Little things can make a big difference!

This post has absolutely nothing to do with either The Gospel of Thomas or Early Christianity so if you are in an academic frame of mind, you might like to skip it.

I have been associated with the University of New England for around 15 years (and I have been a PhD candidate there for more than half that time) and up to now I have only ever had positive interactions with their IT HelpDesk staff. Some of their staff have gone well above and beyond their basic job descriptions to be helpful, in fact. A couple of days ago, however, their student email system started telling the world that my email domain name was @myune.onmicrosoft.com rather than @myune.edu.au so I have been having problems posting to email lists. I contacted them using their on-line form and got a prompt response that suggested I should ring them if the problem wasn’t fixed. It wasn’t, so I rang and for the first time I got someone who didn’t tell me their name, wasn’t interested in listening to me and insisted that I try a fix that I was fairly sure wouldn’t actually work. It didn’t, so I added a comment to my incident report and the same person who’d replied to my first report replied again, asking me to try something else and then ring if that didn’t work. Again, I tried it and it didn’t work.

Now I find myself very unwilling to ring again. I am quite sure that the person who has been sending me emails wants to talk to me because it will be so much easier to diagnose the problem if I am on the end of the phone and can try things and report back. I am also quite sure that if he happens to be the person who answers the phone, he will be helpful. But I might get the unhelpful person. Since there are quite a few staff who answer the HelpDesk phone, I could easily get one of them, too, and they are also likely to be helpful. But I might get the unhelpful person … so I don’t want to ring.

It is amazing how just one encounter with an unhelpful person can have such an effect, and possibly if this last few weeks hadn’t been rather challenging in other ways it wouldn’t have been so bad.  It reminds me, though, that I don’t know what life has been like for the people I encounter and I need to be careful in my interactions with them, lest I put them off unintentionally.

I (Still) Believe – review

A little while ago, I bought a copy of John Byron and Joel N Lohr (eds) I (Still) Believe – leading bible scholars share their stories of faith (Zondervan, Michigan, 2015) because I thought it sounded interesting. I used it as bedtime reading for a week or two, and then got to read most of the rest of it in one day, whilst killing time between appointments.

It proved to be as interesting as I had expected. The editors have put together reflections from 18 experienced biblical scholars from the US, Canada and the UK, specialists in both testaments, whose faith has not been destroyed by the serious academic study of scripture (even though many people are sure that this is what happens when you do it). I hadn’t heard of all of them but knew and was interested in enough of them to make it worth buying, to my mind. I haven’t been disappointed. It is very clear that academic biblical study has changed what and how these people believe, but it is equally clear that each of them still has a strong Christian faith.

Theologically, they represent a wide cross-section of positions and there are some interesting juxtapositions because the chapters are in alphabetical order of family name.  Bruce Waltke’s piece begins with the statement:

My faith in the inerrancy of Scripture as to its Source and in its infallibility as to its authority for faith and practice was firmly rooted in my formative years, nurtured throughout life by my walk with God, defended in college by an apologetic of defensible partiality, enriched in seminary, challenge throughout life, especially at Harvard, and matured in my career. (p 237)

and follows directly after Phyllis Trible’s account of wrestling with the ‘texts of terror’ in the Hebrew Scriptures from a feminist perspective.

In almost all of the pieces, I found things to which I related, things that struck a chord from my own experience. In particular, however, I warmed to Morna Hooker’s notion that ‘trust’ might be a better word than ‘faith’ to translate the Greek pistis (p 125). She argues that faith suggests a set of particular doctrines that one has to believe, whereas the biblical understanding is rather on relying on someone who is utterly reliable – God in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New.

I was also interested in Scot McKnight’s contention that ‘the church does not need historical Jesus studies.‘ (p 168)  He isn’t arguing that it is a waste of time, but that the conclusions it offers are limited.

I can prove that Jesus died, but I can never prove that he died for my sins; I can prove that Jesus asserted that he would be raised from the dead but I can never prove that he rose for my justification. (p 168)

While I had never thought about it in these terms, I have for a long time thought that much of the enthusiasm for historical Jesus studies lies in the hope that we will be able to prove the Bible and that this kind of aim is hopeless. Faith is faith by definition because it believe in things that are essentially unprovable.

