Ten more

Just reporting that I've got ten more pages of notes for the lit review, bringing me up to 16. This whole note-taking thing is new for me. I've never been a note-taker. I've always read everything I needed to read, made comments in the margins, and then sat down to write it all in a day or two. For my exams I have 110 single-spaced pages of quotes. Not a whole lot of actual notes. Neither of these approaches will work for the dissertation.

So right now I'm trying to briefly summarize each article and freewrite reactions and connections, then include relevant quotes. It's going okay so far. I'm a little nervous, though, about how to make this all work in a year long process. Any advice on note-taking throughout or on writing processes in general would be welcome.

Jan 30- update

I'm pleased to say that my meeting last week with my director went well, and I've gotten the go-ahead to schedule the prospectus defense. Today, I heard back from one committee member who is particularly busy this semester, and that person gave me the go-ahead too.

Now it's on to the pesky business of finding a time when all 6 of us can meet. I have no illusions that this will be easy.

I've been writing or revising every day, which makes me very proud of myself.

Here's to keeping it going...

The Calculator

Billie was asking me how I got through my procrastination. I'll write more about it later, but if I had this neat tool when I'd started, maybe I wouldn't have procrastinated so much!


If you're writing your dissertation, especially if you're just starting, may I recommend the Dissertation Calculator from the University of Minnesota Libraries? If you give it a start and end date, it generates milestones, which can be emailed to you. It does include such stages as 'getting closure,' that you might not think about when you make your own checklist, and it doesn't end with the defense. Here's a sample calculation using, roughly, my dates. If you're a methodical worker, this might be an accurate representation of the diss process, but for me it isn't really. It works well as a checklist, though maybe not an accurate calendar of dissertation progress.

(crossposted from my professional blog)

Possible questions???

sorry if this is cheating, but i'm cross-posting a section of something i wrote over at my place. i was doing some thinking today and came up with some stuff that i'd put out there for you, my fellow dissertators, to possibly comment on. here goes:

so, anyway, i finished reading the final sections of PITF [Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson] today and it got me a thinkin about possible diss r-s questions i could realistically aks. i want my inquiry to be both simple and useful/applicable to pedagogy. i'm not abandoning the student-athlete ideas. however, the questions i came up with today while musing in the aftermath of PITF had little to do with student-athletes. the questions are just rumination residue, so i shouldn't worry that my student-athletes are going to be left in the dust (right?). well, i don't know. anyway, the subject pool shouldn't/doesn't matter as much as the usefulness of the question guiding my research (i think). especially if i'm able to construct a study that investigates my hypotheses about physicality and effective learning (phenomenological learning practices). here's what i came up with:

Is there a relationship between the amount of writing done in high school and the level of achievement reached in fyw?

Or

Is there a relationship between the physical act of composing and writing ability?

Or

Does one have to physically compose a text in order to acquire an understanding of how to successfully navigate a written discourse community?

Or

What is the relationship between actually composed text and achievement in college-level writing courses (FYC)?

Or

Etc.

Basically, the idea is based on an epiphanal moment while reading Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations wherein she discusses the discrepancy in the amount of physical engagement with writing texts between “traditional” and “open admissions” high school students. Of course we know that there are correlations between the amount of responded-to-writing that one does and their improvement as a writer over time. (We do know this, right?? Or is this simply an assumption??) My argument, before beginning the research anyway, is that the writing improvement comes as much from the feedback as it does from the phenomenological experiencing – i.e. the physical act of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. How I could test for this (experimentally) could be by assigning one group of students a shit-load of writing that gets no feedback, no grade, simply writing (e.g. frequent posting to blogs such as I assigned last semester) viz. a more traditional classroom wherein there is no blogging, only 4 major papers plus the process-writing documents associated with such writing. The measure would be a pre- and post-test in the form of in-class or take-home essay assignment… btw, the difference between the control group and the blogging group would be, simply, the blogging requirement.


this is all still pretty fresh and i still have two huge chunks of PITF to read. i'll decide what to make of this in the moments/days to come. in the meantime, i think i'll cross-post this over at dissertation boot camp to see if any of my fellow dissertators have any thoughts on the matter. in the meantime, as usual, i welcome the insights of you sage folks out there being all lurkerly.

Getting done

Hello everyone! I've just joined the boot camp and I'm excited to have a nice few months of blogging with you.

I'm a historian of science, working on a dissertation about turn-of-the-(20th)-century medical quackery. I say that I'm joining you for a few months because my current plan is to finish a full draft by early April, in preparation for a mid-May defense! I'm a bit scared and overwhelmed at how soon this seems.

