Today I learned of an article called How to Finish Your Dissertation — Without the Agony that offers 10 strategies meant to “spare you the pain of an extended sojourn in dissertation hell.”
I think most of the strategies are sound, but the first one really grabbed my attention because it smacks of contingency management, clearing your psychic RAM, and the advice of C. Wright Mills:
“Start writing now. Not next year. Not tomorrow. Now! Start writing down ideas as they occur to you at odd moments. Every little idea is a springboard when you have writer’s block.”
Writing. Even before you feel you’re ready. I think that might be the key to this whole business.
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I am a little bit unconvinced by the idea of writing before you are ready.
It’s what I myself have done, because my supervisor, and my university culture as a whole has been a big fan of that approach. I started writing from the very start, three years ago, and this means I have generated an amount of material that was ultimately overwhelming. I have nearly 1000 pages of drafts at all sorts of stages: from rough notes to myself, to literature summaries, to snippets of chapters and (now, thank god) some full chapters. Looking at it all is overwhelming, and has been the inspiration for many a week of avoidance and procrastination. Trying to sew a chapter together from hundreds of pages of scrappy notes and (worse!) polished drafts that just don’t fit together easily is really rather difficult, and it is especially hard to force yourself to leave pages out when you know you spent weeks working on them.
When I first started writing I had no idea where I was going with the thesis, and a lot of what I wrote is now useless (though maybe it can be salvaged for other projects later on). Worse, much of it is just plain wrong and uninformed, because I hadn’t read enough of the relevant literature not to write ignorant bullshit. I regret the weeks and months I spent writing this sort of stuff, especially anything that went beyond roughest possible first draft status. Sometimes my supervisor got me to write summaries of what I had read, she gave me feedback on them, I would polish them until she thought they could ’slot right in’ to my literature review, and now I can’t use them at all because my focus has changed just far enough that they aren’t relevant.
I think that in the early stages of a dissertation, a lot of that time and energy could be better focused on designing your study, reading widely, learning information management skills, and setting up a really robust, well-designed system for storing and managing your data/notes/literature/drafts. If you want and need to be writing, maybe it’s better not to focus on products that you think will be useful in the actual dissertation, but on writing for yourself in order to help develop your ideas.
On the other hand, I haven’t tried writing a dissertation any other way: maybe it really is more daunting to face the blank sheet of paper a few months before your due date than it is to face mountains of unsorted notes and scrappy draft fragments. And probably I did gain some benefit from practising constructing arguments, summarising literature, editing and so on that has served me well even if the actual products of that practice are useless.
Wow, thanks for that, styleygeek! I’m glad someone with real-life experience commented on this, and I hope others will do the same. I’ve got my prospectus defense in just under two weeks, so I’m still barely out of the gate.
1000 pages is staggering. Though as a reader of your blog, I’m not too surprised. Anyone who can write a dissertation 30,000 words over the university limit, not including the conclusion, must be prolific!
I have to agree with your point at the end that you probably gained some benefit from all that writing, but I can see how having that much could also lead to paralysis. Coincidentally, in a workshop today a student said she had 1000 pages of oral history transcripts and didn’t know how to do them all justice in her dissertation–made me wonder if 1000 is the magic number that leads to blocking. (The other coincidence happened after the workshop when I asked a student who is about to defend what her advice for writing a dissertation would be, and she said it was something that her advisor told her: “Write even when you don’t feel ready.” I was like, No way!)
I think your point about “writing for yourself to help develop your ideas” was exactly what I had in mind. I just wanted to caution people who put off even the slightest bit of writing because they think they need to read just one more thing first. There will always be one more thing…
Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
That 30 000 words over the limit thing? That’s another result of writing before you are ready, I think. In my first drafts of chapters, I had no idea what I wanted and needed to say in order to advance my argument, because I didn’t know what my argument was yet! So I put in everything I possibly could, which led to long-winded chapters that didn’t go anywhere interesting.
