Any time you feel like you can’t get through your dissertation, go read someone else’s.  I’ve read two tonight.  One makes massively broad claims with only a single citation to back up 10 different points, has the citation for those 10 points wrong, and misunderstands what the cited person was writing so that they paraphrase it incorrectly.  The person they were citing was another dissertation.  It made that first one look high-quality.  The lit review was like a game of buzzword bingo, and just about as deep, their references were uniformly 10-15 years old, there were a lot of “this”‘s and “that”‘s where it was unclear what the writer was referring to, and there were a number of sentences that made no sense at all.

I feel better now.