Doctoral writing: learning to write and give feedback across cultures

What is it about?

This article broaches several common challenges for academics who support doctoral writing: writers are emotionally protective of their own writing; writing a thesis in English as a second language is a challenging, complex task; and advising across cultures is delicate. Giving constructive feedback kindly, but with the rigour needed to raise writing quality can seem daunting. Addressing those issues, we offer a novel way of working with writing feedback across cultures. Drawing on reflection from student and supervisor perspectives (our data), and oriented by theory, we propose another strategy for supporting doctoral writing across cultures. The case study research team of two candidates and one supervisor found an effective way of working across cultural and institutional difference. What began as advisory feedback on doctoral writing became a collaborative anatomy of prose meaning-making. We reflected separately and collectively on how this happened, analyzed reflections and were led to theories of use to writing feedback practice. We show how to operationalise theory for productive doctoral writing feedback.

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