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[tee_bee]

Forumites,

I want to be clear that I am a professor advising a PhD student. My student is making some programs but his/her (I can't stand the word "hu") writing has some significant problems, the hypotheses are muddled, etc., mostly because the writer's writing is just really bad. I think problems with writing make the whole thing really garbled, and, as a result, my student's models are deeply flawed (huge multicollinearity problems, etc.) and the underlying theory is really thin and hard to follow.

His/her committee and I believe s/he needs to hire an editor to clean up the prose. (Ignore, for now, the long term implications of this problem. Oh, and the author is a native speaker of English.) Because s/he has chosen, prematurely, to work in adjunct jobs, s/he has relatively little time to really bear down on the project.

OK, so s/he wants to hire a dissertation editor/consultant to help with this. I am OK with this provided that (1) s/he doesn't hire a fool (a lot of Ed.D's out there claim to be dissertation consultants, but their websites are barely in English, and, more to the point (2) that s/he doesn't hire someone to write the diss for him/her. The diss does involve hypotheses, data, statistics, etc.--straight up positivism. That's just how I roll. And it's in the social sciences, if that's meaningful.

The questions: do any advisors out there have any experience with folks using editors and consultants? Do any students have this experience? How do you find qualified people to help without writing the dissertation for you? I don't want a whiff of intellectual dishonesty here. Is hiring an editor/consultant prima facie dishonesty? I have seem some websites for consultants that tackle this head on, saying that "I will not write your diss, this is what I will do...." but others are very coy about it. I think s/he needs some help with the writing, so that he can untie the knots in his theory--his/her committee cannot see what he's saying through the thicket of impenetrable "English" in which the first four chapters are written.

I think you know where I am going with this. I am a pretty good writer, but I am not going to rewrite and copy edit any diss--I have enough to do. I think that, if my student had stayed in town. s/he and I could work together and s/he could hammer out a good diss. But this is all happening through email now. I'm sort of at wit's end.

Thanks, wise forumites.

[coneflower]

Just curious - how did a student with such poor writing skills get accepted into a doctoral program? Are they required to submit writing samples as part of the application?

[tee_bee]

The student was here before I was. My understanding is that this student was a competent if not stellar writer then. With the PhD diss., this person started "writing like an academic." This would not be the first case of this happening in North American higher ed. Had I known, I would not have served on this student's committee. The student is a project, shall we say, and I've helped this person make more progress in a year than s/he had in the previous three.

Summary: I didn't admit this student. I'm now playing the hand I am dealt. I don't want to cut him/her off yet. I still believe in the power of redemption, etc.

[msparticularity]

While it is certainly ethical to hire someone to provide the sorts of services that an on-campus Writing Center usually provides (coaching, work on clarity and flow, support on incorporating sources clearly in writing, etc.), and/or paying for copyediting services, this diss sounds like it needs way more than that. The fact that this student is apparently working from a distance (you say it's being done via email), and that s/he is working so much that the diss is not a priority sends off many alarm bells for me. This is particularly so since some of the problems you're describing don't sound like they're just about tortured English prose; they sound like serious methodological holes--in his/her comprehension of the method itself, and of the meaning and implications of the results. Are you thinking that s/he might be able to hire someone to, essentially, provide tutoring on this? I agree that this becomes problematic when the committee members are unable to tell whose actual work they are seeing. Unfortunately, the only way to truly discover whose work it is in this case comes at the defense--and that's a nasty time to have to entertain concerns over academic dishonesty.

Upon preview: Given what you have just posted, I wonder if it is possible for you to require him/her to return to campus to put in some serious work, including meeting with you for in-person feedback and getting some guidance at the Writing Center. Trying to deal with a problem of this magnitude long distance sounds like a no-win situation for you.

[tee_bee]

While it is certainly ethical to hire someone to provide the sorts of services that an on-campus Writing Center usually provides (coaching, work on clarity and flow, support on incorporating sources clearly in writing, etc.), and/or paying for copyediting services, this diss sounds like it needs way more than that. The fact that this student is apparently working from a distance (you say it's being done via email), and that s/he is working so much that the diss is not a priority sends off many alarm bells for me. This is particularly so since some of the problems you're describing don't sound like they're just about tortured English prose; they sound like serious methodological holes--in his/her comprehension of the method itself, and of the meaning and implications of the results. Are you thinking that s/he might be able to hire someone to, essentially, provide tutoring on this? I agree that this becomes problematic when the committee members are unable to tell whose actual work they are seeing. Unfortunately, the only way to truly discover whose work it is in this case comes at the defense--and that's a nasty time to have to entertain concerns over academic dishonesty.

