This blog is partly from the common memory of what happens so often in doctoral vivas, when examiners say ‘why didn’t you explain that in your thesis?’ But it also comes from lots of situations when people just don’t tell you what you need to know. I was talking to …
Following my last blog, how should we write about data? There’s a chapter on this in my qualitative research book, plus another chapter on writer voice. Here though are some thoughts about basic principles. I’m writing about qualitative data; but I have also heard examiners make it clear that they …
Getting writing done seems often to be a major problem for postgraduate researchers. A common scenario is that half way through the programme excellent progress has been made – large parts of literature review and methodology chapters written, most of the data collected and analysed, and perhaps a third of …
Finalising the text in your book or your thesis in a global manner, making sure everything is clear and fits together, is a very important task. My co-author and I have just spent three days working on the final draft of our book. Our aim was to make every part …
I met with my co-author a few weeks ago to take a good look at the draft text of our book. We had already 45,000 words of the 50,000 target; but a pile of interviews, analyses, discussions of theory, reconstructed ethnographic accounts, interesting though all of them were, was really …
An interesting example of what we might call ‘cultural difference’ is the man coming into the café where I am sitting in Canterbury who orders an espresso at the counter, stirs in the sugar with particular panache and then drinks the coffee there and then without sitting down, and leaves. …
I recently went to a conference in Venice. Walking through the narrow streets for the business of getting to and from the conference site drew my attention again to walking rhythms. Where they were major routes for tourists I found I was bumping into people, they were stopping in front …
This is the last section, page 179, from the new edition of my book, Understanding intercultural communication: negotiating a grammar of culture. It should be coming out in the New Year. Safa is a character from one of my reconstructed ethnographic narratives; and I think that what she has been …
The space in the morning is such an important thing to have. It used to be the case that I could just get up and write for half an hour, and that set me up for the day. These days it seems more complex. And for a while I’ve understood …
I have said publicly that I’m not prepared to review any journal submissions that use the native-non-native speaker labels without critical discussion of them. This set me thinking when and when not it would be appropriate to use the labels in research – and to come up with the following. …