Dphil writing: Sharing experiences, challenges and top tips

Dphil writing: Sharing experiences, challenges and top tips
Research Hive, top floor of the Library
Friday 27 May 2:30pm-3:30pm 

How do you write a PhD? The actual process of writing your research can be one of the most daunting experiences of life as a DPhil student.  Is there a formula for writing? How do you structure your time?  Do you have any hints or tips for beating writer's block?  How do you deal with an 80,000 word count?

In the first of a new series, the Research Hive Scholars invite you to an open form discussion on the merits and methods of your particular writing practices.  This session will be driven by the ideas and topics of conversation generated by you.  No lecturing - guaranteed!

Writing can be a lonely activity so, whether you're looking for some peer-driven guidance or think you may have a useful model for consideration then come and make connections with other DPhil students at the University and share your writing ideas and experiences with others.

RSVP to researchhive@sussex.ac.uk

This 'Cloud' really does have a silver lining - a thought on avoiding lost work hell

All the cliches are true - your blood does run cold, and your heart does seem to stop, when you realise that you've just deleted 17 pages of the chapter you've been slaving over.  I still don't know how I did it, but although I do have a backup drive, I don't altogether trust it and anyway it only backs up once a day.  Which lead me to 'The Cloud'.  Not an ethereal other world, but a more mundane cyberspace version of a storage unit, only harder to get old IKEA sofas in.  I ended up opting for www.sugarsync.com which magically synchronises my data as I write with a version in cybersapce, so that the heart stopping loss of pages is a thing of the past, at least until I start worrying about the reliability and short lifespan of web businesses.

So now if I'm using my home PC I can switch to the laptop (can't resist the good weather) and pick up where I left off, or log in to Sugarsync from the Hive and do the same.  Optimistically I'm also looking forward to using the feature that allows me to share large documents (my thesis) with my supervisors by emailing a link which they can use for downloading a read-only or an editable version, rather than clogging up their inboxes with my endless chapters (very optimistic).  Best of all this stuff is free and there's at least 3Gb of space, which I've scarcely touched with two years worth of research documents.  A quick straw poll of fellow DPhils last week suggested that I'm not alone in being a late adopter when it comes to technology, so if you've not come across this stuff have a look.  And if this is old news, what else is out there that I and your fellow researchers should be trying?