Zondervan has a short YouTube clip in which John Byron talks about the book concept – the wish to combat the notion that doing serious biblical study causes you to lose your faith and an understanding of the importance of testimony. I agree that the testimony of these scholars is important. So often we hear that theological/biblical study makes you lose your faith, and that you can’t tell people in the pews these kinds of things. We hear about the biblical scholars who no longer count themselves as Christian, but very rarely from those who do.

Although I have used it as ‘light reading’ – and it is, in comparison to the material I am reading for my research – it is aimed at people who have a grounding in the academic study of the Bible and much of what the authors write about would probably mystify the average reader-in-the-pew. It would, however, be a valuable resource for people who are preparing for ordained ministry and for those in charge of their preparation and a prompt for reflection for the ordained about how they actually integrated their studies with their faith. For those who can’t read the names in the photo, the book contains chapters by:

Richard Bauckahm	Walter Brueggemann	Ellen F Davis
James D G Dunn	Gordon Fee	Beverly Roberts Gaventa
John Goldingay	Donald A Hagner	Morna D Hooker
Edith M Humphrey	Andrew T Lincoln	Scot McKnight
J Ramsey Michaels	Patrick D Miller	RWL Moberly
Katharine Doob Sakenfeld	Phillis Trible	Bruce Waltke

Writing in company, with discipline

This post is a departure from my usual material, but still comes under the broad title of ‘musings on my PhD’, because it’s about one (or two, actually) of the ways that I manage to work full time and still keep up the writing momentum for my dissertation/thesis as a part time student studying at a distance.

The two techniques are Shut Up and Write, and the Pomodoro technique.

Shut Up and Write originated with a group of people in San Francisco who meet in a coffee shop and write creatively, but which I met through Inger Mewburn’s Thesis Whisperer post when it had already begun to be adapted for use in academia. Cassily Charles, the Academic Writing Coordinator for HDR students at Charles Sturt University (CSU), where I spend half my time, advertised some sessions at Wagga campus and invited people to join by email. I asked if she had thought about running them on other campuses and she replied that she’d love to help me set one up at Albury, so I roped in another person who roped in another person and we advertised an event in the library, with coffee and nibbles.

Although we had a few people interested initially, it didn’t work very well in face-to-face mode, even though I provided nice biscuits and plunger coffee and good quality tea bags for free. A number of students said they’d prefer to work in their own offices where they had all their books and access to two screens – because academic writing is different to creative writing. At about that time, however, CSU started using Adobe Connect, which enables groups to meet virtually using sound, video, shared screens and a range of other nifty things which are of less use in Shut Up and Write than they are in other activities for students working at a distance from each other. Cassily started using it and I did the training on the software and also started hosting on-line sessions. I now host three sessions a week which I find hugely useful in making sure that I keep periods of the week free from other activities to work on my thesis/dissertation. An added bonus is that part of my job description says that I provide hospitality to the university community, so hosting sessions is also part of my chaplaincy work – a win-win. 🙂

We get together at a set time each week, chat for 15 minutes, write up our goals for the session, then set a timer and work for 25 minutes, have a 5 minute break in which we share progress and sometimes useful tips, then repeat twice or three times more, depending on the energy of the group. This timing comes from the Pomodoro technique, developed by Francesco Cirillo as a means of managing time, using a timer to break work into manageable segments. Cirillo is Italian and the timer he used to develop the technique was a tomato-shaped kitchen timer – hence the name: pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato.

The full Pomodoro technique is quite complex, but for our purposes, the 25 minutes work followed by 5 minutes break is all we need. People who have real difficulty settling down to work are amazed by how well knowing that in 25 minutes you are going to have to report back focusses your mind. They (we) also find that the timing thing works when we are working by ourselves. You can use a mechanical kitchen timer, a timer on your phone or some kind of app. We tend to use the one at http://tomato-timer.com/.

Tomorrow, I plan to write another post that talks more about the technical aspects of doing Shut Up and Write on line, as well as the things that we’ve learned over the last 18 months or so, but for tonight, I think this is enough.

 

Happy belated anniversary!

My husband just asked me what date it was and I realised that yesterday it was seven years ago that I started this blog. It’s had its ups and downs in terms of postings, but it’s been a place where I can reflect on my academic work and its relevance to my paid work etc.

I know that I have certainly matured in my outlook over the seven years and I really hope that before this blog reaches its eighth anniversary I will have finally submitted my doctoral thesis. This assumes that I can find another supervisor, Majella Franzmann having had to withdraw due to pressure of work in her role as Pro Vice Chancellor Humanities at Curtin University. I am grateful for her encouragement for me to get involved in postgraduate study and will miss her support.

