Author: cathfletcher

Planning a research trip

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I’m just into Week 6 of an eight-week research trip to Italy, funded by the great folks at the Arms and Armour Heritage Trust. I’ve been gathering lots of material to explore the history of the handgun in sixteenth-century Italy (when it was a new technology). This has been my first long archive trip in some time, so I thought it might be useful to share some tips for those of you new to the business. They’re somewhat biased towards how things work in Italy (where the state archives were, charmingly, never centralised after unification which has the unfortunate effect of making it look like I’m on some sort of modern Grand Tour. Oh well). But I hope there’s something in here for everyone.

  1. Do your preparation. This might seem obvious, but there’s limited point in turning up to an archive to gather loads of material only to discover much of it was published in an obscure nineteenth-century tome (though everyone has done this once, so don’t be despondent if it happens!) It’s also unhelpful to turn up and find that the stuff you want was burnt in a fire (Venice) or bombed by the Allies (Naples). For Italy, the Guida Generale is your bible and many of the state archives are putting more detailed inventories online. But the state archives are only part of the story: there are many other private and local archives that may turn out to be useful. Ask colleagues for advice; ask the archivists for advice when you get there (or email queries in advance); see if there’s someone at the local university who might help.
  2. Decide how you’re going to approach your research. Does it make more sense to go to just one archive and mine it thoroughly? Or skip round several? Different research questions will need different strategies but it does take time to get to know the structure of any given archive, so a multiple-archive project will need extra preparation.
  3. Assuming you’re picking one or two main archives to work with, then (time allowing) it’s still worth taking the opportunity to visit other archives within commuting distance and scope out what they’ve got. From Bologna I’ve done day trips to Modena and Parma to look for a couple of specific types of source, which means I now have material for comparison across four different states rather than just two.
  4. Make your choices about timing. There are definite economies of scale on longer research trips. Apartment rental prices drop significantly once you hit a full month, and if you find something interesting but unexpected you can take the time to hit the library for background information and/or call up contextual material. Plus you can do the side trips in point 3. But for multiple reasons long trips aren’t feasible for everyone/all the time and you may have to do a ‘smash and grab’: turn up and photograph as much as you can in a short space of time.
  5. If you are doing a quick trip, planning is doubly important. For example, the Florence state archive restricts users to three items a day: Bologna allows eight. The latter is, therefore, a much brighter prospect for research methodologies that need large samples. If you do have to work with tight limits, think carefully about what to call each day and in what order so as to best fill your time. Two solid prospects and one more speculative request, for example. Or get it wrong and be forced to take the afternoon off to eat ice-cream and see art. What the hell: you’re in Florence and you only live once.
  6. At the risk of sounding obvious again, back up your work/photos as you go, and make sure your notes are sufficiently detailed/ordered to know which photos are of which documents. Photographing the archive label first, before you photograph anything in the file, helps a lot. I file my images into Google Photos albums every night or two.
  7. Even on a short trip, try and factor in some thinking time midway about what you’ve got so far and whether you might need to rework your plans to make sense of it. For example, if you were planning on a large sample of material from multiple decades but you turn up something with fabulous microhistory potential in 1577 then you need to make a call about whether to continue as planned (and leave 1577 for the future) or whether to gather a load of different contextual sources from 1577 to give yourself the basis for a chapter/article on that. (If you’re a PhD student and find yourself in this scenario I suggest you email your supervisor!)
  8. There’s nothing wrong with changing your strategy in light of what you find. I’ve ended up using military sources a lot more than I’d planned, and that’s been very fruitful. I also had to ditch a vague hope of doing quantitative research when I saw that there was no way to get a usable sample of the relevant sources in the time available. You can never finish everything on an archive trip, but it’s always nice to come back with some things you didn’t predict.
  9. Finally, as we’re here on the internet, social media. Should you tweet/blog/otherwise share your findings? I’ve made some good academic contacts on social media, so it’s worth doing. On this trip alone two different colleagues have asked for more information about stories I tweeted, and I’ve been able to take photos and share them. My general rule is that I tweet quirky fun stuff that I happen across, but I don’t tweet the main arguments of my research (I save those for conference papers and then articles). Nor do I tweet really outstanding individual findings, whether central or not, that might make the press/radio/TV (I save those to press release properly). In fact, the tweets that have got the most attention on this trip have been the ones from my museum visits, not the research, so there you go. Turns out that what Academic Twitter likes best is tweets about itself.

