Let’s start with the bottom line:  Buy This Book.  It provides practical, useful tools and techniques that you can immediately apply to your academic writing, as well as a ton of things to consider as you move through your degree.  It doesn’t matter how early you are in your graduate career; in fact I wish someone had given me this right away.  The note taking method alone would have helped as I went through my coursework, and the thoughts on how to choose a topic and advisor are helpful very early in the process.

The book begins with a discussion of some of the statistics around dissertation completion; to say the least, they are kind of scary.  In the social sciences, only 20% graduate within 5 years and only 56% graduate within 10.  She emphasizes how a writing group can improve both your likelihood of finishing and your time to completion, and makes it clear that she understands the challenges that all too many graduate students face today (like families, full time jobs, etc.)

The second chapter focuses on questions of topic and advisor, and most critically interaction between these two parts of the decision.  Single talks about all the possible considerations in choosing an advisor, putting together a committee and then managing the process.  Her advice here is down to earth, practical, and realistic; a welcome change to many of the more philosophical approaches.  Frankly, I wish I had read it much earlier in my academic career.

The core chapters of the book focus on what she calls the “Single System for Academic Writing”.  It includes 8 steps:

1. Interactive Reading
2. Interactive Note-Taking
3. Citeable Notes
4. Focus statement
5. One-Page Outline
6. Long Outline with References
7. Regular Writing Routine
8. Dissertation

The first 6 steps fall into the category of pre-writing.  This is critical in the system because it is hard to know what to say until you’ve completed these steps.   Nonetheless it helped me a lot to hear that so explicitly.  I had been feeling rushed to finish reading and start writing, when in fact it is critical to do the first stages correctly.

She talks extensively about how the point of the reading and the literature review is to enter into the academic conversation, and how part of the goal of the reading is to learn the tone and style of that conversation.  The book provides extensive hints as to what questions to be asking as well as examples of what does or

One of the interesting features of this system is that you begin with the great stack of reading to do, work down to a focus statement of 3-4 sentences, then back up again to the completed dissertation.  Each step prepares both you and your materials for the next stage, although there is some extent to which you can move back and forth between the different steps.

Steps 1 and 2 are covered in chapter 3.  I’ve read it 3 times now and continue to find new nuggets of wisdom.  Single argues that you should read each article once, get the key notes out of it you need and, if done well, never have to go back to it again.  Further those notes should be organized and focused on the major elements of the article like theoretical framework, methods, hypothesis and results.  She also touches on when and how to use quotes.

Chapter 4 moves on to talk about how to distill those notes into usable citeable nuggets that can be used for your dissertation, as well as suggesting that you do this as you go rather than at the end.  Her system for both chapters 3 and 4 are practical, easily implemented and well thought out.  Not surprising since this book grew from her experience teaching a dissertation-writing seminar, which means that many of the kinks have already been worked out.

Chapter 5 talks about creating a focus statement to clarify where you are going.  While I understand why she places this step after the the others, I would advise any person beginning work on their dissertation to at least read through to this point and start to pull together a focus statement early.  You’ll revise it several times, but the process of writing and revising as you read will help you clarify your own thinking about your topic and express it to others.

There is so much great stuff in just these first 5 chapters that I haven’t made it past them.  As I said, I’ve gone back and re-read sections in order to get the steps down.  I can’t even begin to summarize all the nuggets I’ve pulled out so far and the changes it has made to how I approach my reading and note-taking.

The bottom line here is that you should buy this book.  Demystifying Dissertation Writing is about the most practical book on the topic I’ve found, and provides the tools you will need to move your research forward.  Even if the remaining chapters were blank (they aren’t) or advised only writing under the full moon by candlelight, the book would still be worth the money, time and effort to read.  Since a quick scan shows that the remaining chapters are every bit as useful, I can unreservedly recommend this book to anyone involved in a thesis or dissertation.  You will get the skills necessary to be a prolific and ORGANIZED academic writer.

<crickets chirping>

A year later we heard that the journal had gone through a couple of “changes” and wanted to know if we wanted our paper back or were willing to wait*.  We said we’d wait.

<more crickets>

Friday we FINALLY got the paper back – revise and resubmit.

