Writing a dissertation: the basics

Writing a dissertation: the basics | joeac's blog

Before I wrote my Masters' dissertation, I hadn't done a major writing project before. I wished I had someone to give me some advice on how to do it. Not how to make it *good*, I mean dumb practical nuts and bolts. This is what I wished I had been told.

Finding a question

Before you start, you're going to need a good question. There is no step-by-step process for this, only an end goal. You need a question, and the question needs to meet the following criteria:

You can probably add more criteria for your particular situation, but that roughly covers the basics.

You might have started your Masters/PhD/book project with a suitable question in mind: if so, great!

If not, all I can suggest is to follow your nose. Find subjects that interest you, and go to the library and read up on them. Finding an idea is a bit of a magical process, I'm afraid -- there just is no procedure.

If, like me, you're writing a student research project in a university, you'll probably have some compulsory formal process for testing whether your question is suitable. If not, engineer one. Get someone enthusiastic and informed to test you.

Your project timetable

Once you've got a good question nailed down, you're going to want a plan of action. If I were doing a Masters-dissertation-sized project again, I'd plan to do it in six phases:

I'll get on to what I mean by a 'scaffolding draft' and a 'final draft' in a bit.

Bear in mind this was for a Masters dissertation. For a bigger project, I've no idea if this six-phase project plan would work in practice.

Also, obviously, this project plan doesn't have space for primary research: archival work, ethnographic work, etc. Again, if this is your project, I can't help you with that.

Planning

The planning phase should take a week, no more.

Draft your argument. You'll change it big time later on, so don't make it too detailed. The first paragraph of each chapter is about right. Once you've written it down, put it out of sight and ad-lib it to a friend. If you can't remember your argument without notes, it probably doesn't make sense or is too complicated.

Gather your materials. Get a daily log and a scrapbook. You'll probably want scrap paper and pens, and depending on your style, you might want sticky tags for marking pages.

I'd suggest using a digital log, so you can search it easily, but you could do it in a jotter if you prefer.

You might want a scrapbook as well as a log. The advantage of a scrapbook is you can keep lists of things and keep them up to date. For example, I found it handy to have a list of all the environmentalist books I'd read. I also kept some todo lists at various stages in the project. The disadvantage is that keeping lists up to date is hard, so you won't want to keep many lists active. The advantage of a log is, once you've made your entry for the day, it's done forever.

Decide how you're going to write your dissertation, and prepare any technology you'll need.

In my case, I wrote my chapters in Markdown and stored references in a BibTeX file, and compiled it into the final PDF using Pandoc and some Make scripts. I needed to create an upstream Git repository somewhere safe, clone it to my computer, create the Markdown and BibTeX files, write the scripts, and run the scripts to check they work.

If you'd rather use a word processor, create the file, make sure it's getting backed up regularly, and test your workflow for adding a citation. Forget Microsoft, use OpenOffice or LibreOffice, obviously.

Consider how and where you're going to work. Will you work from home, or in the library? (Tip: you'll need to read lots of books in the reading phase.) Will you use a laptop? Can you work ergonomically, and if not, could you improve the situation with a bookstand, laptop stand, wireless keyboard, wireless mouse? How will you access books, e-books, journals, or any other research resources you need? Will you need to print things -- if so, where's your printer? How will you fit your work in with the other things you need in order to stay alive and healthy -- eating regular meals, sleeping, praying, social life, time off, paying rent, physical exercise, any caring or volunteering commitments you have?

Create your project timetable. Assign this six-phase plan to specific dates. Write it down somewhere convenient: I wrote it down in the Project page at the front of my diary. Create deadlines. Fix dates to meet your supervisor. Leave plenty of extra time throughout the project: writing projects, like all projects, always go off-schedule. Put key dates in your calendar. Avoid excessive detail: things will change as you go along anyway.

Last but not least, write down your timetable for this six-phase plan, including deadlines and meetings with your supervisor. Write down the dates in your diary or digital calendar. Leave plenty of extra time throughout the project: writing projects, like all projects, always go off-schedule. Don't be too detailed: the precise dates will shoogle around anyway.

Reading

I found reading by far the most enjoyable and productive part of the whole process. There's no end to the amount of reading you could do. I'd figure out how much time you need for the rest of the project, and then leave as much time for this phase as you have left.

You should spend some time upfront -- a day or two would do -- coming up with a list of titles, and putting them in priority order. You may not read all of these, and you'll definitely find lots more titles along the way, but this list will help you get started. It also means you can plan ahead: if you know you want to read title X next week, but someone's currently borrowing it from the library, you know you can put in a request for it. If the library doesn't have it, you can order it online.