 

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Getting started on a non-fiction book

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So, you’ve decided to write a non-fiction book and you have a topic in mind. An important question to ask is: where am I starting from? You’re almost certainly not starting from nowhere. You know enough to think that the topic’s of interest: you may well have already done some work, perhaps quite a lot of work, on the project. Having a clear idea of where you are now in relation to the end point (finished book) helps identify where you need to go next.

The most common type of first academic book (in the UK at least) is the ‘book of the PhD thesis’. Here you’re likely to be starting with a lot of the research already done, and an idea of what you want to argue, so the key thing is to think through what needs to change for the book, and to understand why those things need to change. Your examiners are a valuable resource here: ask them what they’d want to see more (or less) of in a book on the same topic.

Some books draw on academic research but take it in quite a different direction. My first book, Our Man in Rome/The Divorce of Henry VIII, was one of these. I had nearly all the information I needed before I started on the project – I’d written a related PhD thesis – but I had to change the writing style dramatically to make the book accessible to general readers. That meant thinking more about narrative arc and going back to all the fun human interest details that had taken a back seat in the academic work but now came in handy to engage readers with the people featured in the book.

If you’re starting research with a wider readership in mind then you can make a point of looking for these details from the start. I looked at the Medici wardrobe accounts very early on when I was researching The Black Prince of Florence and they became a central source for the book. Details of dress and furnishings can do a lot to help establish character and to create an image of place and period in a reader’s mind. Not to mention that clothes carry a great deal of social and political significance.

I should add a caveat about how you use those details in non-fiction writing. There’s nothing worse than getting into the spectacular arrival of, say, Charles V at Aachen, only for the writer to stop and give you the entire history of Aachen from the year dot. Detail should help you make a narrative point. It may be that an incident from twelfth-century Aachen handily foreshadows something that’s about to happen, in which case go for it. But if it doesn’t, think carefully about how much of the background your reader needs to know.

Finally, knowing when to stop researching is an important skill if you’re ever going to finish a book. My current project is a book for a general readership on sixteenth-century Italy, a place and period that I’ve taught at university level. So I’ve already read a fair amount of material on the subject; I have an idea of what people find fascinating and which bits are hard work. I began this project with a rough idea of what I wanted to say, which has been refined as I’ve done more reading in the areas that are newer to me. But the biggest challenge has been deciding what to leave out as much as what to leave in, and acknowledging that I need to prioritise.

So, some questions to ask as you start a non-fiction project:

  • Who’s this book for, and how does that affect the style and content?
  • What do I already know, and what extra research do I need to do?
  • What’s the priority for that extra research? Getting a larger range of data to support an argument? Finding some local colour against which the protagonists’ lives will play out?
  • What am I going to have to leave out? Can I decide that now and avoid doing a load of work that will later get cut?

Writing, word counts and targets

~ cathfletcher ~ 1 Comment

One of the trickiest things about managing a writing project is keeping on track to meet deadlines. #NaNoWriMo and to some extent its academic equivalent #AcWriMo are about setting writing targets for the month of November in an effort to make a chunk of progress on a piece of work.

This year, they’ve come at entirely the wrong time for me, because I’m at the point with my next non-fiction book* where I need to start redrafting sections I’ve already written and working up notes into continuous prose rather than writing more. That’s my priority so although I have a fiction project on the side I’m not going to do #NaNoWriMo. I do, however, recommend it for kickstarting a project: I did it without really planning to in 2016 (I was trying to avoid the real world) and got a draft of a novel up from 15k to 31k words.

The big push tactic worked for me that November because I was writing something set in a place and time I knew very well and I didn’t need to do much research. I could just sit down, imagine and turn out 500+ words a day, even alongside a busy teaching schedule. If you’re not at that point, you might need to set a different sort of target. This is not a one-size-fits-all business.

Personal circumstances also affect target-setting and writing practice. I like writing first thing, but if you have to get children to school or be on a commuter train at 6am then that may not suit you. Targets have to work for you as well as your book.

