Steve Tippins explains why dissertations take so long: you're creating original knowledge from scratch and convincing scholars it's valid, not just writing a faster version of a weekend paper. Academic writing is a new language where every claim needs full explanation, citations, and no shortcuts.
Once you get to writing your dissertation in your doctoral program, you're going to find that this is a whole different type of writing. And you're also going to find that a lot of your friends don't understand it. They're going to ask you questions like, well, when are you going to finish? Or this is one of my favorites. You know, I wrote a paper on a weekend in graduate school. Why can't you finish this? Well, you know, quite honestly, they went to the library and copied a bunch of stuff and wrote a paper. You are creating something out of nothing and getting a group of strange people to agree that you can do this. This takes time. You're creating knowledge. Another challenge you're going to have is writing in the academic voice or academic writing. I like to think of it as a new language. There's— you and I can talk. We can say lots of things to each other and have shorthand conversation. But in a dissertation, we have to explain everything. No steps missed. I've got to support everything with citations because it's— somebody's going to read this later and they want to know exactly what's there.
