Female Science Professor’s autopsy of grad student failure has been haunting me for a month, but after reading Dr. Crazy’s 12-Step Program for Academic Success yesterday I finally saw just how much more systematically I could have used my post-prelims years.
I have encountered two disconnects between pre-dissertating and post-dissertating grad school, and these are the kind of disconnects that could be bridged by a thirty-minute Powerpoint presentation:
- Three years of graduate instruction taught me to write reasonably competent 20-page papers, but this has no immediate relation to plotting out a dissertation. I should have been paying attention to the shape and style of scholarly books—although only one or two were assigned.
- Many great seminars ended with conference-style 20-minute presentations, or asked for midterm essays written as drafts of conference papers; but with no institutional discussion of the objective and tone of conference work I found it difficult to see a conference paper as different from an ordinary 10-page essay.
I’m catching up slowly, but the process is intimidating and from time to time I daydream about a cozy office job with regular hours and minimal expectation that I will write and publish on my own time.
FSP intimates that there is a circle of hell for grad students who leave without a degree—the torture probably involves reliving the proposal defense; this has kept my daydreams at bay, but sitting in the middle of a messy chapter I find myself at a bit of a loss without structured guidance. I don’t want to be one of those grad students FSP argues “could do well if they tried/worked harder,” but it can be hard to understand how to try/work harder.
This is where I ask for your assistance, dear reader.
Dozens of books purport to explain how to write a dissertation, or, indeed, how to write a book of any shape. Which have worked for you?
(I’ve already requested Ancrene Wiseass’s recent recommendations from the library: The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp.)
The book that got me through was Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day. Honestly, that book helped me with reshaping the diss into my book manuscript as well.
Dr. Crazy,
It’s wonderful to hear from someone who has made it through (and far past) the dissertation that Bolker’s book was useful—it has a small but ambivalent following in my department. Thank you for the advice!
Some of the department ambivalence towards the Bolker book might come from those who actually talk about how to write the diss. I guess what I’m getting at is that the lukewarm comments I’ve heard about it relate to the fact that it conveys “common sense” info. Now, how much that is common sense to those of us currently writing a diss is a different story.
In some ways I think those of us in comp/rhet are lucky in that we are trained to explicitly discuss our writing and writing processes. I’ve always received very useful advice from our professors. Not that this makes it an easy process. It isn’t. But I think it helps. I blogged about my director’s rules for working with her awhile back [http://harmoniasnecklace.blogspot.com/2008/02/i-should-probably-explain.html]. It has been very useful (the rules, not blogging about the rules).
I just picked up a copy of Publishing In Rhetoric and Composition edited by Gary Olson and Todd Taylor. It was recommended on a listserv I’m on, so I’m hoping it’s useful. Time will tell.
Katy, Your director’s dissertation club sounds like it provides thoughtful structure to help transition from the seminars-twice-a-week model of graduate work to the all-alone-in-the-universe model of dissertating.
Something that has never been clear to me is whether our directors are paid for this sort of work. If your director is making time in her schedule to meet with all her advisees for an hour every two or three weeks, plus the time she meets with you individually, and the time it takes to read your drafts, is she functionally teaching another course? Or two?
Technically, directing dissertations and advising grad students is part of their job, but I’m not sure how it all breaks down in terms of contracts and work-load. And we meet for 2 hours for dissertation club. ;-)
Actually, starting this year, my director has dissertation club set up as class for which she receives course release. And we meet for 2 hours. ;-) However, in the past this hasn’t been the case. Part of the reason she set up dissertation club is because she has so many dissertators. And, with our faculty losses during the past few years, she has even more. Right now she has nine dissertators and she is gaining two more this spring. That doesn’t include all of the dissertation committees she is on in our department and C & I. That’s a whole lot of work! I’m not entirely sure how she does it all and still manages to be a superstar in our field, but she does and she is.
Oops, I just saw a typo/goof in my comment. Blame my late-night internet usage.
I don’t know how useful advice from the science side is for humanities grad school info, esp. when it comes to writing, so I don’t know if Female Science Professor’s advice/complaints is going to apply to you. That said, I loved _Getting What you Came For_, although more for the acknowledgment that departments are political and dangerous than for style-level advice. (Though he does have good points about writing every day and treating writing like slapping together clay rather than cutting diamonds … that was helpful.)
I _hated_ Diss in 15 Minutes A Day, but later realized I could quote/use large chunks of the advice back at people (I borrowed it from a friend). You could say I had a reaction-formation —- appropriately enough; a lot of the language is really Freudian or not even Freudian but crappy pop-psychobabble, but I found I do use the advice to “mourn” stuff when cutting by opening up another file and just leaving the trimmed material there. So check it out and keep reading it even if you find yourself resistant to it.
I had a couple posts back in … fall? … if you want more pointless advice (and I get to cite myself, heh!). Point number one: subheads! They are wonderful! You can splice together three or so of those conference length papers and won’t even need transitions! And you have a draft! Yay!