With that said, some examples of targets I’ve set for myself in the past include:

  • Writing 2,000 words a week. Weekly targets didn’t work very well for me. I tended to leave all the writing to one day, which meant that if I missed a week because I wasn’t feeling well, or because something urgent came up at work, then I had a lot of catching-up to do.
  • Writing 1000 words of notes/super-rough draft a day. I’ve had this target for my new non-fiction book to keep the research on track and was consistently beating it (though not in teaching term).
  • Writing 200 words a day. I have this mini-target at the moment for the side fiction project and again am ahead. That either means I’ll finish a draft ahead of schedule or (more likely) I’ll buy myself space for when I need to stop and work exclusively on finishing the main project.
  • Editing 20 pages of fairly polished draft a day (okay when I didn’t have much else on: a stretch alongside teaching).
  • Editing 3500 words of notes/super-rough draft a day (this is new: we’ll see how it goes).

I’ve found three big advantages of writing daily to modest targets. First, they keep the work fresh in my mind, which means I’m not constantly coming back to it after a break thinking ‘oh dear, now where have I got up to?’ Second, setting targets that I can often beat helps me feel like I’m ahead of the game (a good feeling) and means I have slippage time factored in if things go wrong. Third, reasonable targets help stop writing from sprawling into what should be time off. I find it much easier to stop and do something different if I can tick off my target for the day, which is in turn good for my work/life balance.

* My next non-fiction book, provisionally titled The Crucible of Europe, is about various people and things you have heard of from sixteenth-century Italy (and some you probably haven’t) and how they are connected. All being well, it will be out in Spring 2020.

“Dethroning historical reputations”: some questions

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Last Thursday I read that the Institute for Historical Research was to publish a collection reflecting on the recent controversies over the commemoration of Cecil Rhodes and Edward Colston. I discuss these debates with my second-year students in an introductory module on heritage. Because they are relatively recent there is a lack of fully-cited and/or peer-reviewed work on which students can draw if they choose to write assignments on this topic. I was pleased to see that the IHR (publishing via the in-house School of Advanced Studies imprint, SAS Publications) had decided to address this gap.

I flicked through the table of contents. The editors had evidently decided to reach out beyond academia for contributions, and included ‘fundraisers, a sociologist and a museum director’ to (I quote the blurb here) ‘examine these current issues from different perspectives’.

I think it is commendable to include different perspectives on a topic such as this. So does the IHR. In its own diversity statement, it notes

Part of the focus of the IHR is enabling the exchange of ideas: we believe that the more voices that are represented, the richer this exchange will be.

It was therefore disappointing to note that despite this effort to include ‘different perspectives’ all the volume’s contributors were, as far as I could tell, white. (This was based on publicly-available images; if anyone has better information I am happy to correct.) I therefore asked a question:

Black students in both Cape Town and Oxford played central roles in the campaigns around the Rhodes statues: given that the volume claimed to be exploring ‘different perspectives’ it seemed very odd that it had not included theirs.

The IHR responded the following day with this statement:

This does not answer the question of whether it occurred to anybody that the absence of any non-white contributors might be a problem. Moreover:

I’m glad the IHR is welcoming further proposals but that in itself does not address the structural issues here. These are well-illustrated by the fact that the proceedings of this IHR conference have been produced as a book, but the ‘What’s Happening in Black British History?’ conference series (supported by sister SAS member the Institute for Commonwealth Studies), which has an excellent record of involving Black historians, is now seeking papers for its ninth event without a published proceedings of any of the eight previous meetings in sight.

As Patrick Vernon has pointed out, the large majority of Black historians in the UK work outside universities. As a consequence, they are excluded from the salaried research time that enables some people within the academic system to publish widely. A serious initiative to diversify historical scholarship might, as a first step, work out a way to compensate contributors for their time. The IHR, which already gives publication grants, is in a good place to take a lead on that. I hope the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity and Equality working group will look further at these issues.

As the recent CLPE report on ethnic diversity in children’s books noted, 32% of pupils of compulsory school age in England were of minority ethnic origins on 2017. Even the most hardened free marketeer of the university sector might note that those are our potential future students. If they think their voices are not of interest to historians, why on earth would they come and study with us?

Photo: A statue of Cecil Rhodes is removed from the University of Cape Town, 9 April 2015. Credit: Tony Carr under a CC BY-NC 2.0 licence.

Does TV history have ‘news values’?

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There was a long Twitter discussion the other day on the incessant demand for novelty in TV history. This tweet rather sums it up:

It struck me that this isn’t so dissimilar from some things you find in TV news. And ‘news values’ have been a subject of scholarly inquiry going back to a 1965 study by Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge which I remember reading as an undergrad.

This work and the subsequent debate is synthesised in plenty of textbooks (Brighton & Foy’s News Values, from which I paraphrase some of the below, is a decent starting point). Galtung and Ruge focused on newspapers. Their work predates rolling TV news and the internet, but nonetheless the idea that there are ‘news values’ remains compelling.