My doctoral thesis/dissertation will be a somewhat different document to the one I envisaged when I began my journey as a part time masters research candidate in late 2004, having spent the year learning Coptic for fun. I upgraded to a doctorate in December 2006 and in 2007, I got to spend five weeks with April DeConick at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where I developed some insights into the Coptic text of Thomas that have shaped how I am approaching it.

I also decided while I was there that I really wanted to attend the SBL International Meeting in Auckland in 2008 and that I needed to have a paper accepted in order to be able to afford to go and Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses inspired me to look into psychological research on witness testimony. I became so interested that I worked the paper up into a journal article “How Accurate are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research,” which was published in JBL 129, no. 1 (2010): 177-97. This in turn led to the exciting invitation to write a chapter, “Eyewitness Testimony and the Characters in the Fourth Gospel,” for Chris Skinner’s  Characters and characterization in the gospel of John. (Library of New Testament Studies. London: T & T Clark, 2013), which made me explore characterization theory in more depth. I am also seeing strong links between the psychological research on eyewitness testimony and human memory and the social memory theory work being done by people like Chris Keith, Anthony Le Donne and Rafael Rodríguez.

I’ve also done some teaching with Dr Lesley McLean in RELS 387/587 Earliest Christianity: Social Context and Sacred Text in the Studies in Religion area at University of New England (UNE) – the Australian one. Love the teaching, love the on-line interaction with the students, but the marking not so much. 🙂

In addition, I’ve  been involved as a participant and moderator of the Gospel of Thomas email group where I have appreciated the support of its founder, Mike Grondin* and the other moderators and have enjoyed the conversations. Again, these have provided food for thought on my academic journey.

All this has been interesting, exciting and fun, but has resulted in my having to do a significant rewrite of my methodology chapter and, of course, the literature review, not to mention rejigging some of my earlier analysis of the texts I’m studying. In the middle of it all, I had a long break (nearly two years) where the funding for my chaplaincy position ran out and I spent 14 months working as a research assistant on a number of UNE non-religious projects. This left no intellectual space for biblical studies. I then moved to the other end of the state, became a distance student and spent more time getting my head around a new job that involved working on nearby campuses of two different universities – again, leaving precious little intellectual space. This period was one where there were very few blog posts.

Early last year, I became involved in Shut Up and Write at Charles Sturt University (one of the places where I work). I started moderating on-line sessions using Adobe Connect and while I haven’t found anyone else doing Studies in Religion, I have study buddies all over Australia and in Switzerland and Japan, all experiencing the isolation of the distance post-grad and enjoying the support and structure that weekly writing sessions bring. I am very grateful to Cassily Charles, the Academic Writing Consultant for Higher Degree Research Students for providing me with access to shut Up and Write, and in particular to Willie, Jen, Marcel, Nina and Bruce who have shared writing sessions with me and listened as I thought my way through several episodes of ‘stuckness’ as I worked my way back into my research and my blogging.

My thanks, too, to the various people who have followed this blog and made comments and helpful suggestions over the years. I have really appreciated knowing that I wasn’t just posting into the ether. 🙂

Onward and upward!

*Correction: Mike tells me (well, the whole list, actually) that it was actually Paul Miller who founded the Gospel of Thomas email group. Mike ‘only’ took over the reins twelve months later in late 1999 (or very early 2000).

Music in worship

Yes. I know. Not what you usually get from this blog. But I am on holiday and have been surfing the net. I found a link to Peter Enns’ Rethinking Biblical Christianity Blog and this post piqued my interest. Peter currently attends an Episcopalian service that doesn’t use any music and he enjoys it, even though he likes church music.

I also like music in church. I like to sing and I like to hear harmonies and be part of harmonies. I like a wide range of styles of music that I come across in various forms of worship. It occurred to me as I read Peter’s post, though, that the part of worship that is most likely to alienate me is the hymns. There are hymns that I can only sing if I switch my brain out of ‘find meaning’ mode and just sing each word as it comes up and there are some bits of some hymns that I can’t bring myself to sing at all. In one particularly memorable service, the music person had selected ‘contemporary’ (aka written in the last 40 or so years) music without consulting the worship leader (I knew this because the worship leader had expressed her frustration at the refusal to consult) and I found the clash between the carefully crafted prayers, readings and reflections and the theology of the songs so painful that the only thing that kept me in the building was the fact that I didn’t want the worship leader to think that I was leaving because of something she had done.

