I had the opportunity to speak to a group of doctoral researchers recently about some of the challenges I faced doing my PhD. I called my presentation: The Wide PhD Sea: navigating the research journey and tools for smoother sailing'. I used the metaphor of the PhD as an ocean we, as scholars, have to cross. It is sometimes rough and wild and we feel like Robert Redford's character in '

I am a scribbler. I have piles of notebooks and notepads and bits of paper in folders and scraps of files on my PC full of notes and scribbles and ideas (in various stages of being worked through). This is not really a super-efficient system, because I have too many ideas and notes in too many places, but they are somewhat thematised and organised - it's a work in progress.

I like reading. I am a complete bookworm - my family used to joke when I was growing up that if I didn't have a book, I would read cereal boxes (I did, actually). When I was studying for my final school exams I would reward myself for an hour of maths with a chapter (or 4) of my current novel.

I wrote last year about making work-plans, as I had a mammoth of a plan for 2013 so that I could get my PhD finished. I am writing about this again, from a very different place, as I find this is still a big issue for me. I am not very good at making realistic work-plans: I tend towards an oddly naive and rather (I think) charming sort of idealistic optimism when I am making my writing and reading 'to do' lists, and when I look at these a few months or years after I have written them all out and then largely failed to stick to them I feel shame, but also find myself bemused by my own idealism.

I am procrastinating. About writing. Again. I do this a lot, and I don't really know why. I actually like writing. I like feeling the stretching in my brain as I make connections and think through my ideas and revise and rewrite and fiddle. This, for me, is mostly something I really enjoy doing. But, right now, I just can't seem to make myself do it.

I have been asked to speak to doctoral students at the end of the month at a 'Doc week' attached to the PhD programme I have graduated from, where we all come together from different parts of the country to attend seminars, share our progress, meet with supervisors etc. These weeks were a big and important part of my own journey.

Some of you may have noticed that I missed a post last week. I was fortunate enough to be in Lancaster last week (not writing a blog post), at the Higher Education Close-Up 7 conference. One of the keynote speakers was Ray Land, one of the authors of the now well-known 'threshold concepts' papers (with Jan Meyer). His (and Meyer's) research on threshold concepts also considers 'liminality' and the transformative potential of higher education.

This is supposed to be a somewhat lighthearted post, rather than a serious exposition on feedback. I was chatting to some friends and fellow PhD travellers recently about how we make sense of our supervisors' feedback - what we read into some of the ways in which they phrase comments and questions that give us clues on how to respond in the most appropriate ways.

I have been writing parts of this post in my head for a while. This has been an issue I have been thinking about a lot in relation to my writing centre work with the tutors and also with students, as well as in relation to my own ongoing writing. I mentioned a post or two ago that my MA mini-thesis did very little to prepare me for PhD research and writing - not because it was mini, but rather because I was not very conscious of what I was doing and why I was doing it.

In a post I wrote in 2013, shortly after launching this blog, I introduced you all to PhDgirl - my alter-ego, my superhero self, who was confident and clever, who could write and think and speak eruditely and articulately about her research. In short, she helped me to 'fake it' til I made it, to claim a researcher identity I didn't always feel completely at ease with.

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What are the 'rules' of dissertation writing? They almost certainly differ between fields. In the visual arts, for example, a dissertation would almost certainly include text as well as images, textiles, design elements of a certain shape and form. In Mathematics, a dissertation would have to include mathematical 'language' and forms as well as more conventional text, as arguments are made in equations as well as in other forms of writing.

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