Upon preview: Given what you have just posted, I wonder if it is possible for you to require him/her to return to campus to put in some serious work, including meeting with you for in-person feedback and getting some guidance at the Writing Center. Trying to deal with a problem of this magnitude long distance sounds like a no-win situation for you.

Believe me, I've tried to disabuse my student of the "I can write and work" fantasy. I inherited this student from the Hall of the Near-Doomed. The student has made progress, but yes, has profound problems. But getting the student to move back here is less productive than pi$$ing directly into a hurricane. But maybe this time the message will take--esp when s/he finds out how much these coaches/editors/whatever cost.

What s/he really needs is an editor. Whose work isn't improved with editing? Indeed, the work is an order of magnitude better than it was six months ago. But it still needs the sort of editorial help that I am not going to provide. Once this battle is won, the methods might fall into place with the clarity (I hope) of the prose. The other members of the committee feel that s/he should just hire an English MA student with a good writing record to help him see how to write better. Does this make any sense?

Your other comments, Msp, are dead right.

[msparticularity]

Ah--sorry for the lack of clarity. I didn't mean for the student to move back so much as come for a short but intensive period of work with you and the Writing Center. My friends who did the diss at a distance were universally been required to go personally for meetings at least a couple of times a year, and this seems entirely reasonable to me. I am now working with a brilliant but somewhat erratic doc student (that I inherited) right now, and I am quite certain that I would not be willing or able to do this from a distance!

[parispundit]

This is going to cost your student, for reasonable quality help and a standard length diss., about 3k. Do they (he + she = they) have it? Are they adjuncting out of desperate financial need, desire to be with a partner, or sheer cussedness, i.e. do they have they cash? And of course, there is still going to be intellectual work to be done after the fixed writing reveals the intellectuals problems even to the student. The editing could be a whole lot of help, but only if the student realizes that it will not make the text into an acceptable dissertation all by itself, given the other problems you note.

If student decides to go this route, if you PM me I can give suggestions as to where to get the editing.

[barred_owl]

Projecting a bit into the future, tee_bee, even if your student receives the help s/he needs to edit and subsequently clarify his/her thoughts, what do you feel are the prospects for this student's future?  Finishing the dissertation is a first step, but do you think s/he will need to rely on an editor for publications resulting from the dissertation? for future publications? for writing application letters and statements of research or teaching philosophy? As parispundit noted, the cost for just a dissertation editor might be steep, and MsP pointed out the potential roadblock of the defense.  If s/he can't improve as a writer independently, is it doing him/her any favors to push the student toward the goal of completing the dissertation?

I do wish you luck in sorting this out--you're in a tough position, considering that you've been consigned, essentially, to helping someone with so many obstacles to overcome.

[tee_bee]

Thanks, all, for the comments. These are all great reality checks. This student thinks his/her life will be an utter failure if s/he doesn't finish his dissertation. S/he is definitely on the teaching track, not research. His/her students at the one-year gigs seem to like him/her, from what I've heard.

I have confronted all these issues. I am not sure my student has. It might be time for the Big Talk.

Msparticularity, you're absolutely right, and I am sorry I misunderstood. I guess my problem is that I cannot spare the time to work intensively with a student who often misunderstands my advice, and who often doesn't even believe it (and, yet, who is the full prof in this relationship?). I dread the thought of dealing with this student's psychoses every day, and, yet, s/he is making good enough progress that I don't want to dump the student just yet. Oh, well. There's always bourbon, of which I will partake with gusto later.

[normative_]

FWIW, my sense of the problem is in line with Msparticularity's, in all respects. A candidate who can't clearly express a clear research design or model or evidence and so on normally doesn't know what the answer is. There's only so much an editor can do without interfering in the mental processes of the author and taking over the thinking. Those of us with publishing experience know what that's like: when we get the proofs for our latest books, we get comments on clarity and consistency from the copy editor.  That's the kind of thing your candidate would be able to get without calling into question his/her ability to work independently (which is what the Ph.D. is about). It appears that what your candidate needs in the way of correction far exceeds that.

I should think that the university or your department might want to set some guidelines on the involvement of coaches, editors and the like should you go further down this path. Given the number of executive MBAs and such that I'm involved in teaching, though, I'm always very wary of the 'assistance' my executives feel free to call on to complete their degrees.

I'm curious how this will turn out. Do keep us posted.

[tee_bee]

I think I will push my student to get an editor. I will try to untangle the methods and help Student get through it. This will overcome some of the obvious ethical problems. This is a pain in the a$$, but it's good that my department thinks that I have been heroic so far. Maybe I should get a bust of St. Jude on my desk--but not quite yet.

