{"id":37993,"date":"2017-02-27T13:06:32","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T21:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=37993"},"modified":"2017-02-27T13:06:32","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T21:06:32","slug":"new-series-wakeupreader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/new-series-wakeupreader\/","title":{"rendered":"New series -#wakeupreader"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"90-mile-straight\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When my son was about ten years old we went on holiday to Perth. We didn\u2019t fly, as many\u00a0people do. We drove from Adelaide where we lived. That\u2019s a distance of 2691.44 km, about twenty-four hours driving time. It takes around three days, even more if you stop along the way. A lot of the drive is on The Eyre Highway which\u00a0cuts across The Nullabor \u00a0for\u00a01675Kms. The Nullabor is mostly a flat, dry, treeless plain; there\u00a0are very long stretches of the road where there doesn\u2019t seem to be much going on. It\u2019s only if you stop and get out of the car that you start to see the micro-variation.<\/p>\n

Like many Australians, we figured that Driving The Nullabor was an essential part of the Australian experience. We had to do it at least once.<\/p>\n

\"nullarbor<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019d grown up with my parents\u2019 stories of the drive. They regularly braved the distance in the \u00a0days when the highway wasn\u2019t paved. Then, it was just red dirt. A youthful Mum and Dad, together with my maternal uncle and paternal grandfather, lived in Kalgoorlie, a mining town outside of Perth, and they all went home to Adelaide a couple of times a year. Across The Nullabor in a trusty Ford.<\/p>\n

My father was one of those Australian blokes who could fix anything, so he was usually able to deal with the inevitable mechanical problems that occurred during the then five to six-day trip. However, on one such trip, the windscreen broke \u2013 always a possibility on unmade roads \u2013 and Mum and my uncle spent the best part of a day trying to stop the thick red dust from filling up the car. \u00a0They finally got to a petrol station where Dad was able to make a temporary repair strong enough to go the distance. \u00a0The way they told it, this was both adventurous and hilarious. I\u2019m sure it was actually terrible.<\/p>\n

But when we did the trip, the highway was paved. \u2018Roughing it\u2019, a la parents, was unlikely. But there were still hazards. The Nullabor can be dangerous simply because drivers get tired and don\u2019t stop when they need to. \u2018Straight road\u2019 crashes are common. Cars can break down even if they are checked immediately before travelling, as ours was. \u00a0We carried lots of water and supplies in case we got stranded;\u00a0we could sleep and cook in the van if we needed to. But the most\u00a0likely risk of an accident came from the wildlife. \u00a0Kangaroos regularly appear out of nowhere, particularly from dusk to dawn. Roos\u00a0often come for\u00a0the grass at the side of the road and the moisture on the bitumen, condensation\u00a0produced by\u00a0the desert temperature\u00a0rapidly dropping as\u00a0the sun goes down. We had a \u2018roo bar\u2019 fitted to our van to lessen potential damage, but we still took the precaution of stopping well before sunset.<\/p>\n

\"Eyre<\/a>

Eyre Highway, Norseman, Western Australia<\/p><\/div>\n

Two days of driving across the Nullabor are pretty tiresome for a small-ish person. We had a repertoire of car games, but these were seriously challenged by the sheer distance and apparently same-y landscape. \u201cI spy\u201d and its variations was usually a favorite car-game. But there was only so much S is for Saltbush we could do. And there was often so little traffic on the road that we couldn\u2019t really guestimate the make, colour or model of cars we would see. The dominant traffic on the Eyre Highway is haulage. Massive\u00a0trucks carry consumer goods from one side of the country to the other and they travel through day and the night in \u2018road trains\u2019. T is for Truck wore thin pretty quickly too.<\/p>\n

Now, the\u00a0side of the Nullabor road, the unpaved \u2018shoulder\u2019, is testimony to the power and size of the truck compared to the kangaroo. Road kill. Road kill in abundance. I remember at one point being reduced to playing \u201cGuess how many dead kangaroos I spy on the side of the road in the next five kilometres\u201d. Ghoulish, but effective.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0why am I telling you all this? Well, the analogy is pretty obvious.<\/p>\n

Reading a thesis can be a little \u2013 or a lot \u2013 like travelling on a very long highway. Think of the thesis as The Nullabor Plain. \u00a0Without the writer intending it, a thesis can actually be pretty flat and same-y. Readers can be lulled to sleep \u2013 or bored to the point of putting the text away \u2013 \u00a0by the sheer monotony of the prose. There is\u00a0a repetitive quality\u00a0to the text which is, ultimately, soporific.<\/p>\n

But thesis writers don\u2019t want their examiners to get tired, breakdown or crash into the unexpected textual kangaroo. So they\u00a0need writing which keeps the reader interested. And this doesn\u2019t come straight away. First drafts are about getting the material and the argument lined up. Creating an interesting text takes revision. A lot of revision. And the thesis writer\u00a0therefore\u00a0needs to build strategies that focus specifically on increasing textual liveliness\/reducing textual boredom.\u00a0These\u00a0revision strategies require careful critical reading \u2013\u00a0a\u00a0textual game of \u201cI Spy\u201d to spot the things which might send a\u00a0thesis reader to sleep and\/or crash and burn.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m starting a new series of posts about these revision strategies. These posts are geared to helping thesis writers avoid unnecessary reader-examiner slumber.\u00a0I\u2019ll\u00a0l cover flabbiness, incoherence and dullness. Less evocatively, this means I\u2019m going to look at expression, repetition and flow. And each of these involves more than one thing. For instance, revising to avoid repetition involves looking at how sentences begin and end, the position of the subject and verb, whether the sentences are the same length and structure, and paragraph lengths. Hours of fun ahead.<\/p>\n

These revision posts won\u2019t come one after the other. Nor will they come regularly \u2013 say every Monday. That\u2019s because I want to avoid the problem I\u2019m addressing. A blogger doesn\u2019t want to create\u00a0The Nullabor experience any more than a thesis writer. Readers are kept interested in thesis texts and in blogs because of their variation. So these posts will appear over the next few months, but\u00a0not all at once. I will use a common hashtag for the posts \u2013 #wakeupreader\u00a0\u2013 so you will know them when you see them and can find them later.<\/p>\n

I hope they will be useful.<\/p>\n

Oh \u2013 and parents take note\u00a0\u2013 \u00a0the Nullabor road trip produced strong long-term memories, and perhaps not just for me\u00a0\u00a0\u2026 album cover Virgin Records, 2000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When my son was about ten years old we went on holiday to Perth. We didn\u2019t fly, as many\u00a0people do. We drove from Adelaide where we lived. That\u2019s a distance of 2691.44 km, about twenty-four hours driving time. It takes around three days, even more if you stop along the way. A lot of the […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":37994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[65875],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-37993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-higher-education","tag-revision-strategies"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNew series -#wakeupreader - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/new-series-wakeupreader\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"New series -#wakeupreader - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When my son was about ten years old we went on holiday to Perth. 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