You're managing a massive project, around a full time job, with no boss setting your deadlines and no colleagues to keep pace with. Of course it's hard to know if you're on track.

🛠️ For your toolkit

​Jenny’s (very opinionated) tips for academic writing ​

It is my birthday tomorrow and to celebrate I have pulled together 48 ideas about academic writing that you wish you knew sooner. This 12 page pdf contains tips about words, sentences, and paragraphs, for every section of your thesis. Specific, practical ideas that you can implement right now to make your writing sharper, clearer, and more confident. Get it at www.revealresearch.org.

👋 thanks!!

Wish me luck with the move!

Until next time, Jen

P.S. If a colleague is stuck on their thesis, forward this to them. It's free, and it might be exactly what they need.

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. Learn more