The number one comment by both reviewers?  The literature review was out of date.

^&(*^%$%$#^&^&()()%$&*)*&&^%#@&*(

Well, DUH!  Of course it’s out of date.  YOU PEOPLE SAT ON IT FOR YEARS!!!

*sigh*

So now, instead of working on my literature review, I’m working on the lit review for this paper instead.

It is always better to have published papers in the field, so I know that this is worth the effort in the long run, but if this takes too long I may never graduate.  Again.

* A while back I did a paper with someone in the law school and discovered that they basically shop their papers around to everywhere, all at once, and take “the best” [read: prestigious] offer.  I am so jealous of that system.

I have one OneNote notebook called Dissertation.  Within it, I have 8 sections:

A few things about this:

• The first 5 sections reflect the 5 chapters required in my dissertation: Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Findings, Conclusion
• I have a tab called Media into which I put less scholarly discussion around my topic. I probably won’t use this stuff in my Lit Review but may use it for context in the introduction.
• Meta is where I put notes on things like how to write a literature review, what constitutes a good one, etc.
• Old is where I put notes related to things I may not end up using.  In this case I am looking at changing the specific focus of my dissertation, so the prior focus is under OLD now.  I don’t want to lose that work, but I don’t want it cluttering things up, either.

Within each section, I am creating multiple tabs with notes on specific sub-areas.  For example, here is the literature review pages:

Notice that the first tab is labeled structure.  I am working on an outline of what the eventual document will look like on that tab. That tab also contains search terms I am using for each section of the outline so that later I can revisit and see if I come up with any new ones.

Below that, each 1st author has a tab.  If they have just one applicable paper, the title is part of the tab name.  If not, then I’ll throw in the word Multiple.

Within each tab, I take notes on the paper.  I am trying very hard to make those notes brief, useful, and as much about my observations on the paper as a restatement of the paper itself.  Here is an example:

Key things to notice: the bibliographic reference is at the top.  I am using Zotero to track my references, but including items here just to make sure I take no changes on losing the information.

In this case I copied the abstract in, since it did a good job of summarizing the paper.  I then put in a number of bullet points about things important to my work.  In this case, there were several methodological issues, such as the data used and the lack of confounding variables included in the study. I also put in a bit about the theoretical approach, which was interesting in this case.

If I see a specific number or quote that I believe I will use, I include those in the page.  In general my goal is to keep each paper to under half a page.

OneNote automatically enters the times and dates when the document was started, so that I can revisit items on which my perspective may have changed.

I have done some playing around with tags, but find that to be OneNote’s weakest feature.  In the end I find I’m not using those much.  In fact I don’t even recall what some of those tags were intended to mean.

Today my goal is to put some more thought into the structure given the modified topic.  I had a really good structure for the old review, and am genuinely mourning it’s loss today.  The new one is nowhere near as thorough or well thought out.  Without that structure go guide my reading I feel as though I’ll be wandering around blind again, so while I will certainly update it as the process moves forward, for now I want to get enough down to guide my work.

In theory your dissertation is a new and original contribution to scholarly knowledge.  That means no one has done it before.  In practice, that can be pretty subtle (for example no one has done it for this group before, or using this method, or from this theoretical perspective).  Nonetheless you need to place your research in the context of the broader conversation about this topic.  Just because no one has done exactly what you have before doesn’t mean that they aren’t talking about it.  The literature review is where you do that, and at its most general is just a summary of the conversation to date.  However in doctoral education it is never quite that simple.

Finding the literature is often the easy part.  In fact, it’s veray easy to find way too much.  The big commercial library databases are a good place to start looking, including listings of recent dissertations.  (As a side note I am finding that reading a couple of dissertations has helped me to get a handle on the expectations and tone.  Even tangentially related dissertations have helped with this.)  Once you find a few relevant documents, their bibliographies are the next step in the chain.  Many fields prefer you start from great canonical articles. These can be used with a tool like Web of Science to back-track everyone who has cited that article up to the present day and make finding the state of the subject quite easy.  A little time with a reference librarian to fine tune your search terms and learn some of these more obscure tools is time well spent.