As you produce your list of titles, you'll probably also find they group together into a few different areas of focus. In my case, it was either biblical scholarship on Revelation or apocalypticism, environmental rhetoric, or academic scholarship on the environmental movement.

Box off some time for each area of focus. You don't need to box off all your time this way: leave spare, and once you've had a first pass, you can re-assess and timebox what remains of your reading phase. I boxed off a week each for biblical scholarship, environmental rhetoric, and academic scholarship on the environmental movement, and left two weeks at the end, which I then used to follow some threads I picked up along the way.

Keep a daily log of your reading. You'll need to refer back to this later in the project: it's not optional. I made scratch notes first on scrap paper, then wrote up semi-neat notes in my log.

As you're reading, take time to reflect. You should be constantly going back to your question, and re-formulating your argument as you go.

Scaffolding draft

By a 'scaffolding draft,' I mean an end-to-end draft of your dissertation with lots of gaps. For example, this is a real extract from my scaffolding draft:

Another favourite of green rhetors is to propose smart market-based policies like carbon taxes, aimed at tweaking the incentives for private capital to nudge the market into financing economic transformation. [EXAMPLE]. This was decisively demonstrated in 2018 [ALSO GORDON BROWN'S FUEL PRICE ESCALATOR?], after French President Emmanuel Macron attempted to raise fuel taxes, purportedly in an attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions [EVIDENCE].

My scaffolding draft had gaps, comments, to-dos, bullet points, unproven assertions, missing citations, the lot.

The point of the scaffolding phase is to fill out your argument. The reason why leaving gaps is really important is because gathering all the evidence slows you down, but to fill out your argument, you want to get into the flow and ride the wave. If you find yourself stuck on the same paragraph for more than an hour, stop, and consider if you can leave a to-do for later and move on.

I wish I had left more gaps in my scaffolding draft. I found myself getting bogged down in details too often. Keep sight of the big picture, use the fluency you acquired in the reading phase, don't lose momentum: ride the wave from the beginning right through to the end. The idea is, while all that knowledge you got from reading is hot and fresh in your mind, your argument should be in your head, all you need to do in this phase is splurge it onto the page.

In retrospect, because I was too afraid of leaving gaps, I took too long over this. Next time, I would leave one week, two weeks absolute max.

Revising the scaffolding draft

Having taken your scaffolding draft to your supervisor, and read it through yourself, you should probably have some improvements to make on your argument. Do that now.

At this point, you should see another big advantage of having a 'scaffolding' stage. You'll find yourself taking out or re-working big chunks. If you had spent loads of time citing evidence for those chunks, all that time would have been wasted.

A week should be grand for this phase.

Final draft

Now, you need to go through your scaffolding draft and fill in all the gaps. Having all the gaps filled in is what I mean by a 'final' draft here.

I found this by far the most boring part of the process. It's slow and methodical, and unlikely to show up new insights. Sadly, it's got to be done.

I'd leave at least a week per chapter for this, ideally two.

Revising the final draft

Having given your final draft to your supervisor, and read it through yourself, you'll doubtless have found lots of areas for improvement.

Some of these will be minor edits: re-wording, re-ordering, adding a source here, cutting a section there, getting the whole thing under the word limit.

You should have found any major issues with the shape of your argument at the scaffolding phase, but you haven't got time to significantly rework your argument now anyway.

However, you could find areas that need a bit more open-ended research. In my dissertation, I found that I'd written a bit about a concept from political philosophy called 'post-politics,' but it turned out I didn't really know how to explain that concept or justify how I'd used it in my argument. I needed to go back to the library and do some more reading. For those kind of changes, and inevitably, there will be some, you're essentially doing another miniature reading phase.

I ended up doing this in one week, and because it was, after all, a final draft, this was just about enough. However, I could have done a better job with more time: ideally, you'd have two weeks for this phase.

Submit and... party?

That's my basic framework. I wish I'd had this up-front. I guessed my way here over the course of the project, but I would have benefitted from this advice up-front. In particular, as I said, I spent too much time and left too few gaps in the scaffolding phase, and didn't leave enough time at the end to revise the final draft.

You should bear in mind that my timings are based on working full-time on the writing project. If you are working a job alongside your studies, you should consider how much time you can allocate per week to your project and adjust your timings as appropriate. Though also, I was pretty good at procrastinating a lot of the time, so if you can stay focused, you can probably still use my timings and have six weeks off and all.

My only other general advice is, if you can, get as much contact as you can, not only with your supervisor, but with anyone who can engage intelligently in your subject. There's no better way to embed your learning and refine your arguments than to explain things to a friend. It also stops you going insane: writing projects can be very solitary, and I found that frustrating. Meet up with other students regularly. And take an interest in their projects, too: you can be sure they'll benefit from the contact as much as you do.