G&R came up with ten key values: relevance, timeliness, simplification (i.e., can it be described in straightforward terms), predictability (could it have been foreseen), unexpectedness, continuity (i.e., it continues an existing story), composition (works for the particular outlet), elite people (celebs), elite nations, negativity (bad news is good news). Later studies (focused on TV) noted the importance of pictures to that medium.

The list has been much debated, but I don’t think it’s hard to see how one might use it as a starting point to explore a set of ‘TV history values’ (or indeed a wider set of popular history values). There is certainly an elite of historical personalities whose lives are disproportionately covered, likewise nations. The ‘composition’ value works too: programmes need to fit the outlet’s style. Timeliness produces the demand for novelty: this is all-new research that we need to cover now!

Photo by David at Flickr.

 

Autumn news

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I realised it was a while since I’d posted an update here. This is a busy teaching term for me, but I have several events coming up, including a couple of talks in London, which are listed on my Events page.

I’m particularly looking forward to the first rehearsed reading of a new play on which I’ve been historical advisor. Shakespeare and his Black Mates, by Lynda Burrell and Fran Hajat, is at Nottingham Playhouse on Thursday 2 November, and it’d be great to see people there.

In academic life, I’ve been writing for and co-editing a volume on Queenship and Counsel in Early Modern Europe, which is close to completion and I hope will be out in 2018. That (I think) will be the last of my publications relating to the history of diplomacy, and I’ll be turning my attention to sixteenth-century guns for a while (as a research topic, that is).

Alongside all that, I’m writing a new non-fiction book for Bodley Head with the working title The Crucible of Europe. This will be my take on the period of the Italian Wars, 1494-1559. There are lots of famous names from these years (Christopher Columbus, Lucrezia Borgia, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, Isabella d’Este, Michelangelo Buonarroti…). This is a book about the world in which they lived, and also–importantly–about lots of other people who you probably haven’t heard of but are just as intriguing. Publication is some way off, though: it’s a big project!

And… some of you will know that I’ve been writing a novel. I hope to have more news of what’s happening with that in the New Year.

Now to survive Intro Week and evade the pernicious Freshers’ Flu.

Out of the comfort zone

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TV and radio history presenters often find themselves discussing subjects quite some distance from their specialist research. This can be contentious in the academic sphere, where colleagues often ask why a specialist hasn’t been commissioned, and it’s something I’ve been reflecting on as I approach the second anniversary of becoming a BBC New Generation Thinker. Very often, I’m finding that broadcasting has closer links to teaching than to research, despite the fact that the NGT scheme highlights the link with the latter.

Wonderful though your work may be, the fact is that a focused piece of academic research probably won’t make for more than a couple of radio or TV programmes. My most recent book, for example, was the basis for a Radio 3 Essay, an appearance on Radio 4’s Start the Week and a short BBC Arts film. I’ve drawn on sections of the research in other places too, but there’s only so far one project will take you.

However, I do enjoy broadcasting and, as you can see from my media page, since those early pieces I’ve broadcast on a much wider range of topics. I’ve reviewed art exhibitions – one directly connected to my research on early modern Italy, one not. I’ve done one radio Essay drawing on material from a new research project, and one about my family history. The latter isn’t in my research area, but it does connect to a topic – the representation of imperial history – that I teach on a second year heritage module. And my criterion for what I’m happy to do tends now to be: “does this connect to my teaching?” rather than “does this relate to my research?”

A step beyond again is presenting. This month I’m presenting two programmes for Radio 3: a Sunday Feature and an edition of Free Thinking, which we’re recording at the Hay Festival. The Sunday Feature is part of Radio 3’s Monteverdi 450 season and focuses on the women who worked with the composer. We’re in early seventeenth-century Italy, which is within my teaching interests, but dealing extensively with music, which isn’t really. However, in this format my job is to use my knowledge of the period to pose thoughtful questions to the experts, rather than to be the expert myself.

Free Thinking – a discussion on women’s voices in the classical world – is even further away from my research interests. I guess the academic parallel there is being chair of a round table at a departmental seminar, where my job is to make sure the guests have an interesting conversation that the audience can follow. (As a side note, I’m also learning a lot by reading books that in a more conventional academic world wouldn’t be a priority.)