Apparently other people don’t do this. They just enjoy the melody and it doesn’t matter what the words say.  Is this the curse of the biblical scholar – the need to examine all text closely?

I wonder how I would find a music-free worship? I know that, unlike Peter, I would not be arriving at church at 7.45 am to find out. 🙂

Burridge and the Life of Brian

Chris Keith on the Jesus blog draws our attention to an article in the UK Telegraph about Richard Burridge’s take on the Life of Brian. I first heard of Richard when I attended an international multifaith university chaplains’ conference in Vancouver. Richard was the Christian keynote speaker and his talk, “The Phoenix in the Marketplace”, used Harry Potter to link what chaplains do in universities into popular culture. His presentation was entertaining as well as helpful. I have referred to his What are the Gospels a number of times in my work on eyewitness testimony and memory and I also enjoyed hearing him when he visited Melbourne a year or two ago while he was on study leave and again reflecting on aspects of Christianity in the context contemporary society. I think the Pope and his advisors made a good choice in presenting him with the Ratzinger Prize.

Reading the Telegraph article took me back to the time when Life of Brian was first released in Australia. Richard says that those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were “embarrassingly” ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message and I can attest to a personal example of this. I was living away from home for the first time, in Brisbane (13 hours’ drive from friends and family). I was attending a continuing Presbyterian church (the more progressive members of the Presbyterian church had joined the Uniting Church and the Presbyterian remnant were contemplating whether they could unordain the women ministers who hadn’t left), so people in the congregation I attended were involved in picketting the local picture theatres because they were quite sure it was satanic. I was studying for a graduate diploma in a group of ten students – one Uniting Church person who had grown up Methodist; one Latter Day Saint, me and seven people who were not actively involved in any religious practice. We got to know one another quite well and hung out together quite a bit. Several of the seven wanted to know what the churches had against it and since I was the religious person who went to the pub with them (they wanted to know why the Uniting Church person wouldn’t – weren’t they good enough for her?), they asked me. I had to say that I didn’t know – the newspaper reports made no sense to me, either, but I wasn’t willing to go and see it at the picture theatre  because there was a very good chance that I would be spotted by a picketter and I didn’t know how to cope with that.

I have since seen it several times and cannot believe that anyone could possibly see such brilliant satire on the factions within the church as satanic.  It’s much more a wake-up call to people who get so fixated on the fine detail that they can’t see the big picture and had I attended a screening at the time, we could have had a very worthwhile discussion about it at the student bar, because these people were genuinely interested in what Christians believed and why. I certainly agree with the Telegraph article’s concluding quote from Richard:

They were satirising closed minds, they were satirising fundamentalism and persecution of others and at the same time saying the one person who rises above all this was Jesus, which I think is remarkable and I think that the church missed that at the time.

Maybe the Python reunion this year will provide us with the opportunity to redress that missed opportunity.

Asking questions, getting answers

Returning to my blog after a longish break, I came across this half-written post and thought I might finish it and publish it.

At the end of last year for the first time I was teaching earliest Christianity during the leadup to Christmas. It was a very interesting experience to sit in the pews and listen to preachers talking about the Advent readings from a faith perspective whilst preparing lectures for Studies in Religion students and then reading essays about the challenges for the early Jesus movement. Something that has stood out starkly for me is that the information that you get from the text depends to a very large extent on the questions you bring to it.

The Studies in Religion students had been asked to write about the challenges that the members of the early Jesus groups faced and how they responded. The preachers were talking about the challenges that Christians today face and how we might respond to them. Both groups were using the Bible as a primary source of their answers, but the answers they were giving me were quite different- or they should have been. Unfortunately, some of the students gave me information about how to live as a Christian today, which, whilst not unreasonable things to read out of the text, was the wrong answer to the question they were addressing. Because the preachers I was listening to are good preachers, I didn’t hear sermons that just told me about how the early Jesus groups responded to the challenges of their time, but I have certainly heard this kind of sermon in the past. Usually the preacher of the latter kind of sermon has offered a very reasonable assessment of the situation at the time of writing of the text, but it has not been the right answer to the questions that most members of congregations bring to Sunday worship.