Of course cutting stuff out is usually easier than adding things in, I guess. But I’ll still be interested to watch the two PhD students in my dept who came in 6 months after me, and neither of whom have written anything yet. They are now about 7 or 8 months from their due dates, and I want to see if they really will pull it all together without the sorts of struggles I had.
I have to agree with Styleygeek. I entered my PhD program using an abstract of my dissertation proposal as part of my application statement. I knew what I wanted to do and used courses to work towards the goal. I’ve been writing and rewriting part of this thing for years, and now that I’m in the ABD stage, the piles and piles (and piles) of drafts and notes and references are completely overwhelming. Since I work in literature and I didn’t have a great organizational plan when I started out (and let’s be real, technology changes so fast that it’s hard to get a good system going without needing to revamp it every year or so), I have to go back and do new critical review surveys now anyway, so a lot of my work is re-doing stuff I’ve already partially done.
There comes a point where you have to put aside all you’ve produced and try to get back to basics and get chapter drafts going without trying to piece together years of work, reimagining what you were thinking and why. It’s too hard.
I do think all that work and (pre)writing was part of my process to getting to the real writing, but dissertations are cruel, personal beasts, and everyone’s is different. For me, writer’s block is not a problem. Sorting through the piles and trying not to have an anxiety attack so I can keep writing? That’s my problem.
wwwmama: Thanks for your comment! I hear what you and styleygeek are saying. If I spend half an hour writing notes or brainstorming for a project, let’s say every day for a week, by the end of the week I already have more in those pages than I could ever remember with much clarity. Reviewing them at the end of the week and summarizing is something I might try out. Otherwise, I could see how weeks upon weeks upon years of notetaking and drafting could leave me overwhelmed.
Both of you suggest that you produced too much, so I’m wondering what you would’ve cut back on–do either of you have any thoughts on what kind of writing to do less of? Or, if it’s more about organizing what you produce, have either of you been able to find ways to improve your systems?
I had a similar (but smaller scale) experience a few years back when I started blogging. I had just read Boice’s books and they, along with all the blog posts I was seeing about “just writing”, convinced me that the more I produced the better. I didn’t tell anyone the URL of the blog, so it was pretty much a private venue, with the added spice of the possibility that someone might happen across it. I ended up with hundreds of pages of stuff produced over a few months that I didn’t have time to reread immediately. I eventually fed it all to DevonThink (Mac database software) and forgot about it. Occasionally, though, when I’m searching for useful stuff in DevonThink, I have a weird experience: I come across something that looks interesting; when I check the source, I find that it’s my own writing though I have no memory of having produced it. So it wasn’t useless, but the tangible benefits are rather few. However, it is possible that it made me a more fluent writer.
It’s very easy for a specific approach to working to become a de facto standard without enough attention paid to possible drawbacks. So I heartily welcome this discussion. More than 3 months have passed since styleygeek’s posts. Any news as to whether those candidates who hadn’t written anything back in April have been making progress?
Wow, Rick, I’ve had that same experience in DevonThink! Your comment reminded me that I’ve been thinking of browsing DevonThink and reviewing my daily writing at least once a week (as I mentioned in a comment above). I took a look this afternoon and found some really useful stuff, so I think it’s worth pursuing.
I’ll contact Styleygeek and see if she can give us an update on her colleagues.
Interesting you should ask. One of them has now pulled together two full and one partial chapter, and seemed to have an easier time of it than I did. She has written each as an independently publishable paper, which probably helped her in focusing them.
The other student freaked out at being so close to her deadline with nothing to show for it, and has dropped out.
I guess it goes to show that one advantage of writing before you are ready is that the pile of scraps and half-chapters are tangible evidence of what you have done, and maybe also make you feel you’ve come too far to drop things now.