But it had never been clearly articulated to me what made a literature review good.  In reviewing a journal article recently I discovered what made one bad: one paragraph per study, summarizing the population, methods and findings, with no consolidation or theme.  In effect it was an annotated bibliography, and it was awful (not to mention painful to read).  As my adviser once told me, a literature review should have an argument; a common thread that not only explains what has come before but helps you tell the reader why your work is important and why your conclusions matter.

An article provided by a friend in my reading group has given me a much better understanding of the elements of a good literature review.

This chart* summarizes what I think are an excellent set of criteria for judging a literature review.  It also sets the bar quite high as far as what a student needs to accomplish.

The first item on the list is Coverage, and this requires some explaination.  It is very easy to undersearch (not find everything), oversearch (find everything and include it even when it makes no sense, is out of date or repetative), or fail to truly think about why you are including something.  The items you include should be purposeful and well thought out; not just there to prove that you’ve read everything regardless.  Moreover you MUST keep up with the literature as your research progresses.  The lit review is the first chapter you work on, but it should also be the last one you look at before you turn the dissertation in.

Synthesis is the second category and is what seperates a scholar from an undergrad; any undergrad can regurgitate a list of articles, but it takes a more sophisticated approach to look at the broader picture, find the commonalities and differences, and call out the gaps.

Methodology was a new one for me.  The authors argue that a good review looks at both the main methodologies used in the area, but also evaluates them, looks for gaps and proposes potential new approaches.  In a perfect world the new approach should be precisely what you are doing in your dissertation.

Significance is an interesting one in education.  We produce PhDs (thought to be more research oriented) and EdDs (thought to be more practice oriented).  Some would argue that this should result in different criteria for the literature review, although the authors of the chart disagree.  I would suggest that all doctoral students need to understand both, but that the balance (60% scholarly / 40% practical or vice versa) could change depending on the degree and the topic.

The last category is Rhetoric, which relates back to my adviser’s comments.  The quality of the writing needs to be clear, organized and integrated with the rest of the document.

As I am reading, I am trying to keep these ideas in my mind.  As I read abstracts I am trying to place the topic within the broader academic conversation, and using that placement to decide whether I am going to read the entire article or skip this.  I am using tagging to help with synthesis and methodology, and for now am not eliminating any articles I find.  Later I intend to trim and note why, but feel that I need that big picture first. By knowing what a good literature review looks like first I hope to be able to produce one.

* Boote, D. N.  P., & Beile, P. L. (2005). Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation. Educational Researcher, 34(6), 3-15.

So I am going to try a technology experiment.  First, I will be (*DEEP BREATH*) upgrading this machine to Vista.  Then I will be installing a Wacom Bamboo Graphics Tablet on which I can write my notes directly into Onenote.  If this works and I find myself using it a lot I may explore a tablet PC in the future, but this is an inexpensive way to get the functionality (hand write and the computer can read it) without spending $1000 on a new computer.

Ideas from those who had completed their dissertations

When I polled my writing group, the two that had finished immediately talked about how they started with the most general and went to the most specific.  That wasn’t what I meant.  My concern was more fundamental then that; how do you keep all the notes straight, find references again when you need it, and assist yourself in remembering what you’ve read?  And how do you do it as you go along, as opposed to after the fact?

One person in the writing group admitted:

My primary organizational system was (and still is) “piles” of stacks of readings all over the place – I didn’t use refworks or any other computer program for organizing things. I would try to organize a summary and highlight main points on a piece of paper attached to each article. But I’m mostly a margin writer. I attached an article that was really helpful for me in getting started.

That would make me CRAZY!  But she was done and I wasn’t, so it was at least worth thinking about.

Another was a bit more organized:

The way I organized my readings was by topic. I numbered each hard copy and then put them in a big binder with a tab for each article. You can see that in the written document that the article’s number appears by the title, but under the heading of the topic

She then wrote up an annotated bibliography, reorganized each item in a word doc to the flow she wanted, then wrote the review.  Better, but I am more technologically-minded then that and couldn’t imagine flipping around through a word doc to find the articles and reorganize them.

Technical tools

I knew in advance I would be keeping my references in Zotero;  I have been nothing but impressed by the software. (If you agree, there is an anonymous donor matching donations $2 per $1 you donate.)  However I wasn’t inclined to try keeping all my notes in there – I wanted something that would give me more visible space and a way of organizing not just within an article but across articles.

