ABSTRACT
In previous chapters we’ve suggested a number of strategies to help doctoral researchers write with authority, often before they feel authoritative. We’ve looked at ways of using metaphors, staging moves of an argument and creating a scholarly persona in the text. In this chapter we shift our focus to a closer kind of text work by introducing a linguistic toolkit for supervisors. We argue that grammar is a useful tool for helping researchers make their writing more coherent, engaging and clear. But to do this work we need a meta-language, a language about language. We need a set of tools for doing archaeological work – for digging into student text, to see how it works and how it may be remade to work more effectively.
