The Thesis Whisperer Speaks
Original collage by Helen Sword
On Tuesday September 28, our WriteSPACE international membership community welcomed special guest Professor Inger Mewburn, better known as the Thesis Whisperer, as the special guest at our monthly Special Event.
Inger is Director of Researcher Development at the Australian National University and the author of numerous scholarly papers, books, and book chapters about research education and post-PhD employability. If you're not yet familiar with Inger's fabulous long-running blog at www.thesiswhisperer.com, be sure to check it out!
In the first hour of this 2-hour Special Event, I talked with Inger about her work as an influential writing scholar, research developer, and blogger. She told us how and when she started the Thesis Whisperer blog, why she recently stopped publishing guest posts, and what projects she’s working on now — for example PostAc, Postac, a tool for PhD students in search of non-academic jobs. I especially loved hearing about her childhood as the daughter of a computer technician; she used to sit with her back against his big mainframe computer to keep warm and build card houses out of stacks of used punch cards.
Quote of the hour: “The future is Search.”
In the second hour, Inger took us through a hands-on writing workshop based on her recent book How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble. We learned why so many academic authors write hard-to-read sentences and explored some simple ways to fix them.
Quote of the hour: “The English reader is not a good guesser.”
If you’re a WriteSPACE member, you can watch an edited video of the conversation and workshop with Inger Mewburn in the Library.
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