My sympathies

Recently I was asked to Chair a review of one of the University's schools and now the hardest part of the job is calling for my attention: the writing of the review report. The review is carried out over three days, with three external reviewers from various parts of the globe, and they all contribute in one way or another to the report, so I don't have to write it all myself. In addition, we had agreed to be decisive and pithy: a small number of recommendations and concise text. Nevertheless, I found myself over the weekend with a document that was 30 pages long, contained about 35 recommendations, was written in four different voices, and in which consistent writing conventions had been thrown to the wind.

This made me feel very sympathetic towards all those research students currently writing up: trying to incorporate the ideas of others in your literature review, trying to synthesize the results extracted from kilos of papers, submissions, interviews and data analyses; trying to create something that is beautiful, will be a pleasure to read, and will facillitate future action, rather than obscure it.

So how did I go about this task? Well, like all of you, I also had to work around the realities of the rest of my life. On Saturday morning my son asked if I would take him and a friend to a skateboarding competition in Gosnells. Gosnells is a million miles away, so we packed the car with boys, suncream, food and gallons of drinks, and my new laptop (which has about 6 hours of battery life).

Then in a carpark, in the sun, in the middle of nowhere, the work began. Here's how I approached it. I had a top-down structure of what the document should look like: a coversheet, an executive summary, the list of recommendations, then the body of the text covering the following sections: overview, governance, teaching & learning, research, and service. I also had contributions from my three colleagues, covering various of the subsections.

I pasted all the contributions into the appropriate parts of the text. The body of the text is supposed to contain the arguments leading to each of the recommendations. I started working through the body, correcting minor typos and re-expressing various phrases that were difficult to understand. I worked on making each recommendation a clearly defined action, with a clearly defined actor. I copied and pasted all the revised recommendations into the "list of recommendations" section.

I then started my global search functions: all proper noun instances of "school", "faculty" and "university" to be capitalised. All uses of the terms "field work" and "field-work" to become "fieldwork". Likewise with terms like "database" and "coursework" and "postgraduate". All references to our committee were capitalised as Review Committee, rather than "panel", "committee", the "review team" etc.

I did a global search on "which", changing all instances that should have been a "that". (What's the difference you ask? Well, "which" is non-restrictive, whereas "that" defines and restricts. Restrictive clauses ("that" with no commas) are essential, defining, irremovable. Non-restrictive clauses ("which" with commas) are parenthetical, descriptive, detachable. For example: "The doctor injected his arm, which was infected" - the injection was going to happen anyway, and the infection information is just additional to the overall description; "The doctor injected his arm that was infective" - in this case, the doctor could have injected either arm, but injected the one that was infected and presumerably that was the whole point of the injection.)

I checked that the logical structure of the document was correct. Headings were actually coded as headings, lists were actually coded as lists, etc. The document title was in Uppers and Lowers (all words capitalised except for articles and non-stressed connectives) and all other headings used Sentence Capitalisation (only the first word, and all proper nouns capitalized).

Each of my contributors has a tendency to write very long sentences. Normally, sentence length should follow a normal distribution with mean around 18 words. So some long sentences are ok, but if there are too many then the argument becomes hard to follow. I chopped up sentences.

When I got home I printed out a copy of the report and read it through from start to finish. I noticed lots of little things I had missed on the screen (for example, no footer with page numbers, inconsistencies between the recommendations listed in the front of the document, and those repeated in the body of the text).

So now I am just about ready to circulate version 2 to all the authors, to see if we are converging on a final document.

Oh!, and my son won the Under 12 division.