The PhD process, like any period of research, is a journey towards increasing certainty. At the beginning, most of us have still to formulate a meaningful question. We might place our trust in our supervisor to provide a question that we can work on, but if we are to move beyond a mere technical contribution, we will need to figure out why this question is interesting to others and how we can approach it in order to make a scientific contribution worthy of a doctorate. As we advance our understanding through experimentation and analysis, we may need to re-evaluate our initial assumptions and even shift the focus of our research until eventually we are able to present a coherent body of work that can convince the scientific community that we have generated a significant advance. What we often don’t realise, however, is that the process of doing research and the process of communicating it provide us with a perfect framework to develop our thinking and gain confidence in the contribution we are making. By understanding this relationship, we can progress from research proposal, through progress reports, and finally to the preparation of a thesis in such a way that we do not need to treat each of these as a separate task. By understanding the writing process and developing our thinking around it, we can create a map of our current thinking and update it in the light of new findings, both our own and those of others. Slowly, this intellectual map can evolve quite naturally into a presentation of our work in the form of a final thesis, whilst providing a basis for developing our research and communicating it periodically along the way.

This program takes a practical, hands-on approach to developing our thinking around our PhD and using this clarity to link research communication with experimental strategy. It is suitable for PhD students at any stage of their work—it is never too early, or too late, to start thinking clearly about our research.