Probing normalized institutional discourses about writing: The case of the doctoral thesis
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past decade, much government and institutional interest internationally has focused on the expansion and improvement of doctoral education, with degree completion rates and times topping government and university agendas. Since degree completion is intimately linked to the thesis, doctoral writing has surfaced as a new problem space for institutional attention and intervention. These interventions, as well as the roles assigned to teachers and researchers of writing, language, and academic development, however, depend largely on how institutions conceive of writing, which in turn is shaped by normalized inherited discourses about writing. Drawing on rhetorical theories of discourse and writing, this article examines institutional discourse for how it conceives of the doctoral thesis, how it regulates the writing of the thesis, how it positions the process and product of thesis writing within the knowledge-making activities of the university, and what implications this discourse has for how institutional interventions in support of doctoral writing are conceptualized. Using the example of discourse about doctoral thesis writing offered by graduate schools at research-intensive universities in Canada, the article works from a systemic perspective that invites all those involved in facilitating research education to examine, reflect on, and contemplate institutional discourses about writing as inherited and normalized patterns of social practice. Finally, the article argues that these practices have significant consequences for doctoral scholars, supervisors, and the ability of institutions to develop new visions for curricular innovation in research education.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it