Dissertating

Strange sounding word "dissertating"... it simultaneously sounds ominous and a little creepy, but its verbal proximity to "dessertating" (which isn't a word, but if it was, would be a delicious word), makes it a strange kind of word.

So you might notice over on the left column that I've removed the banner declaring me a 2006 NaNoWriMo winner. I figured since the 2007 NaNoWriMo season has started, it would soon become a dated banner... but my blog certainly misses the color it added.

Instead, there's a little dissertation meter. It's recording the number of words I've typed in the dissertation compared to the number of words I should have by the end. It's not very accurate though. For one, the number of words I have written is fairly large but the number of GOOD words I've written is much smaller. Right now I'm spilling stuff out on the page and it needs to be organized and made more concise, so it's not really an accurate idea of where I am, just how much I've spilled.

I also suspect that my dissertation will be longer than the 70,000 words I've allocated. That number is based on the ideal number of words, at least according to Patrick Lunleavy in Authoring a PhD. The book indicates that each chapter should be an average of 10,000 words, and I've got 7 chapters mapped out, hence the 70,000. But I think some of my chapters will exceed the ideal number of words just because of the things I need to accomplish in them. Without footnotes it might be 10,000, but with them, they'll be considerably longer.

But the book is very useful. I considered buying Write your Dissertation in 15 minutes a day, but I suspect that you can't really write a dissertation in 15 minutes a day, and the title is just a clever way of getting desperate people to buy the book. Maybe I'm wrong, but I was just a bit suspicious. And besides, the Dunleavy book came well recommended.

I bought the Dunleavy book because I felt so overwhelmed at the start of the dissertation that I didn't know where to actually start! Giving me some good advice for how to get started, the book has been valuable. But when I started reading one of the later chapters, I realized that I don't really need this book, at least not to write the dissertation.

The dissertation is indeed a monstrously huge beast, but when you come right down to it, it's just like any other piece of writing. You need to do all the same things that you do for any shorter piece - even blog posts - that is, you need to introduce your subject, you need to organize the content into a logical sequence, and you need to finish it off in some way.

Sure, in a dissertation, you have to do this very well. And you have to do it over many, many pages. But really, the process is just the same. And no book will help you get out of the necessity of just doing it. So the beginning of the book was useful, but I might not turn to it again until I'm finishing up to see if there's any final words of wisdom I might glean from it. All I really need right now is to get the dissertation written!

One book I have also been reading, and am continuing to read is William Germano's From Dissertation to Book. It might seem in reading this book that I'm putting the cart before the horse, but it's actually quite valuable while writing the dissertation.

First off, I do intend to turn the dissertation into a book (provided of course that I end up in a job where I'm not teaching a 4-4 or even 5-4 load and haven't the time to turn around, let alone revise!). So knowing what I would have to do to accomplish that right now, might help me craft a dissertation that can more easily be turned into a book than if I didn't know what's necessary. Or at least that's the theory. So far, from what I've learnt in reading the book, I think it will turn out to have been a good idea. I also suspect that a dissertation that is written with the principles of a book in mind will be more readable and will avoid many of the pitfalls that dissertations fall into - but that's just a suspicion, I could be wrong.

It might also be appropriate since I'm on the subject to mention a book I read several years ago, near the beginning of my doctoral degree: Gregory Semenza's Graduate Student for the 21st Century. Although I read it a long time ago, I should've read it even earlier. It would be an excellent book to read before you enter graduate study. Or at least start reading before you begin a doctoral degree.

The book is valuable for what it tells you about what you're about to get into (or have gotten into). It discusses the nature of graduate study in the humanities, then moves through all the activities of a grad student - seminar papers, conferences, dissertation - and ends with a chapter on the job market. I found it very comforting to read as I went through each of these things (well, except for the job market of course), and it didn't sugar coat anything. If you're thinking at any point of entering graduate study, it would be a very good read.

Of course I question whether I needed to read these books or not. I certainly have a better idea of what I'm involved in and what's going on around me, but I suspect I might've survived quite well without them. But sometimes survival isn't enough, and I've found my reading about graduate study in some cases just as valuable as my reading for graduate study.