[dcbetty]

I'm an editor who's worked on dissertations and other academic prose.  Writing and thinking are intimately connected, and if this person has nothing coherent to say then there's only so much an editor can do.  I worked for months with a PhD candidate whose problem was not that she was ESL but that she just didn't have much of substance to say.  I did help her with her argument, as far as that was possible with her pretty thin evidence, mostly by talking her through various things. 

I worked with someone else whose diss was 200 pages of very well-written description but with no argument whatsoever; I could proofread, in that case, but getting the diss to SAY something was beyond my job description as it required a complete rewrite and a totally different approach to the material.  And indeed in that case he was sent back by his committee to do so -- in the end it took him almost 2 years.

On another note -- it sounds to me like this student is really financially strapped.  I speak as a former PhD student who had to leave academia to become an editor in part because I simply could not afford to continue.  (I have a small child and we pretty much were looking at going on welfare.  I now make more money working PT than I would have gotten for a FT assistant professorship.)  Your idea that she should be writing and nothing else can be grossly unrealistic for many people.  Does she have a completion grant or any other award?  If not, can you help her get one? 

If you are going to dump her, please do not allow her to take out a giant student loan just to finish the diss.  And if you are going to dump her, PLEASE do it now, instead of wasting more of her life on a career in which you, her primary advisor, obviously cannot support her (which may well guarantee her failure). 

If she could write well before, why not now?  Is she panicking?  Has she hired someone to write it for her already?  Who has influenced her to do this?

[normative_]

I looked back at the original post and took more notice this time of the statistics orientation of the candidate's research. Tee_bee, if there are multicollinearity problems, I'd think that has more to do with the thinking and analysis behind the stats rather than language or writing problems. I have a lot of experience with foreign-language majors and a good amount with stats as well. It's absolutely the last place I would expect language problems to impede success. It's far more straighforward than qualitative research design and testing.

I hope your efforts pay off for you if you choose to follow it (okay, you have, so I wish you the best with it) and I understand the incentives to do so, but my concerns are in line with Dcbetty's.* I'm also in favour of cutting someone loose if things appear hopeless. I might suggest that you have the candidate's editor give an initial assessment of whether this is a hard case or not, just like getting an estimate from a mechanic before you decide whether to repair your car. It's not as easy with a text, but a good, experienced editor will be able to tell you quickly to what degree the manuscript makes sense and can be made fit for purpose with reasonable effort, or whether it is all but a lost cause.



* A very warm welcome, Dcbetty!
 

[reesespeanutbutter]

tee_bee, I have nothing to add on the actual topic, I just wanted to say that I think your efforts to help the grad student that no one else has taken the time to help are incredible and amazing.  You are exactly the type of adviser I hope to be--the one that makes a solid effort to get the student through.  I hope things settle out well for everyone involved without taking too much away from your work.

[msparticularity]

On another note -- it sounds to me like this student is really financially strapped.  I speak as a former PhD student who had to leave academia to become an editor in part because I simply could not afford to continue.  (I have a small child and we pretty much were looking at going on welfare.  I now make more money working PT than I would have gotten for a FT assistant professorship.)  Your idea that she should be writing and nothing else can be grossly unrealistic for many people.  Does she have a completion grant or any other award?  If not, can you help her get one? 

If you are going to dump her, please do not allow her to take out a giant student loan just to finish the diss.  And if you are going to dump her, PLEASE do it now, instead of wasting more of her life on a career in which you, her primary advisor, obviously cannot support her (which may well guarantee her failure). 

DCbetty, I absolutely agree with what you have to say here, but I'm posting again to continue the conversation on finances. My thought in posting about the student being far away was less about the fact that s/he is working, and more about the distance involved. While it is true that many or most of our grad students end up needing to work (sometimes a great deal) while they are writing the diss, there are some patterns that I have noticed that seem to surround this. A lot of people--including me!--have patched together a combination of a GA slot and adjuncting and/or other wage-paying work to survive while finishing. However, almost everyone I have seen or know about who has been successful in this has remained in the immediate area while doing so.

Conversely, the people that I have seen who have left the immediate area to take a job have seemed to have problems that go beyond finishing the diss. Often (again anecdotally) there seems to be an attitude on the part of these folks that they are actually prepared for a career, and that the diss is just a formality--or an annoyance. There may be resistance toward and resentment of the advisor and the committee; this may be accompanied by a great deal of complaining about their unreasonable demands and the need to deal with them in the face of the new professional responsibilities. In several cases, the "new professional responsibilities" have consisted of a position that actually pays less than the combined GA and other wage-earning work that would have been possible at or near the university in question! Again, it appeared to me that the person in question was just impatient with the process and regarded it as irrelevant.

I am wondering if tee_bee's student might be one who is far less interested in completing the research involved in doing a diss, than in getting the credential and moving on.