I am going to admit this right here. I did not write a literature review for my dissertation. But having to learn this genre myself made me a better teacher of it. In the English dissertation I wrote at Rutgers, reviewing literature was woven throughout the document rather than being broken out as a separate […]
In the groggy days after a baby arrives, sleep deprived new parents are likely to hear the phrase “sleep begets sleep,” meaning: the more a baby sleeps, the more likely it is to sleep. I was writing my dissertation when my sleep-addled brain contemplated this catch-22. How could I get the baby to sleep more […]
Back in the (probably mythical) day, it was enough just to have an advanced degree. Relatively few people went to graduate school, and those who did were largely destined for the professoriate, the clergy, law, and medicine. In these cases, the relationship between the educational path and the professional path was fairly straightforward. It would […]
Conclusions can be tricky to write for a similar reason that introductions and abstracts can be: because it’s hard to write about our own writing. Metadiscourse, to use a fifty-cent word, requires that we have enough distance to be able to describe and reflect on the work we’ve done. This can be difficult for […]
Interdisciplinary. Intersectionality. Let’s face it: the “inters” are sexy. They hold the promise of new ways of knowing, new ways of conceptualizing, and new ways of doing scholarship. But the reality is that interdisciplinary work often seems like stepchild of the academic world. Traditional academic fields exert a great deal of power simply because they are written […]
One issue that graduate faculty frequently see is a kind of disconnect between the questions students write for their research instruments and the primary research questions themselves. In other words, the questions don’t “get at” the information the student seeks. The result is that the data yielded by the instrument won’t answer the primary question(s). […]
We have all read the thesis or dissertation chapter where there is no frame narrative, no explanatory container. In such cases it can feel like the writer has done a good job of marshaling sources but has not yet figured out how to talk about them. Sometimes it is impossible to discern the author’s stance […]
Your dissertation advisee is sitting in front of you, but for the life of you, you can’t quite remember what her proposed dissertation methods are, though you remember that they seemed problematic. In fact, the details of her project are fuzzy altogether. The last draft of the proposal you saw still needed significant work in […]
“Publish or perish” would seem to be a one-size-fits-all dictum, but it’s not. In fact, what you need from publications may well change over the course of your career. First, it’s important to understand why you need to publish. If you are a graduate student, it may be more important to get a byline in a […]
Anyone who teaches or advises writers has experienced the infuriating déjà vu of reading a student’s paper or dissertation chapter and thinking, “I know I responded to this in the last draft, but here it is again…unchanged.” This moment can generate something I call reader rage (basically road rage on the page). The brain whirrs: […]
Introductions are tricky bastards. In fact, I would place them just behind the literature review in terms of difficulty among thesis or dissertation chapters. What the introduction has going for it that the lit review doesn’t is the home court advantage: you have doubtless read and even written introductions before you sit down to write […]
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