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My resources for postgraduate students

This page collects a few pointers to resources of mine that might be of interest to postgraduate students.

Some issues in writing a PhD. These are collaborative notes written by the participants of a session on writing for (psychology) PhD students held in 2001.
Developing the skeleton of a PhD thesis. This is about how to organise the dissertation as a whole: the message, the argument, the structure for the writing, the structure to help reading it. (Written for HCI and psychology PhDs.)
(An exercise on this.)
Basic advice on academic writing. This is a section in a document for undergraduates writing "critical reviews" which are a substantial (e.g. 5,000 word) piece of coursework. The advice on writing certainly applies also to PhD theses, although additional issues apply to these.
Alternatively, here is a paper by Barry Wellman How to write -- and edit -- a paper.
Being critical. The same document has a section on "being critical" i.e. how to do critical thinking and how to write about it. Most PhD examiners expect a PhD thesis to display critical (including self-critical) thinking, and many universities explicitly list this as a necessary criterion for the award of a PhD on the form that PhD examiners must complete. Some of the weakest and most unsatisfactory PhDs I have had to examine in recent years have been deficient in exactly this. Often, too, in talking to the candidate it has emerged that there was nothing wrong with their minds, but they seemed to have completely missed the idea that critical thinking is an essential part of a dissertation, and that the phrase "defending a thesis" means assembling and presenting the arguments for and against the conclusions a PhD puts forward.
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~jw/thesis.html (Written for physics PhDs.) Recommended by Konstantinos Chorianopoulos (and I like it too): "I like this one, too, because it is translated into French and Spanish, so I can pretend studying for the PhD while at the same time brushing up my language skills..."
It also has an appendix on How to survive a thesis defence (viva)
http://www.elec.uq.edu.au/doc/Thesis_guide/phdth1.html (Written for business/management PhDs.) Recommended by Konstantinos Chorianopoulos (but I don't like it except for its Appendix one): "This one is very good. It is brief, yet it covers everything: structure, process, philosophy, etc of doing a PhD."
"Three little-known keys to writing a thesis" (Actually this is the first appendix of the previous document.)
- Have a 'thesis' of the thesis [See also my "skeleton" document above.]
- Have a research problem which is gradually refined as the thesis is written.
- Start writing a first draft early
Books on how to write / do a PhD. Here's a page with a book list.
Particularly recommended by a PhD student who's a friend is: Rowena Murray's (2002) How to Write a Thesis.
Lecture notes on instruments. This document gives notes on seven alternative instruments or methods that can be applied to any practical research, and how to compare, contrast, and choose between them.
Links and summaries concerning wayfinding on campus. Material on one applied problem, wayfinding, can be found here.

My resources for postgraduate students

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