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WRITING
This page contains an Exercise required for LAW 994
Being a research student involves many different sorts of writing. Of course, the most obvious and biggest writing task is writing up the thesis. But before getting to that stage it is necessary to write a topic, research questions, and a research proposal. These tasks are dealt with at other parts of this web site.
Then there is all the writing involved in taking notes on the information you collect, whether that is from books and articles, from legal sources, or from interviews: see below Notes, filing and retrieval.
There are several ways of writing up results along the way, as draft chapters, work in progress seminars, conference papers or journal articles. See below Work in progress and feedback.
Further resources on writing the thesis itself are available from Learning Development, and see the thesis writing resources on the Office of Research website.
Notes, filing and retrieval
Before getting too far in your research, you need a system for taking notes, storing information, and finding it again when you need it.
It is important that the information you save is the same as that which you will require when writing up your thesis. Perhaps the simplest and most obvious example of this is in regard to citations, whether of cases, web sites, journal articles, news stories or interviews. Whenever you take a note from any source, make sure you keep full details of the source. If it is a standard form of reference, note all the details required for subsequent citation. See the Australian Guide to Legal Citation for the information you need to keep. Note what is said there about referring to web sites: you need the URL address and the date accessed, and you should keep a copy on file (hard copy or electronic file).
Bibliographical database applications, such as EndNote, are particularly valuable in prompting for each of the fields that must be noted for any type of reference source. They also assist in retrieval, insertion into text, and formatting. You are strongly advised to use such a database from the very beginning of your research.
The University of Wollongong has a site licence for EndNote. You can install it on your own computer by borrowing a CD from the Library or by arrangement with the Law Faculty's computer support officer. See modules for link to training modules for EndNote.
Whenever you find a media report, interview, or any other material you might subsequently need to draw on, always note the date and the full source (including page numbers if newpapers; the channel or network if electronic media). When interviewing people in any official capacity, make sure you have the correct spelling of their name, and their designation. (NB: Check ethics requirements regarding interviews: see Timelines and Supervision).
These fundamentals are required just to note the source of your information. This says nothing about the information itself. It is crucial that you develop note-taking styles which are suited to the type of thesis you are writing, and which allow you to address your research questions. In the spirit of piloting or testing out the usefulness of your notes, it may be worthwhile beginning to write up a paper or a chapter from those notes in the early stages of each data gathering exercise.
On some specific ways of taking notes while interviewing see Interviews.
Do not neglect the security of your notes or other information. Computers (especially laptops) get stolen, hard disks crash, and bags are stolen from cars. Always back up and keep spare copies in different locations.
Work in progress and feedback
Just as writing up a paper is a way of checking your note-taking, it is also useful for checking the development of your ideas and the way you are presenting your results. There are many different forums in which you may be able to air your results and ideas. Work in progress seminars offer a non-threatening environment in which to practise your paper-giving skills. You will get more specific feedback from more specialised audiences, such as research centre seminars and specialist conferences. Consider funding requirements.
Doing postgraduate research and writing a thesis is a long and often lonely pastime. By going to seminars and conferences you meet people working in related areas, and have an opportunity to get feedback from more than your local network.
Writing draft chapters is an important way of gaining feedback from supervisors. Writing journal articles gains feedback from the scholars who review papers for the journal.
It is worth thinking about your thesis as a series of layers or iterations which can get different levels of exposure, and earn different feedback and recognition at different stages. Look at the way other scholars in your field have written up their research in different stages: articles, theses, books.
Consider the following examples of books which have developed out of PhD theses. Read the preface to each of them for an idea of the range of publications that sections of each had appeared in while it was a work in progress:
Darian-Smith, Eve. Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Manderson, Desmond. Songs without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
EXERCISE
Select a thesis, or a book which you know to have developed out of a thesis, preferably in your own research area. In no more than 2,000 words answer the following questions about it:
1. Where is the topic stated? How does the author indicate its relevance and importance? How successfully?
2. Write the overall 'thesis' or argument of the work in your own words in a single short paragraph. Has the author done this? Where? If so, do you prefer your statement of the 'thesis' or the author's? Why?
3. How is the work divided into sections? On what basis? Does this structure help or hinder your understanding of the overall thesis? Why?
4. How is the conclusion related to the statement of the topic? How effectively does the author address the issues which made the topic seem important in the introduction?
Other resources
The Research Student Centre offers a series of Thesis Writing Workshops within the Higher Degree Research Students Seminar series. Law research students are encouraged to participate in these workshops, and other seminars in the series, early in their candidature. Other seminars of particular relevance are those on the use of EndNote bibliographies and on managing large documents in Word.
Learning Development has more basic guidance, including a number of exercises, on writing and notetaking at the Unilearning website.