I went back and reviewed a couple of articles I had saved that I thought would help.  I previously referenced this post on Mind Mapping the Literature Review, but in rereading it determined that for it to be useful you had to be very familiar with the literature in question.  More recently, I ran across the idea of using a wiki to organize thoughts and materials.  This idea seemed promising, but I don’t know wiki software and was concerned that I might spend all my time learning the software, not working.  I was also concerned about backups, given that this is NOT something I’m going to want to redo it due to someone elses disk crash.

In the end, I found myself comparing Evernote and OneNote.  Each has different strengths and weaknesses, and I had to evaluate which features were more important for my work.  (Believe me, throwing “compare evernote onenote” into google will get you a LOT of responses and opinions, only some of which will match your own requirements.)

Key features I considered were:

Of course there are other less critical differences.  Onenote has some excellent integration with outlook, but I don’t use outlook at home.  Evernote is stronger on web clipping, but for dissertation research that isn’t really an issue.  Onenote has just about everything you have in Word and other office tools, while Evernote is lightweight.

In the end I chose Onenote, primarily because it seemed that Evernote was too light weight for such a heavy topic.

The next step was to determine how I would use it.  Onenote has tabs across the top and another set (within a given top tab) down the side.  This allowed me to use the top tabs for the different sections of the dissertation (Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Findings, Conclusion).  Within the literature review section, each additional page is related to a piece of literature that has been given tags regarding the section of the review it relates to (can be more than one), the methods (quant, qual, mixed), and anything I may need to do with/about it (such as follow up on the author, find things that are referenced in their literature, or talk to my chair/committee).

Within each tab the first page is Structure.  I read about mind mapping all the time, but in the end I wrote an outline.  I guess I’m just a more linear thinker.  I took my writing groups suggestion of going from more broad to more narrow in each of the key areas, and tried to think of the questions I needed to answer to build my case for each.

Now comes the hard work – reading all the articles.

• Working full time at day job, who has laid off half the company in the last 3 months so I need to perform adequately
• Teaching 1 section on Intro to Statistics and the associated Lab
• AERA presentation to write, to be uploaded by March 23rd
• Reading prep toward comps this summer and dissertation after that.  I know 1 comp question so far (local and national environment of high stakes testing with regard to its relationship to college performance)
• Data may start coming in that will be used for dissertation, in which case I will have to start turning disjointed files into a longitudinal database; that’s going to be a blast.

All of which means I need to get back to being reasonably organized.

• WORK: Luckily my day job is relatively self-contained.  I organize myself within that bucket and it rarely crosses over outside the occasional blackberry message. 
• TEACHING:  For the teaching, I have finished lecture notes for 7 out of 15
  chapters and 2 of the 4 exams.  I’m not quite up through spring break,
  but getting there.  
• Today I need to go through the piles of papers on my desk and organize what goes to class and what doesn’t.
• Tonight I need to go through my ancillary materials and add to my notes pages for the 4 chapters I just finished, then print the notes pages for myself.
• Tomorrow I need to call the Blackboard Administrator and get my class turned on so that I can use it for distributing copies of the Presentations to the students, as well as ancillary materials.
• Tomorrow night is the first class; I need to be well rested, fed, and my most sparkling self (ugh)
• Next weekend, in addition to grading the first homework, I would like to go through and complete the two chapters to get me through spring break.
• AERA: Dang that thing sneaks up on me every single year.  I need to review my proposal and the comments made by the reviewers and my adviser, then start writing.  I have most of the materials, but this is a slightly different way of organizing the material and I need to not underestimate how long that can take.
• Next weekend I need to re-read the proposal, my advisers comments and those of the reviewers, then begin free-writing around the topic. 
• COMPS: This is the one I have the most fudge on, so I will probably let this slide until after the AERA paper is done.  The exception is if adviser decides to have any kind of regular meeting (doubtful) between now and when the data is all here.
• DATA: Waiting game – the good news is that its not here yet, so I have nothing to do.  The bad news is that I don’t know when it WILL be here…..

