How to fix the 5 main dissertation writing issues
A guide to five common dissertation problems: writer's block, unclear requirements, jargon, weak literature reviews, and perfectionism. Use institutional templates and recent dissertations as models, leverage AI for drafting, break work into pieces, and seek feedback from your chair. Treat academic writing as a new language that demands explicit statements, not implication.
Chapters
Okay. This is when we search the web a lot or when we clean our house because we can't figure out how to get started, or we can't figure out how to move forward from where we are. Okay. One tool that a lot of people don't think of as helping in writer's block is a template. So if your school has a template like, here's what should be in chapter one, and here are the headings and things like that, it can at least help you break things down into smaller pieces. And that can be very, very beneficial. Moving along with that, I always recommend to people to get copies of the most recent dissertation that your chair has chaired, especially if it's using a similar methodology that can show you what they have your chair has accepted in the past. So it can give you, oh, they want me to write about this. Or this needs to be in here. So having some targets to shoot at can be very beneficial to get started. There's a saying that a writer once told me, nobody likes to write. Everybody likes to have written. And that's true. And, you know, let's get you to the point of having written. So writer's block is breaking into small pieces, finding tools that can help you get there. And I'm going to suggest one other thing. You can use AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever AI you're comfortable with. And I'm not telling you to use AI to write something for you and use it as your product. I'm saying use AI to say, can you give me a sample of. And then it can give you again, something to react to. Okay, yeah, that didn't say it quite right. I'm going to move it like this. So when you're reacting to things and you're moving or rewording, it can really help you get started, you know, getting over writer's block, getting started in the process. So I think this can be. You know, it's. Getting started can be a really big issue now in academia, and we tend to encourage this unintentionally. I think many times is people are looking for perfection and not knowing what's good enough. Okay, you've never done this before. Why would you know what is appropriate or what is right? Yes, you can look at previous things that have been written. Yes, you can bounce things off your committee and others, but on your own, why would I know what every. What is enough? So I've seen too many people try for perfection and keep trying and keep rewriting and keep. But the thing is, you in your little cocoon of Writing at your home or your office or wherever you're doing this. You actually don't know what perfection is. It's not like you're bowling and you're going for a 300 and that's a perfect score. You just don't know because you haven't done it. And you aren't the keeper perfection. It's your committee. So you have to start understanding when I think I've got this right, and then let someone else look at it. Give it to your chair so your chair can tell you, okay, this is good, or move this direction, or this isn't exactly what we're looking for. We need this. Because without direction, you may start veering off into areas that are nothing to do, and it's going to be a lot of work to bring you back in. So beginning to understand and ask for what is good enough. And I've told people in the past they need to get a T shirt on it that says good enough is good enough. Because you know a dissertation, you get signatures on it. You don't get A pluses, you get signatures, and that's good enough. Now you'll find people who have issues because they don't really know what goes into a dissertation. They don't know what's part of a dissertation. This, some of this comes back to a template. Okay, here's the parts that need to be there. But if it says literature review and you say, great, I've looked at the literature and here are eight articles and I'm done, and here's six pages, well, that's probably not thorough enough for what your committee's looking for. You don't understand the conventions, which is why I hear many dissertation chairs say, read one or two dissertations at least before you get started, meaning get familiar with the genre. If you're going to write a mystery, then you better know what entails. A mystery entails what goes into a mystery novel. If you're going to write a history book, you're going to need to know about how to structure a historical book. If you're going to write a dissertation, understand what is requested of you in a dissertation. And if you're going to write a dissertation, that's a different model. For example, the three paper dissertation. Understand what's required for your three papers, and if something else is also required. So part of writing issues is a lack of understanding what the process is, but also a lack of understanding of the requirements of your institution in order to get to your proposal. Here's what has to happen in Order to get to your final defense, here's what has to happen. Understand your school's rules, and that can also help you save a lot of time. Writing. Something that comes up for people is a terminology. You know, anytime you get into a new field, there's new terminology. I was listening to someone the other day talk about roi and their ROI was an abbreviation for a term I or phrases. I didn't know. I knew ROI is return on investment. So I had to ask, really, what do you mean by roi? So when there is new terminology, if there is new ways of thinking about it, to you, then you need to do some research. You need to ask people, really, what do you mean by that? Faculty have been using these terms seemingly forever. So for them, when they give you a term, they just assume everybody knows it. But if you don't know it, then it's incumbent upon you to ask, because they're just going to assume if you don't ask a question that you got it. So reach out to your faculty members, reach out to fellow students, reach out to us. We'll help you translate things because some of this process is translation, because academic writing is a new language. And that's the other big thing. This is a new language. So if you've ever tried to learn a new language and then start writing in that language, then we process verbs and nouns and all kinds of parts of language, maybe differently in Spanish than we do in English or in the Basque language than we do in English. Well, academic writing is typically for all of us in English, but it processes things a little differently. It's a lot more exacting. And it doesn't you. It's not a lot of nuance. It's exact. And we don't imply things. Whereas if I write a novel, I can do a lot of implying to keep the reader interested. In academic writing, we don't imply anything. We just flat out tell people things. That's what causes some people problems, is understanding that you're just not. You have to tell people things. And I guess the last point of writing and academic communication I want to get to is the concept of concepts, of integration and synthesis. I've seen too many reviews of literature that are reports on literature. Jones said this, Johnson said this, Rabinowitz said this, Smith said this, Williams said this, Shankar said this. And it's a whole bunch of reporting what people said. But I don't know how what Shankar said relates to what Jones said. Based on what you told me. Do not make the reader try to figure it out. You want to let the reader know that you understand how everything integrates and how you can synthesize the material. You're showing a mastery of the material and that's what they're looking for when they ask you, hey, synthesize this material. Show us you understand it and you understand what it all means and where the research you want to do fits within the field that you're studying. Are there any questions today from people? Well, I'm not hearing any questions, so I want to just end by saying writing problems can be overcome. Lack of understanding can be overcome by just some hard work and asking and trying to understand the field in which you are working. King, the style you're using, is it Apa or Turabian or whatever? Understanding what's required there. Once you get that down, you're going to avoid a lot of problems and through everything, I wish you a lot of luck because I want you all to finish, graduate and go out and change the world. Have a great day.