The early Christian texts are capable of providing answers to a range of both historical and faith questions and I think it’s perfectly valid to ask both kinds of questions of them, but it’s important not to confuse the answers. Or to try to force the answers to your questions down the throats of people who are asking different questions. As someone whose initial training in biblical studies was focussed on answering faith questions, I find that I have to watch quite carefully at times that I don’t slip into that mode in my current writing, but careful historical work is an essential basis for the faith work.

Dealing with reviewers’ comments

More things I learned whilst being underemployed – this time (as the title suggests) about dealing with reviewers’ comments on your work.

1. If your manuscript comes back from the reviewers with recommendations for change, bear in mind that someone needs to check that you have actually addressed them effectively, so it is really helpful if you include a note with the new manuscript that indicates how you think you have done what they asked. List each recommendation and then say how you have dealt with it. If you are not going to do what has been suggested, (and this is your right – reviewers are not infallible) it is crucial that you justify this. I personally would not bother prefacing this note with “the author(s) thank(s) the reviewers for their helpful comments” because (a) you probably don’t, since many of them are not tactfully phrased even if they’re correct and (b) in most cases, the reviewers probably aren’t going to be the people who check the revised manuscript unless perhaps the person who is checking it thinks you have done a really bad job of addressing the recommendations and one of the recommendations is that the paper only be accepted if it is radically reworked.
2. Reviewers don’t always make sensible comments. One comment I read suggested that the paper would be better if it stopped trying to stretch itself to be relevant to distance education and confined itself to topic X. This was, in fact, true, but seeing the conference at which it is to be presented was on distance education, what s/he should have recommended was that the authors articulated more clearly how the  model they were advocating was (particularly) relevant to teaching by distance.  Reviewers may say that the paper would be much better if A was expanded, and this may well be true, but if the paper is already up to the word limit and you have already edited it very tightly to get it that short, you won’t be able to expand A unless you drop something else. An alternative is to flag A as something that would be worthy of being dealt with further in another publication.
3. Reviewers don’t always agree and you sometimes have to read between the lines of their comments. You may be presented with one set of comments that says that the paper would be much better if it omitted all reference to X and another that says that the best bit of it was the section about X which needs to be expanded. Since you obviously can’t do both, you need to decide which reviewer to go with, but bear in mind, if you decide to expand the material about X, that you probably haven’t articulated clearly enough how X is relevant to the rest of the paper if the other reviewer thinks it can be cut out completely. See if you can make the links clearer.
4. Remember that while you will probably never know who your reviewers are, they may well make a point of reading the final version of your paper when it is published, or of attending your conference presentation. They have expertise in your field or they would not have been asked to review it in the first place, so keeping them on side if possible is not a bad idea. Try to take as much of their advice into account as you can, or indicate subtly why you haven’t (eg “Some might suggest that A, but in view of X & Y, it seems more likely that B”). In particular, if they suggest that you might find a particular article or author’s work useful, include it in your revised version if at all possible. The published version of the paper is the right place to put your little note about thanking the reviers, if they did indeed make helpful suggestions.
5. Once you have completed your revisions, check the manuscript very carefully – not just for typos and oddities of expression; also check the references very carefully. The editors will pick up your typos, but not incorrect references, and it is possible that in moving text around you have left some or all of the relevant citions in the wrong place, or removed a point without removing the relevant citations. This is particularly likely if you have initially said something like “Many sources demonstrate that A and B are important” and you then change the sentence to say “Many sources demonstrate that A is important”. You need to check that none of the citations are only relevant to B, which you have now removed. If what you have written is of any interest in your field, people will check those references because they want to read more about your subject matter (or because you have cited them and they want to see what you’re saying abou their work) and you will end up looking careless or silly.
6. When you have what you believe to be the final version of the text, remove the bibliographic software codes and make sure that the formatting complies with the style guide. If the conference, journal or organisation provides a template you would ideally have been using it from the outset, because applying template styles to your headings, bullets etc is much faster than manually formatting each of them every time you use them, but it is still not too late to attach it to your text. Be a little wary about conference proceedings templates and style guides, though. If they have been adjusted from some well-recognised format, they may not be free of error because the adjustments may have been done in a hurry by a member of the organising committee whose primary expertise is in another area. I have recently been working on a paper for a conference, the template for which does not apply the level 3 header formatting prescribed in the style guide. The style guide is also fun. It says that references should be formatted to comply to APA 5, which I did. I then read it a bit more carefully and discovered that what they really wanted was APA 5 with modifications to the way electronic articles are cited. I agree that their method is more user-friendly but if they’d said up-front that they wanted a modified form of APA 5, I would have read the formatting examples more carefully the first time round.