A possible lesson is that, when things are sub-optimal, we tend to look for an optimal approach. In this case, I’m dissatisfied with the benefits I got from writing a lot. What I might be forgetting is that things might be a lot worse if I hadn’t done it. Your examples seem to show that things could go either way, but, frustrating though it might be to wade through a stack of notes, the worst-case scenario of dropping out would seem to be much less likely, and that alone might be ample justification for the practice.
In other words, maybe the sunk cost fallacy is good for something other than prolonging land wars in Asia?
The Wikipedia entry on s.k.f. includes this relevant anecdote: “By deliberately using the tactic of incurring sunk costs beyond the point of no return, economic actors may get ventures going that otherwise would not have. In his autobiography, film director Elia Kazan explains how he repeatedly used the tactic of sunk costs to get his films started: “My tactic was one familiar to directors …: to get the work rolling, involve actors contractually, build sets, collect props and costumes, expose negative, and so get the studio in deep. Once money in some significant amount had been spent, it would be difficult for [the studio head] to do anything except scream and holler. If he suspended a film that had been shooting for a few weeks, he’d be in for an irretrievable loss, not only of money but of ‘face.’ The thing to do was get the film going” (pp. 412-13). The same tactic has been used for the construction of bridges, tunnels, and other infrastructure. Very few partially built bridges exist, because once construction has started sunk costs are too high to revert the decision and stop again.”
Nevertheless, there are a lot of unfinished dissertations out there….
Since this thread is still alive and I just saw Jim’s question above: Both of you suggest that you produced too much, so I’m wondering what you would’ve cut back on–do either of you have any thoughts on what kind of writing to do less of? Or, if it’s more about organizing what you produce, have either of you been able to find ways to improve your systems?, I’ll respond to that briefly too.
I would do less summarising. I spent a lot of time summarising what I was reading. When it came to writing a lit review, you don’t want summaries, you want critical analysis. You might think that summaries will help remind you of what you read, but they aren’t very helpful for that, either. For one thing, if you can’t remember the original text, you can’t be sure that your summary is accurate, or whether you misunderstood what you read back then, or even misrepresented it. So you still have to go back to the original text before referring to it in your dissertation. For another thing, the chances are that your summary will focus on points the author makes that aren’t necessarily the ones that are of interest to you when you have developed your own ideas more clearly.
More useful than summaries, I think, are accurate entries in your bibliography (i.e. Endnote or Bibtex) which are tagged with a good number of consistent keywords so that you can search and find them later. A few notes to yourself in the bib entry on what the author argues are maybe a good idea too, but you don’t want to waste time on writing this up into full sentences or anything well-structured. (Do, however, include notes on where the actual text is! (URL for electronic papers, library call number if a book, notes about where you have filed it if a photocopy).)
I would also spend next to no time editing or polishing anything I wrote in the first two years or so. You’ll just have to do it again later anyway to make the piece fit into your final draft, and you may not end up using that section at all anyway.
The sort of writing that I think WAS helpful was anything where I came up with an original idea and then tried to build it up into an argument with actual evidence. That sort of writing is useful because it gives you practise in arguing your point, which is what you’ll be doing in your dissertation, and it helps you clarify your own ideas and see whether you really can muster enough evidence to support them. Again, though, I wouldn’t bother with polishing these sorts of drafts until you are dead certain they will be included in the final version, and have worked out exactly where in the structure they will fit.
Mostly, though, as Jim suggests, it’s about organizing what you produce. I write in Latex and I am (now) a big fan of putting notes straight into the text, using the comment symbol (%) to “grey them out”. So if I were starting again, I would draw up a thesis outline, create a latex file for each chapter, add in section headings, and then always make my notes either in my bibliography, or directly in the thesis file. Tagging is also your friend. You can tag places in the text just by using a particular symbol and a tag phrase, and keeping a list of these (e.g. **frameworks**). Then when you want to find any section or note you have tagged as “frameworks” you just do a text search for “**frameworks**. I started doing this later on, and wished I had done it from the start.
Other people use html notebooks for this sort of thing and then you can link between notes too, which might work.
