What does my PhD supervisor mean when they ask me to write more critically?
It’s a common question from PhD researchers, particularly in the first year. When we ask researchers to write critically, we challenge them to display not just intellectual and analytical skills, but also an attitude, a state of mind. We want them to apply this searching mindset to reading as well as writing. Yet a critical approach at this level can’t be taught as a ‘one-size-fits all’ skill; researchers need to experiment and discover what it is to be critical, in their discipline, for their specific project. They need to feel it—perhaps even in their body—so they can recognize it in their own work. I have been using the QFT to help researchers understand what it means to think critically and I’ve found that it enables some researchers to hear—perhaps for the first time—the sound of their own critical academic voice.
Here are two examples of the QFT in a critical thinking context. I’m exploring many other opportunities to incorporate the technique into my workshops:
Example 1
The City Literary Institute is an adult education college in central London that runs a wide range of affordable writing courses, including my one day course, Postgraduate Academic Writing. I ran a QFT activity with a small, diverse group of (mostly mature) students from different disciplines and at different stages of research. The activity fitted neatly into the section that considers different elements of academic practice, including critical thinking.
The QFocus was the statement vegan diets are not necessarily healthy, chosen as a scaffold to the task that followed—to critically analyse an article on vegan diets. In groups of three or four, they plunged into generating questions with energy and enthusiasm. Their questions centred on definitions of words such as vegan and healthy and also on the types of evidence that might support, or refute, the assertion. They distinguished between open and closed questions and changed one to the other. I then asked them to reflect on the activity:
“It makes you wonder if you’re asking the right questions.”
“We got deeper and deeper as we went along.”
“Our group had mainly closed questions – is that wrong?”
“It’s so hard to turn a closed question into an open question!”
“We went down a rabbit hole and got obsessed with one thing.”
I related their reflections to the PhD journey—that there are times when we need to open out our thinking (divergent) and other times when we need to choose just one path (convergent), but it’s important to be aware of the kinds of questions we are asking (metacognition). I then asked them to close their eyes for a moment.
“The experience you just had—of searching for the right questions—is critical thinking. Where in your body do you feel it?”
Some felt it in their head, chest or stomach; others could not identify a bodily sensation. But connecting a critical mindset to a somatic experience can help some researchers re-create the experience for themselves.
Example 2
Two colleagues and I ran a week-long writing retreat for twenty medical researchers from three African countries, attached to a British Medical School. The group was a mix of PhD and early career researchers, investigating different aspects of neglected tropical diseases. We ran the QFT on Day 3 of the retreat, after everyone had written (and refined) a short summary of their research.
Each researcher silently swapped summaries with someone who was not familiar with their work. No apologies, no explanation. They had eight minutes to generate as many questions as possible in response to their partner’s summary—speed was essential to discourage too much self-censoring. They identified the questions as open or closed, changed one to the other, then chose the three most important questions. The writer then silently received their partner’s questions and read them. A long discussion followed, with conversation in the room rising to a crescendo. Every writer reported that the QFT activity highlighted where they needed to be clearer when explaining their research to a critical reader and made them more aware of how they came across as a writer.
My limited experience suggests that the QFT has vast potential to support postgraduate reading and writing. Actively formulating questions stimulates a critical mindset and boosts researchers’ confidence to respond to other scholars’ work. It also helps them anticipate possible questions from readers of their own writing and, by doing so, communicate their ideas in writing more effectively.
Dr Anne Wilson is a Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow, running a wide range of academic writing interventions for postgraduates and staff in universities and Higher Education Institutions in the UK. You can hear her talk about her approach to teaching academic writing at PhD level here.