Last time I taught I found my entire weekends being occupied with things related to teaching.  That can’t happen again.  More importantly, I need to align how I use the weekends for the entire semester to meet my broader goals.  So here are a few goals:

1. Weeknights are mine.  Either I am teaching until 8pm or I am trying to get to the gym, but one way or the other I need the downtime to relax and am too often braindead anyway from a day of work.  The most I will ever ask of myself on a weeknight is grading homework in front of the TV.
2. One day out of every weekend is devoted to AERA writing and Comps;  At first it should be mostly AERA, later in the term it will refocus to mostly comps, but the goal is not to let the class take up both days and to do both from the very beginning.
3. I need to get the remaining lecture notes between now and spring break (2 chapters) completed next weekend.  I can then complete the remainder of these notes after the AERA paper is done.

Unlike so much of life, most of the non-class related tasks are not things that can easily be broken down and put on a list.  I’ve tried to turn the project “Write AERA paper” into a series of next actions and failed.  They are either too vague, or specific but rapidly become irrelevant or incorrect.  Therefore I need to focus on those types of lists for what I CAN create lists for (grade homework, review lecture notes, answer emails from class) and allot time in chunks for those that I cannot.

Here is to the internal hope that arises every semester that somehow, this one can be different. 

1. The 29 steps to writing a dissertation.  The first step to finishing anything is breaking it down into managable parts, and this article does that for the dissertation.  I have to admit, reading it made me hopeful that I could finish some day, particularly because it had a guideline for hours as well as for steps.  I doubt the hours will work out exactly, but proportionally it makes sense.  More importantly the article breaks up the process into chunks that can more easily function as projects in GTD. 
2. The 12 steps to becoming a more prolific scholar.  Interestingly enough, the ideas are complementary.  It starts with Step 1, write 15-30 minutes per day, EVERY day, and Step 2 to share your daily writing records with others.  These strike me as critical, since writing is a skill, not a gift, and one must practice to get better.  Much like other types of habit-building, accountability can be the difference between success and failure.  So sharing the record of whether you wrote each day and for how long can be truly helpful.

To help myself get into writing more, I created a form using google docs and a spreadsheet that will allow me to enter my time daily.  I then shared it with my writing group and forwarded it to them.  Maybe if I can get them doing this it will help us all, but regardless it will help ME keep moving forward.  If you are interested in trying this tool or joining an informal accountability group for writing, let me know and we can put something together!

I have 2 conferences coming up for which I need to write the papers.  They are variations on the same theme, so the background research is all the same, which will save some time, but they are a lot of work none the less.

At the same time I am finishing out my methods classes; The historical research methods class asks us to write a history paper on anything we want, showing what we’ve learned.  That was due on Friday.

Now, I was aware from the beginning that I couldn’t entirely double (triple?) dip here;  The class paper is much shorter (12 pages or so) than the conference paper (30).  But I wanted to make as much reusable as possible.

That proved far more difficult than I had anticipated.  While I do think the paper I turned in can be used as a very early first draft of the conference paper, it has a much different tone from the one I intend to use for the final conference paper.  Moreover, the audience was entirely different, which caused me to write differently.  The class paper went to a historian who knows little about the history of education.  The conference paper will be going to historians of education who may know as much, if not more, about my topic than I do.

I also cut the class paper off from revisions at an entirely different (and frankly lower) level than I will the conference version.  I must admit, I am at the point in the PhD program where my attitude is “I just need a B; no one will look at class grades ever again once I write my dissertation”.  So I can see the flaws in this paper; It is probably better than many other papers in the class, but I can do much better.  And will, for the conference, where (frankly) it counts for a lot more.