I've had years of procrastinating and dilly-dallying, had personal illnesses and tragedies throw me off course, but I've emerged here in late January with drafts of every chapter, intro and conclusion. My advisor used a pregnancy metaphor to describe finishing the dissertation: now is the time to push. She's going on sabbatical next year, and other folks on my committee go away for the summer, so I have a real deadline. I'm finally at a point where there's no way out but through.

My next milestone is to have Chapter 3 in a final stage by February 1. It's coming together much more quickly than I'd feared. Then it's revising a chapter every two weeks till it's done, or till April, whichever is sooner.

I'm currently feeling pretty stoical about my topic--or, more accurately, fed up. I'm hoping that all of your enthusiasm will wear off! I also noticed that many of my fellow bootcampers are in the early stages of their diss. I'm happy to give advice and tell true stories of how I got from there to here. Nice to meet you and bonne chance!

Confusion Can Create Clarification

Hi, all. Like my alliteration? :-) I hope your week is going well and that you are achieving your goals. I'm hanging in.

This past week, I had a lot of IRB (Institutional Review Board, approves work with human subjects) issues, and it threw a kink in my productivity (like I needed any additional excuse). These IRB issues have been dragging on for quite some time, but they came to a head this week, and I realized just how tedious and time consuming the work that required IRB input could be. Secondly, I realized how difficult working with some folks can be, particularly when they don't share the passion for the work. (These folks would be IRB administrative assistants.) Thirdly, though, and this actually might be the good news, the IRB issues brought to mind a point about the dissertation: I should simplify. I was working to construct a quantitative and a qualitative dissertation, dealing with student and faculty surveys, an ethnographic study, and a longitudinal study . . . . analyzing student writing, survey responses, a particular course I teach. It was just too much and I couldn't wrap my little fingers around it all to begin to write about it. As it stood, my dissertation was probably going to be 8 or 9 chapters long. That's just too much for this kind of dissertation and for what I need to do to finish.

So. The IRB issues-- while a pain-- did get me to rethink the direction of my work and to simplify. I think it was Chris who said: K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid). That's my goal.

More concretely, however, my goal this week is to draft the pedagogy chapter. By Friday, I'll have a draft for the advisor.

An Introduction, A Start

First, thanks to Billie for signing me up, and thanks to Meagan for the link on your blog. This is a fabulous idea. Dissertation writers need all the support we can get.

So, a brief introduction. I'm Abby, a doctoral candidate in composition studies at the University of New Hampshire. I'm just starting my dissertation on feminist rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. I (think I am) looking at the ways in which three feminist rhetorical theories can answer challenges to traditional modes of teaching argument. That's the idea at least.

I passed my proposal defense a year ago, I think and, to be honest, have been floundering a bit since. I'm teaching one course a semester and I'm not great at balancing my dissertation work with my teaching. I'm also not great at balancing my work with my deep love of t.v. But I completed the pilot version of my classroom study during the spring semester 2006, I completed the main portion of my classroom study last semester, and I'm including this semester in my classroom study as well -- I figure it's good to have a back-up cache of data.

I am currently trying to get going on my literature review chapter and hope to have some part of a chapter draft done by the end of March. My first posting here coincides with my first actual writing -- I wrote six pages of notes today to get going on that lit review and have just finished reading another article. I'm going to write and read for another hour and a half before heading to dinner. I know it's only notes, and I know it's only 6 pages, but I'm pretty excited to have anything written at all. It's a start.

Good luck to all those reading, writing, thinking, and pacing.

Dissertation Macots

Krista, over at Thinkery, posted a picture of her dissertation mascot: a stuffed sting ray. This mascot, she says, watches as she writes and thinks.




I have a peace bear (who happens to listen to Sarah McLachlan) as my dissertation mascot . . . she keeps me calm (the bear and Sarah) as I write.

What kind of mascot do you need, dear boot campers, to get you through this process of writing?

Much better day!

Got a lot of reading done today and some writing. It felt good to accomplish something!

Not Such a Productive Day (but I refuse to beat myself up over it)

Today I was to have met with my advisor to discuss my current chapter, but I was unable to meet with him (issues with my daughter and her car being broken into). [He's also not at the same university where I am. It's a drive to see him.] It seems, though, that so much gets in the way of writing the dissertation, of meeting with advisor, of just doing the work of dissertating. I don't think I intentionally sabotage my efforts, but it does seem like it sometimes. The car gets broken into? I have to schedule student conferences? I have to attend meetings that can't be scheduled any other time? The dog needs a bath? The curtains need changing? Something always seems to get in the way. I wonder, though, if I don't just place those things in the way . . .

However, I will not berate myself over it all. I'm keeping to my goal of writing something everyday. I'm reading each day and making notes . . . and it's all coming together. Just very very slowly. Tomorrow will be a better day. It will.