When I started out doing media work as an academic, I tended to think of it in relation to research impact and the demands of the REF. The more I do, the more I think that’s a very narrow way of looking at it. Perhaps we should focus instead on the long-term benefits to research from thinking about topics outside one’s discipline, and the synergies with teaching besides.

 

2017: New Year, new projects

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2017 will feature some family history

Happy New Year! (You can insert the obligatory “wasn’t 2016 awful” line here.) I’m now a year and four months into working at Swansea University and have some big new projects for the coming year. (And, below, a few thoughts on managing workload and the REF.)

More Radio 3 Essays: In January you’ll be able to hear some very early findings from my new research project on the history of handguns as part of a Radio 3 Essay series on gun culture. And in March there’s a very new historical departure for me: I’ll be at the Free Thinking Festival in Gateshead with an Essay about my grandparents, who were missionaries in Dhaka and Kolkata from the 1940s to the 60s. This is some way out of my historical comfort zone, but I have done a fair bit of teaching on public perceptions of Britain’s imperial past. A few years into lecturing I’m finding new topics emerging from the teaching side of the job.

New research: There will be more research on that handguns project, which focuses on Italy c. 1500-1550, with a first paper at the Renaissance Society of America conference this spring. And some (more) grant applications in the hope of getting funding for the archive research I really need to do to get this up and running in a bigger way. Fingers crossed. I also have a couple of outstanding articles/chapters from previous projects to write up.

Fiction: For a while now I’ve been playing at writing a novel that’s a spin-off from The Black Prince of Florence. I’m going to finish it in 2017. I have no idea whether it’ll be publishable quality but the process is raising some interesting methodological issues for me about writing history so at the very least I’m hoping for a theory article.

Non-fiction: Yes. I hope to have news about a new non-fiction book project soon… and various other things that are at different stages of development… stay tuned…

Lectures: Besides those for my students, I have public lectures coming up at the British School at Rome (January), in Swansea (March) and in Leeds (September). I list these on my Talks & Events page, so keep an eye out there for details.

Is this an unfeasible workload? I agree it’s an ambitious one. But I’m not planning to finish all the big projects in 2017. And in the past few years I’ve got a lot better at breaking down larger writing tasks into tiny pieces. If I write 200 words a day every day for a year, for example (the equivalent of ten or eleven tweets a day), that’s a full draft (73,000 words) of an academic monograph. And with a 200-word daily target on a project it’s also possible to get ahead of the game by writing more some days, which is psychologically a lot more comforting than setting higher targets and then stressing about getting behind.

Academics reading this post may be wondering about how this pattern of work connects to the demands of the REF. One of the consequences of the huge uncertainty about the rules at the moment (to port or not to port, how many outputs per person, will impact be less linked to outputs, etc.) is that it’s basically impossible to plan. So I decided to stop worrying and work on things that interest me, which is probably, to be honest, the best route to turning out good publications.

 

Money-saving tips for academics

~ cathfletcher ~ 4 Comments

pound-414418_1280I was about to post my annual reminder of the deadline for claiming the money you’re owed for your journal articles, when Twitter sprung to life with complaints about the exorbitant cost of attending academic conferences, and the expectation that we should cover all or part of our own expenses when we do.

There are major structural issues here – partly (I suspect) fuelled by an assumption based on STEM practice that grant funding covers conference attendance, partly by an understandable desire to focus limited research funds on seedcorn and scoping work in the hope that will generate financial returns. (This ignores the fact that conferences are often the most convenient place to meet international collaborators, but there you go.)

As far as I’m concerned, Universities shouldn’t expect staff to attend conferences (and certainly shouldn’t make that part of probation/promotion criteria) without covering the full cost. However, until we get a change in the system, here are some ways I’ve managed to subsidise expenses or otherwise save/make money in academia. (I’m based in the UK – if you know equivalents for other countries, please post in the comments.)

