It’s been said before and we’ll say it again – research is writing

Doctoral writing is often seen as a technical matter, simply a question of skills. Problems in writing can be readily addressed through the provision of a set of guidelines and handy hints. Writing is simply the means by which the real work of doctoral research is finally ‘written up’. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the catalogues of academic publishers

who specialise in research methods books. After pages devoted to general research methods, philosophy of research, research skills and design, there are then more pages of offerings about specific methods – quantitative, mixed methods, and various kinds of qualitative approaches. There are small collections of research in specific areas – psychology, geography, business, politics – and then a series of expensive and comprehensive handbooks designed for library purchase. At the very back of the catalogues are a set of texts called projects, dissertations and study skills. Here are books that offer guidance on project design, conducting literature reviews, writing the thesis, managing the viva, publishing and presenting research and coping with the postgraduate experience (see Kamler and Thomson 2008). It is highly likely that this volume is listed in just such a section of a catalogue. We do not have hard evidence about who buys such texts. However, judging by our

own universities, we suspect that one of the most important things about project, dissertation and study skills books is that they are less likely to be used in research education courses than methods texts, and more likely to be bought by universities for individual use, or by students for their own libraries. And in the university library shelves we see exactly the same kind of cataloguing organisation – writing is separated from other aspects of research. The discursive dissociation of writing from the central concerns of research may make

one kind of sense, but it is also problematic. In this chapter, we argue that writing is central to research and we consider the ‘work’ that it does. We then show how research and scholarly identities are co-constructed in and as writing, using examples of doctoral researchers’ struggles with literatures, chapter conclusions and journal articles. We conclude by returning to the problem of disconnecting writing from thinking, doing, arguing and representing research.