What you are aiming to do with all this is to make your paper as easy to publish as possible. If you are not a Big Name in your field, you want to create a good impression with the editor(s) as someone whose work doesn’t take huge amounts of staff time and effort to get into publishable form. Even if you are a Big Name, I would argue that it is a courtesy to the people who are putting the publication together to prepare you paper well, but if you’re an early career researcher (aka beginner) being a pleasure to work with cannot do you any harm at all in the publishing stakes. 🙂 Especially since many of the people involved are doing their editing work on top of their other academic workload as part of their service to the academic community.

 

Preparing material for review and publication

As you may have noticed, I haven’t blogged for a long time. This is because last year I was what a colleague terms ‘underemployed’ – ie the church ran out of money to fund my chaplaincy position and I worked in a range of short term casual research positions whilst looking for something I want to commit to for an extended period. Most of the research I did was related to previous qualifications and I simply didn’t have the mental space to think about the Gospel of Thomas. Three months ago, I started a new chaplaincy position and now am almost at the stage where I can concentrate on something other than learning the lie of the land. Last year, although I made minimal progress on my research, I learned and was reminded about useful things.

I have been editing theses/dissertations for quite a few years, and in the latter part of my undermployment, I was paid to check whether the revised versions of papers submitted as peer reviewed articles for a conference proceedings had satisfactorily addressed the reviewers’ comments and then to edit them for inclusion in a book. This was an eye-opening experience, not the least because by no means all the authors of problematic manuscripts were students!!

It does not matter how brilliant your argument material is, if it is presented with poor formatting, spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax or general written expression, it is less likely to make a favourable impression.  As a result, I offer the following for students who are preparing articles/papers for peer review and theses/dissertations for examination:

1. Even if the style guide being used by the publication is, IYNSHO, an abomination unto the Lord (like APA 5 or 6), you still have to follow it if you want to see your paper in print. If you are submitting for a conference and they are desperate for papers, the organisers/editors might send your paper out for review in the wrong format, but they will not reformat it for you for publication and in particular they will not transform your beloved footnote referencing system into in-text references or vice versa. Or even transform your Harvard references into APA. This is at least partly because your paper in its current format does not contain the information they need to do this quickly and they certainly don’t have the time to go looking for it. I would recommend putting all your references into a good bibliographic software program (eg Endnote or Zotero) because you can change referencing styles quickly, easily and far more accurately than you can manually.
2. Having a PhD, even in Education, does not guarantee that a person has a good grasp of grammar, syntax, punctuation or general good written expression – just that they know a lot about a particular area. It is also not your supervisor’s/advisor’s role to proofread and edit your work, unless his/her name is going on the paper. Even then, s/he may not have good proofreading skills. Thus, the fact that s/he has read it and said it is OK does not mean that it is ready for publication, just that it contains no major errors or idiocies.
3. If you are enrolled in a good educational institution, they will provide guides on spelling, punctuation and common grammatical mistakes. Read them. If anything in them surprises you, check your manuscript to see that what you have written complies with the information in the guide. If you are writing in English, pay particular attention to how you should use (and not use) “however”, “which” and “that”, commas and apostrophes. If you are writing in another language, there will be equivalent common mistakes.
4. Note particularly that usage varies between different English speaking countries. If the publication wants you to use American spelling, it will also want you to comply with American grammatical and syntactical conventions. If you did not grow up in the US, this means that some of the things you were taught at school will be considered wrong.  One of my friends did her PhD in the US and she said that for the first six months, she would submit written work to her advisor who would want her to change the grammar and syntax from what she believed to be correct to incorrect usage. It was only when she got a US style manual to replace her Australian one that she realised that she was being asked to change from correct Australian English to correct US and things settled down. If the publication uses British conventions, you are fairly safe if you grew up in Australia and New Zealand (although there are some differences), but if you grew up with US conventions, you will be asked to do things that you were taught were incorrect.
5. If you grew up in a country that uses English as the lingua franca although it is no-one’s first language, there will be some conventions of usage that are not considered correct in the standard English used by any publications outside your home country, and some vocabulary that has been adopted from the traditional language(s) of your country which will need either to be translated into standard English or explained. This is why Word allows you to select from such a wide variety of versions of English. A proofreader from outside your home country will be able to point these out to you, or you can select the desired version of English from the Word menu, but the latter is not without risks.
6. Be very careful about using a thesaurus to provide variety in your text if you are not writing in a language in which you are very fluent – you may select an option that is wrong in the context in which you are using it even though it is listed as a synonym.
7. If you are writing in a language in which you are not extremely proficient, you should try to find someone who speaks it as their first language to proofread your document. Correction: you should try to find someone who speaks it as their first language and has a good track record of writing academic papers in it. If the student in the next room to yours offers to proofread for you, it would be good to find out, tactfully if possible, whether s/he gets consistently high grades or merely passes. If the latter, then your grasp of the grammatical rules of the language is probably better than hers/his.
8. Remember that the way you speak a particular language or use it to write emails is not necessarily appropriate for publication in an academic forum. Unless you are transcribing the content of an interview, you should avoid colloquialisms and contractions. As one of my early supervisors said, “you can’t use ‘gut feeling’ in an academic paper, even if you have put it in inverted commas”. The academy is currently undergoing a shift in opinion about how appropriate it is to use the first person (ie “I”, “me”, “my”) and active rather than passive voice (“I have shown that” or “the author has shown that” rather than “it has been shown that”). Read material written the last 5 years to get a feel for what is being done in your language and your field. If you are preparing something for a journal, read recent editions of the journal you are targetting. Talk about it with your supervisor/advisor.
9. The previous point reminds me that one of the differences in convention between British-based and US-based punctuation is how you use single and double inverted commas (quotation marks). I have switched between the two so often now that I can no longer remember which belongs where and I always check the style manual for the publication.
10. While it is probably wise to remove the bibliographic software codes from your manuscript before you send it off for review (so that there is no risk of the file throwing a hissy fit on another computer and transforming all your citations into field codes eg #239, rather than the author and publication details) you should only do this as the last step, after making sure that you have saved a copy of the file with the codes still intact.

