This article aims to explore the difficulties encountered by many doctoral students when writing their dissertations. Over 30 years of guiding doctoral students, teaching, and leading dissertation committees, it has been observed that these students often lack essential skills for writing dissertations. This is referred to as critical writing. The article suggests that critical writing is dependent on critical thinking, which in turn requires critical reading, starting with purposeful reading.
In classroom discussions, students often make insightful connections across readings and engage thoughtfully with peers. However, their written work frequently resembles a collection of disjointed summaries or annotated bibliographies, rather than a well-supported argument. Many educators notice this gap between students’ verbal articulation and their written expression.
Students often grapple with expressing complex ideas in writing, even though they comprehend them orally or in discussions. Their writing tends to restate what authors have written rather than synthesizing these sources within a broader context. Doctoral students often focus on fulfilling assignment prompts without engaging in deeper intellectual exploration. The issue isn’t students’ inability to think critically, but rather the instructional approach that fails to integrate reading, thinking, and writing effectively.
Students are typically taught to read for comprehension, engage in discussions, and write assignments centered around sources rather than arguments. When faculty expect synthesis and intellectual positioning, students might not realize the shift in expectations. This transition becomes crucial as students move from master’s level to doctoral work, shifting from writing to demonstrate understanding to writing to support a thesis.
Observations of numerous doctoral students indicate that they struggle with transitioning to doctoral-level writing due to unrecognized changes in objectives. Doctoral students often remain focused on demonstrating understanding of their readings, although understanding is essential, it is no longer the primary goal at their level.
Doctoral writers need to transition to supporting a thesis, ensuring each section and paragraph has a clear purpose. This purpose is not necessarily the main point but should support the thesis. Doctoral-level writers must evaluate different interpretations, reconcile evidence, and clarify their positions through writing. This cycle helps them develop a position to support in their writing.
Reading, thinking, and writing are often treated as separate activities instead of parts of a unified academic process. Reading tends to focus on comprehension, not inquiry, with students concentrating on understanding individual authors rather than identifying broader patterns and relationships across sources. Consequently, writing becomes a report rather than an exploration of ideas.
Students develop source-based writing habits in earlier academic experiences, often encouraged by assignments that reward accurate summaries and balanced viewpoints. While these habits aren’t inherently negative, they can lead to writing organized around authors, not ideas. When faced with assignments requiring synthesis, students may default to familiar structures, often resulting in well-documented but conceptually fragmented papers.
Annotated bibliographies illustrate this issue, as they encourage careful evaluation but maintain a source-centered focus. Bryan and Graham (2020) note that annotated bibliographies are effective transitional tools, helping students develop evaluative reading habits without necessarily teaching integration across sources. The transition from evaluation to synthesis requires an additional instructional step, often not visible to students.
Students frequently begin reading without a clear intellectual purpose, focusing on comprehension over examining relationships among ideas. Purposeful reading starts with a guiding question or problem, encouraging students to compare arguments and recognize unresolved issues, laying the groundwork for synthesis and thesis development.
Synthesis involves determining which ideas are central and which are peripheral. Students are often taught to present multiple perspectives and avoid bias, which supports intellectual humility but can hinder them from taking clear positions. At advanced academic levels, positioning becomes crucial, requiring writers to explain their interpretations in relation to existing literature.
Original Source: facultyfocus.com
