Blog

Research Degree Insiders featured on .blog

Posted by

.blog is part of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com and Jetpack, supporting the .blog domain, so it was an absolute delight to see that Research Degree Insiders was their featured site this week, with advice about finding your niche audience, offering variety while staying on topic, and sharing from both your expertise and personal experience.

Back in 2014, the post ‘Sounds and Silence and Headspace‘ was featured on ‘Freshly Pressed’ (now Discover WordPress). I look back at that post, seven years ago, and am surprised at how similar that post is to my most recent work (for example ‘Are you “inspired” or are you just breathing?‘). I’ve been blogging for nearly 9 years now, and I’ve found it a wonderful way to connect to readers, and to explore and draft in public towards what has now been published in my various books.

If you’d like to see what they said, you can read the feature article here.

Australian book launch of How to Fix your Academic Writing Trouble

Posted by

The authors.JPG

Katherine Firth, Inger Mewburn, and Shaun Lehmann, in Canberra. 

It was a delight to visit Canberra during the first week in November for a book event celebrating our book How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble. The event was held at Harry Hartog’s bookshop at the Australian National University campus, and it was a wonderful chance to meet readers and for potential readers to meet us.

I wrote about the launch over on my blog Research Degree Insiders. 

For more information about the book, including how to purchase it.

‘Should a PhD be hard?’ published in Times Higher Education

Posted by

The Times Higher Education (THE) recently republished a post first published on my blog, Research Degree Insiders.

In the post, I say:

If you are finding the PhD hard, that’s okay. If you are being bullied or are getting sick because of the PhD, that’s not okay. Find a way to make the PhD hard like climbing a mountain, not hard like being hit with a stick.

Nearly 7,000 people have read the original post, and I’ve received many comments from students who found it helpful. I hope the THE version reaches, and helps, even more people!

Reading Advice published in the Times Higher Education online

Posted by

A post from my Research Degree Voodoo blog was republished in the Times Higher Education online.

Read the article here:

Often we think that we learned to read by the time we were about 8. We know that we have to continue to learn to write and that the thesis is a major writing task that we have to learn how to succeed in – and there’s a lot of books, advice and workshops out there on improving doctoral writing.

But a lot of the difficulties that doctoral students have in getting started, in powering through the shitty middle, and in getting to completion, are actually caused by reading. And why? Because, and I hate to tell you this, you’re probably reading wrong.

The five biggest reading mistakes and how to avoid them:
Katherine Firth on why you should approach texts less like a Victorian maiden and more like a pirate hero