Because this is now a very long post, I will put the points about dealing with reviewers’ comments in another post.

For the new year …

… I am going to diverge from writing about my research or even theology/biblical studies in general and post something more personal (yes, a few days late for the actual New Year’s Day, I know, but…)

I am currently on long service leave and officially finished as the Uniting Church chaplain to the University of New England on 31 December, although I have been on annual and study leave since mid November. The church’s current game plan is to replace me with two half time “mission workers” – students or otherwise theologically etc untrained people who seem to be going to be expected to work between them the same hours as I did, but for less than half the pay. Assuming, of course, that two suitable people apply.

The university public relations people did a rather nice piece about me which was clearly widely read by the university communty. As a result of this, I have had a fairly constant stream of people coming up to me on campus and in the shopping centre to tell me how sorry they are to see me go and that they think the Uniting Church is very stupid. It doesn’t seem to matter whether they are committed Christians or rampant atheists or somewhere in between. Apparently, the ones who haven’t found me have told the various members of my family, all of whom work or study on campus. It’s comforting to know that I haven’t wasted the last nine years.

At the moment, as I said, I’m on long service leave until towards the end of February.  I’m using the time mainly to work on my PhD, which has suffered significantly over the last twelve months, but I’m also job hunting. The full time study has been great, although somewhat hampered by the fact that I haven’t had internet access on campus for over three weeks. The IT people didn’t test that the existing cabling would be adequate for the new all-singing-all-dancing internet system until after they installed the new hardware. Guess what? It wasn’t and Al the cabler was been too busy to fit recabling our part of the building in before Christmas and the uni has been closed since then.

The job hunting has been less great. By looking at a number of ministry profiles (similar to position descriptions) and talking to various people, I have eliminated a number of things that I don’t want to do, but am yet to find something that I feel I could commit to for the next 5 years. This is the expectation for most ministry placements in my denomination. There are several ministry positions coming up soon, but applications don’t close until the end of February or some time in March. A friend at the uni has offered me some short term research assistant work, but there’s nothing much going in the way of longer term work at the uni. Those in the know suggest that this will probably change when the new Vice Chancellor arrives in February.

So, in the meantime, I am contemplating the mysteries of the Gospel of Thomas and writing chapters of my thesis/dissertation interspersed with writing  job applications. Although in the week between Christmas and New Year, I mainly read novels and had a rest. A Facebook friend whom I’ve never met posted a wish on my wall that the best of 2009 would be the worst of 2010. I hope she’s right!