My husband, however, pointed out that this was an important lesson for me.  I’ll be the first to admit that I am a perfectionist.  I was getting stressed about this paper in an unhealthy way because I felt it wasn’t up to my standards, when in fact it was just fine for its purpose.  He forced me to ask some really important questions about the paper that I wanted to share:

• What is the purpose of the paper?  “Passing a class” is very different from “Impressing future potential hiring committees” and the effort you put in should reflect the purpose
• Who is the audience?  Again, “one history professor teaching a masters class” is different from “many history of education professors at a conference” and changes not only what you write but what background and context is needed to make the paper make sense?
• What are the requirements/parameters of the paper? If I failed in any one respect here it was that I failed to meet one of the requirements of the class paper; I was over in length.  He said 2500-3500 words, what I turned in was nearly 4200.  I’m sure he’ll dock me for it.  On the other hand, I added a section that will be removed from the conference paper as unnecessary in itself.  It’s points will be embedded in the broader paper, which is likely to end up around 10,000 words before its done.
• What is my most important point and do I succeed in making it? I am finding it hard to write about a topic I am becoming so intimate with.  I want to include everything I’ve learned when in fact I need to focus on a single thesis and make it cleanly. 

Once I answered these questions for  myself I was able to make better progress.  I knew when to stop, and I also cut more than 500 words of details that were likely to make little difference to this audience and got me at least a bit closer to the requirements. 

Now I need to revisit those questions as I write the two conference papers.  The thesis is slightly different between them, and one is a more prestigious (national as opposed to regional) conference and therefore needs my best work.  The first needs to be done by the end of the month, the second by October 10th.  Wish me luck.

First I went to a history of ed conference in Newark that was awesome.  I practically got giggly when I saw some of the big names in the field sitting across the lunch table from me. 

I really needed that conference; I’ve been losing faith in both my ability and desire to finish this.  Working full time in a career that is, in some ways, still very interesting (even if it isn’t the life-style I want long-term) with a major project deadline was sapping my enthusiasm for my academic work.  However the project is done, so that will help going forward.  I hope.  And the conference reinvigorated me toward my work.

Then, like every other education scholar, I have been rushing to prepare conference proposals to the “big” conference in the field (AERA) that were due yesterday.  Tomorrow I have a paper due for one of my classes, so I won’t get caught up until after that.

I can say that I am very pleased with my submissions to AERA.  I sent in one proposal to a SIG that essentially is what I want to do for my dissertation, so I forwarded it off to my adviser as well.  My writing group read it and only one had any real substantive comments; the rest were just grammar (I still mix up that/which for example) and clarifying of wording.  Everyone thought it was well written.  We’ll see if the sig agrees.  It is definitely a unique perspective.

What interested me about that proposal is that the angle came to me on a drive and, when I got home, I wrote the whole thing up in under 4 hours.  It really just flowed.  I thought when I sent it off to my readers that they would say it sucked or was scattered, but apparently it was more along the inspired lines.  Ah the power of a conference to get one motivated, followed by amazing cinnamon swirl french toast for energy.

I also sent in a pre-conference professional development proposal having to do with presentation skills for academic conferences.  Last week I was at a really interesting international conference and was reminded again of just how few academics seem to know how to:

• Summarize their paper into a 15-20 minute talk (ie edit the content reasonably)
• Distill in information into slides that help, not hinder, their presentation
• Deliver said presentation within the timelimit
• “Read the room” to determine whether pacing is working, explainations are clear, etc.

So my presentation (called “Making your Brilliance Known”) focuses on taking what is certainly a fabulous paper and distilling it down, making slides that help, how NOT to read your own slides but deliver in an engaging way and use the feedback from the room to modify your delivery.  I’ve blogged on parts of this topic before, but this will give me a chance to pull it all together.

Who knows if that one will get accepted; I think it is needed, but some people might find it offensive.  (“What does some chick with an MBA know about presenting at an academic conference?  Shouldn’t she at least finish her dissertation before she starts trying to tell us what to do?”)  I just don’t get why people don’t realize the skills are VERY different.

I have decided that I need about 3 conferences per year to stay motivated.  That means this international one during the summer, the american history of ed conference in the fall (already have a paper accepted for this) and the big conference in the spring.  I am committing to myself to submit to each one, which shouldn’t be hard.  I’m finding that if anything I have too many ideas after each conference.  This is going to cost money, but as long as I am working full time it is a managable expense if it keeps my enthusiasm level up for the work.  Once I am a full time academic, I can back that off.  (Anyway, the international conference next year is in the Netherlands – I’ve never been!!!)

Anyway, now I have a historiography paper due this week and an academic
book review due next week that I need to write.  Sometimes it feels
like it never ends, bit a little enthusiasm helps.