Supporting students' writing

There are a number of ways in which supervisors can help students develop their writing practice by building writing into the departmental PhD programme: 

• It is common practice for students to be offered the opportunity to write and present a paper as part of the research training seminar in the first year. It could be helpful to encourage students to circulate the written version of their paper in advance of the presentation, to enable them to practise writing for a wider audience. This has the additional benefit of helping to produce more useful feedback to the presenter.
• The “milestone” of the upgrade or first year review is usually the first opportunity students have to write a substantial chunk of text. Supervisors can help students to complete this task more successfully by requesting “mini-milestone” documents during the first two terms (such as a page on the core research question, two pages on the review of a specific aspect of the literature). 
• Students can also be encouraged to support each other in developing writing practice, for example by creating informal writing groups/circles for which members produce material that is (constructively) criticised. Reading groups can be used to support “reading like a writer” practices that support students in unpacking different practices of scholarship.
• Online academic communities can offer a space to encourage good writing practices through goal setting and peer support.   

Whenever students have worked to produce material they deserve to have it read and commented upon. Written comments (even just a few notes on the submission) usually prove more useful in the longer term than purely oral feedback.  

Remember that supervisors are expected to provide feedback within one month of students submitting work. 

You and your students are likely to both have preferences for how feedback is provided and discussed. In the sections on ‘Building positive working relationships’ and ‘Supervisory teams’ helpful tools for discussing expectations with students and co-supervisors are provided and an important aspect of these includes discussing and agreeing on preferences around feedback early in the supervisory relationship, and re-visiting as the student progresses.  

Receiving feedback can be an emotive process for students and criticism of their work can be taken personally. To ensure it is effective, feedback should be timely, it should offer actionable constructive comments, clarify performance goals and use language students can understand.  

Consider how your students are working with their feedback. Effective feedback should not only prompt the student to act, but also to learn to evaluate their own work, and to engage in a dialogue with their supervisors, peers and wider scholarly communities.  

It is inevitable that some students will get stuck at some points, and you may well recognise symptoms of “writing avoidance” and procrastination: your student will start running additional analyses on their data, for example, or perhaps take on extra teaching duties, become deeply involved in organising other activities in the department, or simply not show up to agreed meetings or fail to get work to you to an agreed schedule. If/when this happens there are a number of solutions that you as the supervisor can suggest:

• cutting down on the “displacement” activities (sometimes easier said than done!); 
• employing new writing strategies such as: – “free writing” for five minutes: set a stopwatch and just write down whatever comes into the head without stopping and checking – this gets a separation between the creativity of writing and editing which can be very helpful; 
• using mind mapping to help lateral thinking and to see ways of linking ideas and themes together; 
• writing short paragraphs (2 or 3 sentences) on the main ideas, printing them off and physically moving them about to find a sensible ordering and logical flow; 
• taking regular breaks and having treat rewards for achieving writing goals. 

You can also refer students to the research-level writing support for doctoral students which is available from LSE PhD Academy. 

Encourage students facing challenges writing academic English to make full use of the facilities in word processing packages to check their grammar and sentence structure. In addition, where appropriate, encourage them to make use of the Language Centre provision for doctoral students. 

Given the many and various ways in which students might receive support for their writing the School has set out guidelines on what is and is not permissible and how students should acknowledge any editorial assistance they receive in their thesis here. 

Part of the discipline of good writing is appropriate referencing and citation. Encourage your students to keep their referencing on track from the start, and draw their attention regularly and from an early stage to School’s Regulations on plagiarism and other aspects of research integrity, and to support available through the Research Ethics team. 

Research students are subject to the School’s position on the use of AI in education in relation to activities associated with taught courses. At all other times, they are expected to follow the School’s guidance on the use of AI in research.  

• LSE position on Generative AI and Education 
• LSE guidance on the use of Generative AI to support research