For actual physical items, e.g. photocopies, I eventually set up a system of binders, each labelled with the relevant chapter, and divided by subtopic covered within that chapter, and filed everything in there. That way when it came to pulling together a final draft, I could flip through the binder and make sure I had mentioned all the relevant stuff.
Those are some ideas that worked for me. But I think the main thing is to have a consistent system and stick to it. Right from the start.
Okay, so maybe “briefly” wasn’t the right word. Sorry!
That’s a great reply, Styley! Your advice on summarizing definitely rings true, though I think that’s the first time I’ve heard someone spell it out. I know from preparing for my general exams that producing more critical analysis and synthesis would’ve been a better use of my time than the straightforward summaries I did. Makes sense to carry that over to the thesis.
I still haven’t really clarified my thoughts on the issues here, but I’ll make a few remarks, hopefully before writing a fuller answer later. (I have no problem with long, thoughtful comments like Styley’s, by the way!)
First, I agree that bibli-stuff is hyper-important. It’s time-wasting and discouraging to have to search again for things that you used earlier.
The trouble with spending too long on bibliographic information, at least in conventional bibliographic software, is that it’s difficult to move your focus away from individual works and towards your own analysis of multiple works. For example, it isn’t possible in Bookends or EndNote to link to Item B from the Notes field of Item A.
Two other points I would make:
An idea I picked up from the Circus Ponies Notebook forums is to create a Notebook with one topic set up per page, each with a clipping service. Any time you come across a useful source you have to get it into Bookends, of course, but you don’t make notes there: you commit yourself there and then to assign it to the topic where it makes most sense in the context of your work. This means that even if you’re not writing you are continuously questioning yourself as to the meaning of things you find. I guess this is a kind of compromise between making source-centered notes in Bookends, and Styley’s method of actually mapping out the whole structure of the thesis.
Another idea, this one propagated by Steven Berlin Johnson, is that you want to organize your own writing and notes on sources (and actual quotes from the sources) so that you can quickly answer questions such as “What was my preferred definition of Web 2.0?” or “What are Nielsen’s 10 heuristics to evaluate usability?”. Having to rummage around at length to recover such details interrupts the flow of any extended bit of writing, unless you are satisfied with notes to yourself like [insert Nielsen's 10 heuristics here]. His solution is to store everything in fairly small chunks in DevonThink, and each chunk would address one of these problems.
I think all three of these (good reference/citation data; topic- or chapter-organised notes; and easily searchable/browsable notes) are important. I think that even with advances in software at present that means at least two pieces of software, for all but the highly tech-savvy: a dedicated reference manager, and a notes repository, and preferably some system for linking them together.
I guess that’s enough for the short version!
Great points, Rick. I especially like the idea of processing new sources right away and identifying how they relate to your work. I find it easy to stockpile PDFs (often in DEVONthink) thinking they’ll be useful down the road and I can attend to them later. But this is like leaving unprocessed email in my inbox, something I can’t stand.
I think DEVONthink will let you set up a file of clippings (and relatedly, a linked html notebook, or wiki, like Styley mentioned) similar to what you can do with CP. That’s something I’m going to tinker with b/c I can see it being very useful.
By the way, if either of you ever get the urge to write a guest post for this site I’d be thrilled. You’ve both shared some very helpful information that deserves to be brought up out of the comments section. Let me know.
Thanks, Jim. I like Rick’s thoughts. I wish I’d read people talking about this before I started!
There’s one thing in Rick’s last comment I would reply to, though, and that is the comment that using bibliographic managers “it’s difficult to move your focus away from individual works and towards your own analysis of multiple works”.
It’s difficult, yes, because bibliographic managers don’t force you to think about the way multiple works relate to each other. But I think it can be done (to an extent at least) by thoughtful use of tagging. Especially if you have very detailed tags—e.g. “debate re definition of concept X”. Apply that to a bunch of works and it at least provides you with a solid basis for writing something later that brings them together.
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