James
Woods is a professor in the University of California
In the sticky, sweltering heat of late summer, I wrote a little
post called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dissertation,” which translated
my writing struggles into a therapeutic list of writing tips. This post was
written as I despairingly grappled with many of the negative emotions that can
accompany slogging through a long form project like a dissertation (guilt,
self-loathing, and a healthy dose of but I don’t wanna,
primarily).
The final tip was “You
can do this,” a hopeful message to not give up. I am proud to
say, at this point, that I have, indeed, mostly done this. There’s still a long
way to go between here and the final submission. But I have an actual draft!
Whole and complete. Sitting right there on my hard drive ( on a USB drive, and
my backup hard drive, and on my friend's computer...).
This post isn’t just to brag about my accomplishments, but to
offer tips for getting through the dissertation process from someone who mostly
has and is now looking back on the places where I struggled the most. The
(occasionally contradictory) tips below represent the things I would have done
differently, if I could have.
Set deadlines early on in the process. Having a goal to work towards is
incredibly important for sustaining motivation over a long period of time. As
someone who needs the pressure of a deadline to get anything done, I found that
a list of due dates was essential for keeping me on track.
But make sure those goals are flexible.
That said, I pretty much immediately blew past my deadlines and had to keep
adjusting them back. Life unexpectedly happens often over a year-long period
(or more!), and knowing that your deadlines will likely change will help to
prevent you feeling guilty about that. If you’ve set early deadlines, you
should be able to move things around without throwing off your schedule.
Ask for feedback early, and often. The sooner you can be communicating with
your committee about your writing, the smoother your editing stages will go.
Sit with your advisor with just a rough outline of the chapter and find out if
it works. Send partial drafts to anyone willing to read them. This will not
only prevent feelings of isolation as you write, as it will keep you connected
to your committee and other writers, but it will also help prevent situations
where you have to rewrite entire chapters.
As long as you can handle feedback, anyway. There may be times when you don’t need
actual criticism, and instead just need to write, or to have someone say
something encouraging. One of my biggest stumbling blocks while drafting came
from receiving negative feedback on a chapter. My fragile ego interpreted the
critique as a condemnation of my viability as a scholar, and I moped around for
several weeks, wasting time assuming I was worthless. At a time when I needed
encouragement, hearing any criticism, no matter how constructive, hurt my
productivity. Knowing yourself and the kinds of feedback you need as you write
is important on a project like this. If you need someone to say “yay, good
job!” find someone to say that to you.
Find out what your committee wants and expects from your work. Following the advice about feedback
above, find out what kind of writing your committee expects. Read dissertations
completed by students they have worked with before. Ask them often what kinds
of expectations they have for your chapters, and your project: what kinds of
sources, how footnotes get used, the structure of chapters, how they feel about
headings, and more. Knowing expectations will help you write effectively to
your audience, and communication is key to avoiding potential pitfalls.
But
remember that this is your dissertation. At the end of the day, this is your work.
It represents who you are as a scholar (for now, anyway). Stand up for what you
think is important, and for what you want to say. Trying to please the entirety
of your committee may be impossible, and at the end of the day it is up to you
to know what you need to write.
Take time off when you need it. As Katy Meyers mentioned in her post last week, taking time off is important to
personal happiness, and you should do so as guilt free as possible.
Dissertations take time, and you will need to take breaks and recharge at some
point. There will be times where you have to focus your energies elsewhere:
teaching, the job market, writing publishable articles, sitting on committees,
taking care of your family, watching cartoons. It is important to understand
that short breaks in writing will happen, and you can take those breaks without
feeling guilty.
But remember to start writing again. Short breaks are awesome! Take a week off to
focus on grading 150 papers. Take off two weeks to prepare for job interviews.
But then start writing again. Academic work is always a balancing act between
various pressures, and you have to get used to carving out time for writing
next to all of your responsibilities. We likely all know that guy who is on his
7th year of writing because he “can’t find the time” to write. Don’t be that
guy. To that end...
Claim writing time by learning to say no. One of the challenges of writing a
dissertation is being surrounded by people who don’t understand; some of your
colleagues, friends, and family likely have no idea what writing a long form
project like a dissertation is like. It is hugely overwhelming and distracting,
and you need to be able to say “Go away, I’m writing.” Sometimes this
means turning down a seat on that committee, choosing not to go to that
concert, or kicking your friends out of your office. My friends often struggle
with the fact that I don’t have the free time to spend with them that I used
to, but it is important to my sanity to say “no” every now and then, as much as
I hate it.
But say yes sometimes too. As I said above, taking breaks is
essential. Next time someone asks you to go for a beer, close your computer and
say yes.
Carve out little bits of writing time. As I mentioned in my previous post, dissertation writing is a marathon, not a
sprint. Writing often happens in little bits spread out over time. No matter
how busy you are, take the time to write for half an hour a day. You can find
half an hour somewhere. Get up early if you have to. If you write about a page
a day, you can finish a chapter in a month.
Stop making excuses. There will always be a million reasons to
not write. You have other work to do, you have papers to grade, you have jobs
to apply for, you have meetings to go to, your back hurts, your computer is
acting funny, the stars aren’t in the right position. There will always be
reasons not to write. And it’s hard, but sometimes you pretty much just have to
tell these reasons to shut up. Sitting down to write, even when it seems like you
can’t, is the only way to get anything written.
Read everything you can. Read this post. Read the one I wrote in August. Read this one by
Kaitlin Gallagher about PhD thesis project management, or the one she wrote on sucstress. Read this post by Amy Rubens about Exit Strategies.
Read this post by
Terry Brock on “The Dissertation from Afar”, or this one by Micalee Sullivan on getting started writing. Browse our dissertation or productivity tags. Read this book, or this book, or this book. Or this one. Try this one. An awful lot of people, far smarter and more
accomplished than I, have written guides for writing a dissertation. Read them.
But remember that reading about writing a dissertation isn’t the
same as actually writing it. It’s
easy to feel like you’re doing work when you read a book about dissertation
writing, but reading GradHacker won’t code your data, compile your sources, or
write your literature review.
Celebrate accomplishments as you go. Take time to appreciate all of the little
accomplishments as you write. Working solely for the “reward” of defending or
graduating is overwhelming, so find little places to celebrate as you go along.
Finish a page? Have a cookie! Finish a chapter? Go get a beer! Work through
data you were struggling with? Take the rest of the night off! Find places to
feel good about what you’re doing.
But don’t let good feelings stop you from working. I have the bad habit of working furiously
to meet a deadline and then riding the endorphin rush of finishing the work for
weeks. Don’t get distracted by small feelings of accomplishment: finishing one
page means that you are now ready to write the next one, after all.
Know that you can do it. You’ve got this, seriously. If I can do
it, you can do it. It’ll be great.
Have you written, or are you writing, a long form project like
the dissertation? Share your hacks in the comments below!
