Dissertation Reflections

Whew! On Sunday, as scheduled, I turned in revisions of chapters 1, 2, and 3 of my dissertation to my adviser. Now on to work on revisions of chapters 4, 5, and the conclusion, which I'll turn in on July 6.

After getting this round of comments from my adviser*, another set of revisions of the whole dissertation, then submit it to the other readers on the committee, get their comments, do another set of revisions, then hopefully it'll be ready to defend.

So, while I know I'm not completely finished with it yet, it honestly is almost a polished, done deal, and I now feel qualified to say a little bit about the dissertation writing process. This past year I've been on a fellowship, and I can't say how much that helped. I'm certain I wouldn't have gotten this far without it.

Also, I have to admit that those books really do work. I had my doubts; I didn't think that anything would come out of all those freewriting sessions, but it does. Even just typing out some blockquotes you might want to use and rearranging them is something. That's what I did a lot: I put in quotations along with little placeholder notes to myself. Those were my zero drafts, basically strings of quotations followed by to-do lists ("Be sure to bring in Heilbrun; connect it to what Warnick says about ethos," "write definition of trackback," "summarize Lazere's argument here; show how it's relevant," etc.). It was a start, though, and that helped. And it's true what Anne Lamott says; no one ever has to see those drafts.

I also did lots of exercises related to my dissertation. For example, when I was having trouble figuring out how to work my responses from my interviews into my chapters, as an exercise, I decided to take all my questions and group them under headings that corresponded to my chapter topics. As another exercise, I did Toulmin schema of a lot of different claims I encountered in my research, both in the blog posts and the scholarly sources, like so:

Initial Enthymeme: Women aren't interested in politics; they're interested in babies, fashion and celebrity gossip.

Claim: Women aren't interested in politics

Reason: because they're interested in babies, fashion and celebrity gossip

Warrant: 1. Someone who is interested in babies, fashion, and celebrity gossip couldn't also be interested in politics; 2. {Politics} and {babies, fashion, and celebrity gossip} are mutually exclusive.

It was as though I was always jabbing my dissertation, saying, "Can you feel it when I do this?"

"Can you feel it when I do this?"

"Can you feel it when I do THIS?"

That's me on the left, by the way.

Public accountability helped, too, like that "Write/Exercise" block I had on my sidebar for a while. I'm going to bring that back soon, but right now I'm doing so much writing that it's hard to keep track of it. For now, I'll bring back just the exercise part. I joined Ladies' Workout Express a week or so ago, so I've been doing a lot of exercising as well. I also formed a dissertation writing group that met biweekly this past academic year. That, too, helped a lot, and I'd recommend it.

My dissertation approach, then, has consisted of:

1. Breaking writing down into small modules of around a couple of pages each
2. Doing planning drafts that were, literally, blockquotes and to-do lists
3. Implementing the Getting Things Done system and thinking of each chapter as a project. Then I'd write down every single little thing I could think of do related to that chapter -- David Allen calls them "next action" steps. They'd be tasks as small as "request such-and-such a book from interlibrary loan." I just tried to capture every single task.
4. Doing thought exercises: If one occurred to me, I did it.
5. Taking a seminar the Women's Studies department at UMN offers called "Feminist Research and Writing" which is basically a writing/project management practicum. If your university has something like this, TAKE IT. I wrote several drafts of my dissertation prospectus in a timely manner because I was getting graded on it.
6. Forming a dissertation writing group and attending meetings (we did things in the same draft workshop format as the Feminist Research and Writing class). Oh, and I had absolutely no compunction about giving them those ugly planning drafts to read.
7. Revising ambitions and goals. I've cut lots of whole sections and ideas from chapters, simply because it would take too much time to develop them and connect them to what I'm already doing (plus, including everything I think of would distract from the unity I'm striving for). I'm keeping these in a list for future projects instead. A dissertation is a generative process; that's part of the point. Just because certain interesting connections might occur to me doesn't mean they all have to be documented in the dissertation. Simply pick some ideas and go with them; don't even try to cover everything.
8. Reading other people's dissertations -- not the award winners, but people who finished and passed.
9. Oh, and I know this might not be possible for everyone, but if you're just starting your PhD program, I'd recommend deciding on a dissertation topic immediately (a broad area, at least -- back in 2002, mine was just "gender and blogging," and I could have done a lot of different things with that) and funneling seminar papers and comprehensive exam essays toward the dissertation.

* I've already gotten her comments on the first three chapters, and they're encouraging! Not too much left to do now.