Writing Genres: The Dissertation

By Jonathan Kanary, GWC Consultant

When I started working on my dissertation, I thought I knew how to write. After all, I had successfully completed seminar papers. I had prepared and delivered talks for conferences. I had even placed a couple of scholarly articles. Surely I had the hang of this academic writing thing by now, right?

Then I got my director’s feedback on a draft chapter. He was gracious, and he liked a lot of what I was doing. But he also made it clear that my work needed a lot of revision. I started to think, “maybe I don’t know what I’m doing after all.”

The Problem

Almost no one who begins writing a dissertation has ever written a dissertation before. You might have written a master’s thesis, and that helps. But you’re also new to this.

The good news is that if you’ve gotten this far, you’ve done a lot of writing. You have most of the skills you need to complete the task.

The challenge is that it isn’t exactly the same task. If you want to master the dissertation, you have to understand what kind of thing it is: its genre.

In this post, I want to break the dissertation’s genre into three parts: the purpose, the audience, and the format.

The Purpose

What is a dissertation for? This might seem like an obvious question: you’re making a scholarly argument. If you’re in STEM or the Social Sciences, the basis for your argument is probably a study, or a series of studies. If you’re in the Humanities, the material for your argument will likely include evidence you have gathered from books and articles. Your task is to make this argument and make it well.

True—but incomplete. Your dissertation has a second major purpose: showing that you’ve done your work. In today’s world, a graduate degree is a kind of credential. It’s a stamp of approval that you have the competencies those letters after your name represent. Your dissertation tells your committee that they don’t have to feel bad about giving you that stamp of approval. They can release you into the world with a reasonable hope that you know how to do the sorts of things that people with advanced degrees in your field do. This means that you need to demonstrate the thoroughness of your research. And you have to explain—maybe more fully than you would in other kinds of academic writing—exactly how your argument relates to other scholars’ work.

The Audience

Who is the dissertation for? Again, this initially seems obvious: you write for your committee. But have you thought about what that means? Your director may or may not have a high degree of expertise in the specific area of your project. Other members of your committee have relevant expertise; but they almost certainly don’t all work in your exact area. If you have an “outside reader” from another department, or someone from your own department who does a very different kind of research, they may not know all the technical terminology you’re using. They may lack historical context. When you reference a scholarly work that has defined your area, they may not know why it’s such a big deal.

Ask yourself, “What might someone on my committee need to know for this argument to make sense?” And then figure out how to include that information.

Although the primary audience for a dissertation is your committee, you could end up having a secondary audience: other scholars working in your area. I am citing several dissertations as I write my own. However, if you do a good job providing background for everyone on your committee, it will likely be enough for secondary readers as well.

The Format

So how the heck do I put together this dissertation?

Here, I have good news: the Graduate School has lots of resources to help you format your dissertation properly. (Hint: If you go ahead and put your draft into this format to begin with, it will save you a lot of time later.)

But you might also want to ask your director if he or she can point you to an earlier dissertation that proved successful. Sometimes seeing what an acceptable entry in the genre looks like can help you imagine your own.

Getting Done

Notice, I said an “acceptable” entry, not a “brilliant” or “ground-breaking” one. More than one faculty member has told me, “A good dissertation is a done dissertation.” It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. This isn’t the last thing you get to write. You will have plenty of time to revise before it becomes a book or a series of articles. Just keep your purpose in mind, pursue it in a way that will make sense to your audience, and follow the basic format.

You can do this.

 

Jonathan Kanary is a PhD candidate in English at Baylor, where he serves as a consultant for the Graduate Writing Center and teaches for the Great Texts department. His research focuses on the intersection of literature and spirituality, with a particular interest in the Middle Ages and 19th-20th century British literatures.