I also had a post where I talked about looking at the scholarly books you read/work with to model yourself as a scholar. Literally —- looking at the publishers and back blurbs and where it gets shelved and everything. But now, thinking about it I would add point number three: go compare someone’s diss you know (your advisor’s?) to his/her book. Seriously, it helps. Even great books were once shitty dissertations. It’s really useful to discover the limitations and rough spots and smaller scope and lumpier introduction to a dissertation and it helps you see what happens across the revision into a book. We had someone (long before I got here) get an ivy job and I pored over her book and diss page by page. The diss? It’s good, it’s fine, but it still looks like a dissertation, complete with rough edges and a shitload of footnotes to prove she’s a grounded scholar. All the “sizzle” and that voice of confidence came in the later revision.
And, yeah, Dr. Crazy had a very lucky time with the mentoring and work building upon itself — I didn’t get any “introducings” from my advisor and still have a very fuzzy idea of how all this “carving out a research trajectory for oneself” works. And at least in my dept this is the norm.
Ooh, and doesn’t your SMAX have a book award? Like a “best contribution to the field” award for the best book? There you go! Go read some of them and you will have models that someone else thinks are good! (Just don’t let their goodness paralyze you — that’s why I suggest reading some shitty dissertations, to make you feel you can do this too.)
Finally, when in doubt, eat chocolate. Or even when you’re not in doubt.
Damn do I go on! Heh.
Katy, I think I have about twenty different responses to that news. Many of them involve awe, but it also seems that the professors who attract so much attention from grad students should be given lighter teaching loads and more money for the work they do, both to reward that work and to invite directors to follow their students’ work in a structured way.
Sisyphus: In the Writing Center one of my absolute favorite tricks is subheads. Students’ eyes light up when they realize they can skim past messy transitions just by giving a 3-page chunk an à propos title.
(And then they ask “Is that allowed?” It’s both cute and a reminder that many students see academic writing as a dangerous and jealously-guarded space.)
Although I also encourage writers I see in the Writing Center to flip through an interesting dissertation to get a sense of the structure and tone of the thing, I have been hesitant to do so myself. Partly this is because I get hung up about style, and partly this is because I am hesitant to see where I fit in the larger landscape of graduate writing.
For those of you following along at home, here are links to the Sisyphus posts in question:
* Regarding subheads
* Regarding book covers
I love using headers! I sometimes forget that those trained in writing humanities papers might not be as likely to use them. Some areas of comp/rhet use APA style and Library and Info science uses it frequently, as well. As an undergrad, I started out in international studies, so I read a lot of social science writing. I always use headers to organize myself.
One thing that my wonderful diss director said that has been very useful is that it is okay to think of the dissertation as a series of shorter essays. Transitions, chapter intros, etc. can be added later to make it all coalesce. This really helps me because I was having trouble conceptualizing the dissertation chapter as a genre.
The book-dissertation distinction seems to me a tricky one when it comes to finding models for one’s own dissertation. Like Sisyphus says, the transition from dissertation to book is often a dramatic one, since you’re expected to have the Scholarly Apparatus of the dissertation well-established before then removing it for the book, like necessary but disposable scaffolding. So modeling dissertation chapters on book chapters only gets you so far, it seems to me. But I’d be interested in hearing other perspectives on this.
And I totally agree with the sub-heading deal. That worked magic on my drafting process for the chapter I’ve submitted.
Ooh, are you the one who’s been telling my students it’s ok to have three subheads in a four-page paper? Or that subheads mean you don’t have to have an argument stretching across the whole thing?
I warn you, I’m coming after you…
Not I! I do have them use headers if it helps them draft the paper. Sometimes students (and your’s truly) get caught up in things like transitions when they really need to develop other areas of a paper first. Transitions can always be written in later (but they should be there).
So here’s a question I have, Katy & Sisyphus: why must transitions be there?
Or maybe the best way to put this question is this: is there such a thing as a transition which is sufficiently easy for the reader to understand that it can be implied rather than spelled out?
A well-loved but slightly infamous English professor at Grinnell, I am told, would ask her intro to lit students to write essays in which every single sentence began with “therefore,” “however,” or a similar connective word or phrase.
Having taught intro lit courses a few times I understand the value of such an assignment—though I think that reading two dozen essays like that would drive me a little batty—but I would hope that writers at our level would not make such regular argumentative leaps that our readers wouldn’t be able to follow us.
Do professional writers really use transitions? If we grab any random New Yorker article will we see linking sentences at the end of each paragraph?
Well, I’d argue that there is a difference between between creating overall thematic cohesion and using transition words/phrases like “however” or “therefore.” I think a really good discussion of this takes place in the recently departed Joseph William’s book Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Chapter 5 – Cohesion and Coherence. I love using this chapter with my students because they see ways to create those connections without overusing transition words/phrases. It’s a difficult text for undergrads – it can be difficult for grad students – but I think it can be used very effectively.
I think that when we make those argumentative leaps, it is because we are so immersed in our topic that the leap makes sense to us – we don’t realize what might be missing. I don’t think this is uncommon – I saw it in the writing center all of the time with both grad and undergrad students.