Last July, Inside Higher Ed looked at how long it takes students from different disciplines to get that Ph.D.: after 10 years of grad school fewer than half of humanities students reach their degree. This is partly because of attrition, but there are hundreds of other reasons it might take a decade to finish a dissertation.
I wonder, though: might 10-year dissertations be better than dissertations that take, say, 3 years?
Some novels that take a decade to write are genre-shaping masterworks: Middlesex, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This is not to say that decades of writing guarantee merit—consider Finnegans Wake. What distinguishes the remarkable slow books from the slow books that fail? How can a decade of gestation work to the writer’s advantage?
Jeffrey Eugenides and Junot Díaz didn’t use their decade to master the material—no one finishes a great novel only to exclaim how beautifully it was researched—but to identify a narrative arc and excise anything that didn’t pertain. The longer they wrote, the shorter their books.
Oughtn’t the same apply to scholarship? How often have you read 25-page articles that needed only 15 to make their point? I’m sure that my dissertation could make as strong an argument with a third the verbage, and I’m probably not alone there.
I’m not arguing that we should write less, but that we should delete more, and that our readers should appreciate that we who spend 10 years writing can just as fruitfully spend 3 years deleting.
Hey! Don’t I get Sconnie status too? ;-)