What Do Grad Students Need to Know About Writing Qualitative Research?
Location
1048
Format Type
Event
Format Type
Paper
Start Date
January 2019
End Date
January 2019
Abstract
Graduate students learning qualitative methods often receive much instruction in collecting and analyzing data. Yet they receive far less in how to write up their results—perhaps one class period, maybe two—so they often feel overwhelmed when committing their findings to articles and chapters. For many, they bog down, sometimes never finishing their dissertation even after collecting all the data. In this presentation, I explore some of the common reasons data collection and theoretical foundations of qualitative research take so much more coursework time than writing. These reasons include the large skillsets and time involved with data collection, the diversity of approaches available, the lack of confidence many instructors have in teaching writing, and the vastly fewer resources (like guidebooks and technology) available on qualitative writing. To end the paper, I explore the writing skills that graduate students often don’t enter a class with, but which need to be taught to ensure they can write scholarly projects, both for their academic programs and their careers. These include basic rhetorical(not academic) grammar, the ability to analyze organization and rhetoric in their discipline’s models, the common qualities of all qualitative writing, and some general revision skills.
Keywords
writing qualitative research, graduate education, writing instruction
What Do Grad Students Need to Know About Writing Qualitative Research?
1048
Graduate students learning qualitative methods often receive much instruction in collecting and analyzing data. Yet they receive far less in how to write up their results—perhaps one class period, maybe two—so they often feel overwhelmed when committing their findings to articles and chapters. For many, they bog down, sometimes never finishing their dissertation even after collecting all the data. In this presentation, I explore some of the common reasons data collection and theoretical foundations of qualitative research take so much more coursework time than writing. These reasons include the large skillsets and time involved with data collection, the diversity of approaches available, the lack of confidence many instructors have in teaching writing, and the vastly fewer resources (like guidebooks and technology) available on qualitative writing. To end the paper, I explore the writing skills that graduate students often don’t enter a class with, but which need to be taught to ensure they can write scholarly projects, both for their academic programs and their careers. These include basic rhetorical(not academic) grammar, the ability to analyze organization and rhetoric in their discipline’s models, the common qualities of all qualitative writing, and some general revision skills.
Comments
My apologies for the late submission!