  1. Back to that deadline I mentioned at the start of the article. The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society collects money on behalf of authors that universities (and other institutions) pay for the right to photocopy or digitise your work. You need to register your publications with them by 30 November to get the money you’re entitled to. This can be several hundred pounds so it’s well worth doing and doesn’t cost anything upfront. Basically it’s free money.
  2. Reclaim your tax on work-related expenses. If you have to spend your own money to do your job then this is tax-deductible and you are entitled to 20% of it back if you’re a basic rate tax-payer or 40% if you pay the higher rate. A percentage of UCU subscriptions is deductible, for example, as are subscriptions to learned societies, some travel expenses and so forth. HMRC issues guidance on how this works. Do not over-egg it with the tax claims, or you risk getting in trouble with the tax office (I’m aware of a case where this happened). Reclaiming tax is for things you need to pay for to do your present job, not for your personal desire to jet out to that Hawaii conference or own all the lovely first editions of the books you teach. More seriously, the rules mean that career development you pay for yourself is not usually tax-deductible.
  3. If you’re travelling internationally for a conference, talk to your International Office. Universities do lots of international business that you might be able to help with while you’re there in return for some cash from a different budget heading. You could speak at a school overseas that’s been targeted for international recruitment, visit a university that’s a focus for building research collaborations, or do a regular due diligence visit to an overseas partner for a student exchange programme.
  4. Collect your frequent flyer miles on trips you do get paid for, and use them to subsidise the ones you don’t.
  5. Academic publishers generally offer an author discount to anyone who’s written for them. This applies for authors of chapters within books as well as whole books. If you don’t have an author discount with that publisher, ask a colleague who does.
  6. Reviewing books pre-publication brings you cash or more books. Post-publication it gets you a copy of the book (usually, though certain publishers are trying to replace this with an e-book only…) Very useful if you were going to read the book anyway, perhaps not the best use of time if it’s only tangentially relevant.
  7. External examining (which is paid separately to a main academic contract) is typically done by relatively senior academics, but there are other ‘externalling’ opportunities too. For example, I’ve been an academic reviewer for the Open University’s Centre for Inclusion and Collaborative Partnerships, which validates degree programmes at institutions without independent degree-awarding powers. Again, there’s a time/money trade-off, but being asked is a marker of esteem, and it also gives you useful insight into how other institutions work.
  8. Finally, if you’re asked to give talks to external organisations, or write for non-academic publications, ask if there’s a fee. They might say no, and then you have to make a call about whether to do it without. I take the view that I should do some public engagement within my salaried role, so a few expenses-only gigs are fine. But not too many.

Other suggestions? Post them in the comments!

P. S. If you get paid for talks, external examining and so forth, and this is not taxed at source by the organisation paying you then you should declare it to HMRC.

Disclaimer: I’m not a tax professional. If you have questions on the tax side that aren’t answered on the HMRC website, call HMRC (be prepared for a call-centre queue) or speak to an accredited tax adviser.

Speak your essay feedback: voice recording on Turnitin

~ cathfletcher ~ 1 Comment

The other day on Twitter I got into a discussion about dealing with large quantities of marking. Are there any ways of making it easier?

About this time last year, I started using the voice recording feature on Turnitin. I had moved from a university where marking with pencil on paper (plus a paragraph of typewritten feedback) was the standard way of doing things, to one that was all-electronic, which would inevitably add to an already heavy proportion of time at the computer screen.

So, recording rather than typing essay feedback was initially, for me, a way of reducing the risk of RSI (which I had a long time ago and believe me was unpleasant). But having tried it for a while, I think it helps me give feedback in an informal, accessible style, and initial student response has been positive. I’m hoping to get some proper survey evidence this year of what my students make of it, and how they use it, and I hope others who use the function can feed into this too.

How does it work? Very simply, Turnitin gives you the option of recording up to three minutes of feedback, perhaps 300-400 words, so more than you can easily write. I usually record as much as I can, write a few bullet points summarising it, and add inline comments (those little bubbles that Turnitin does) on specific points in the text. So there’s a mix of written and oral feedback.

You only get one take, which can be frustrating. I hand-write a short list of key points I want to make, then record as I look at specific parts of the essay. Typical feedback might go something like this. ‘Hello. I thought this essay started really nicely. If we look at page one, in your opening paragraph, you’ve got a good sentence setting out what you’re going to argue…’ Then I’d continue a bit on that section, giving some tips for improvement. Then I’d move on to discuss two or three further sections, before wrapping up with a summary of key things to work on for next time.

When I’m recording, I try to imagine that I’m sitting in my office with the student and a copy of the essay, going through what’s gone well and what hasn’t. It’s possible to convey a lot through tone of voice: you can be very pleased with one bit of the essay and rather disappointed about another. You do need to be cautious about this, though. If you’re exhausted or in a foul mood about something else, listen back carefully to make sure you’re not inadvertently conveying that to the student.

Recording feedback won’t be for everyone, and the lack of a pause button is less than ideal. But if you could do with reducing your typing load, it might be a good place to start.