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AB A Guide to Completing the

Disser tation Phase of Doctoral Studies

Keith Hjortshoj

TO

WRITING F R O M

2 A Guide to Completing the Dissertation Phase of Doctoral Studies

Keith Hjortshoj is the John S. Knight Director of Writing in the Majors. He joined the staff of the Writing Workshop shortly after completing his Ph. D. in anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell, in 1977, with research interests in Indo-Islamic culture in northern India. As a member of the Knight Institute and Writing Workshop staffs he has taught writing courses for students at all levels, including seminars for freshmen, a course he initiated for graduate students, an advanced writing course on social research, and teaching seminars for graduate students and faculty at Cornell and at other institutions. With Harry Shaw, then director of the Knight Writing Program, Hjortshoj developed Writing in the Majors in 1987 and became the director of this program in 1992. He has also served as the co-director of the Lilly Endowment Teaching Fellows Program at Cornell. Hjortshoj has received the Clark Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Merrill Presidential Scholar Award for Outstanding Educator.

Keith Hjortshoj has published work in Asian and Islamic studies and in rhetoric and com- position. His most recent publications in composition include “The Marginality of the Left-Hand Castes (A Parable for Writ- ing Teachers)” (CCC 46, 1995), “Theory, Confusion, Inclusion” in Critical Theory: Curriculum , Pedagogy, Politics, edited by James Slevin and Art Young (NCTE: 1996), The Transition to College Writing (Bedford: 2001), and Understanding Writing Blocks (Oxford U. Press, 2001).

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Contents

The Mystery of Graduate Writing 4 A Rhetoric of Transition for the End of Schooling 7 Rhetorical Differences Between Student and Professional Writing 11 Focus and Frame of Reference 17 The Essential Structure of Research- Based Writing 22 Time Management and the Writing Process 29 Advice for Non-Native Speakers of English 39 Conclusions 41 Some References for Dissertation Writers 44

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4 A Guide to Completing the Dissertation Phase of Doctoral Studies

The Admission to Candidacy Exam, or “A Exam,” is one of the few common requirements among Cornell’s diverse

PhD programs. According to the Cornell Guide to Graduate Study, passing the A Exam means that you are “ready to present a dissertation.” Before you can present a dissertation, of course, you have to produce one, and doing so is your main job description as a PhD candidate in transit between the A Exam and the B Exam. Passing the B Exam and filing an approved copy of the dissertation are the last common requirements for the PhD.

Producing a dissertation is therefore the main subject of this guide for those of you en route between the A and B Exams.

Because the dissertation is a complex written document that all successful PhD candidates must complete, writing is critically important in this last phase of doctoral work. For reasons explained in following sections, the process of completing a dissertation is normally difficult. Writing projects on a comparable scale, such as book manuscripts, remain challenging and

frustrating even for the most experienced and productive scholars. For the great majority of PhD candidates, producing a document of such length over months or years is also an unfamiliar task, requiring new methods, motivations, standards, and uses of time. In all fields, increasing competition for jobs and postdoctoral fellowships favors PhD candidates who not only complete their dissertations efficiently but also complete research proposals and articles, conference papers, and other professional writing. In these final years of doctoral study, progress is almost synonymous with getting things written.

The typical challenges involved in this process should not be mysterious. Everyone who has a PhD, including your advisors and other members of your departments, has successfully completed a dissertation. At large research universities, hundreds of doctoral candidates are currently working on these projects. Our libraries contain thousands of dissertations, approved, bound, and catalogued for circulation. More than any other form of writing, the dissertation

Imagine that you are observing production in a widget factory and that your view toward the end of the process is obstructed. As a result, you witness only partial assembly and then, somewhat mi- raculously, a string of finished products. Given the complexity of their design, you become curious: What occurred in between? In the pro- duction of PhDs, this blind spot is the dissertation process. Because it is decentralized and largely privatized, the process remains hidden to most graduate students, leaving them unprepared to negotiate the multifaceted challenges of the dissertation stage.

Karen Cardozo, “Demystifying the Dissertation”

The Mystery of Graduate Writing

4 A Guide to Completing the Dissertation Phase of Doctoral Studies

Chapter 1. The Mystery of Graduate Writing

The Admission to Candidacy Exam, or “A Exam,” is one of the few common requirements among Cornell’s diverse PhD programs. According to the Cornell Guide to Graduate Study, passing the A Exam means that you are “ready to present a dissertation.” Before you can present a dissertation, of course, you have to produce one, and doing so is your main job description as a PhD candidate in transit between the A Exam and the B Exam. Passing the B Exam and filing an approved copy of the dissertation are the last common requirements for the PhD.

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From one level to the next, writing projects tend to become more difficult and time- consuming, not easier.

At ascending levels of higher education, the diverse forms and functions of writing seem increasingly to defy generalization. This is one reason that “graduate writing” seems mysterious. Advanced studies among the disciplines do not produce good writers in general; they produce highly specialized good writers who have become familiar with distinct forms of explanation and argument, presented in diverse styles and terminologies. If we asked successful writers in physics or chemical engineering to produce a professional article in literary studies, most of them would become weak or hopelessly blocked writers in that alien academic form. Scholars in the humanities would be equally incompetent at producing scientific research articles.

Specialization also helps to explain the scarcity of writing assistance for graduate students, especially at advanced levels of doctoral programs. Beginning in the late 19th century, college writing instruction developed in response to perceived weaknesses in the writing skills of college freshmen, often attributed to “preparation deficits” in secondary education. Writing courses and programs still focus primarily on the first year of college and rapidly diminish at higher levels, nearly vanishing at the beginning of graduate studies. Although graduate advisors sometimes tell struggling advisees that they should “take a writing course,” those designed for undergraduates rarely address the needs of graduate students, especially in advanced studies outside the humanities. Because writing instruction retains some of its original association with the remediation of “basic skills” in general education, acknowledging difficulty with writing at higher levels appears to be an admission of weakness.

When combined with factors of

represents an essential, nearly universal credential and shared experience among scholars.

It seems very odd, therefore, that as you embark on this heavily traveled path to the PhD, many of you will feel that you are entering uncharted territory with unknown pitfalls, mires, and false turns. If these are normal difficulties, why do PhD candidates tend to view them as personal struggles, peculiar to their own circumstances, research projects, or dispositions? In this kind of academic writing, why does experience seem to produce amnesia and uncertainty rather than common knowledge? Why is help with writing so rarely available at this level of academic work?

To illuminate the most common challenges of completing dissertations, we begin with some general answers to those questions. Later sections of this guide will give more detailed explanations and practical advice.

A popular myth encourages us to believe that by the early years of college, good writers establish basic skills and strategies that remain a stable, sufficient platform for writing throughout their lives and careers. If this were true, writing would become increasingly easy, without further instruction or fundamental changes in our writing strategies.

But all experienced writers, including the most productive scholars, know that the development of writing ability is a lifelong process. Successful approaches that students develop in high school no longer work in college. Forms of essays or lab reports that received good grades in freshman courses no longer meet expectations in advanced undergraduate or graduate courses. Methods used to complete papers for graduate courses no longer work for producing dissertations, research articles, or books. The most successful writers are those who adapt most quickly and flexibly to changing conditions.

A Guide to Completing the Dissertation Phase of Doctoral Studies6

specialization, this association of writing difficulties with deficits in basic skills may also explain why studies of common problems in graduate education rarely mention struggles with “writing” as distinct causes of attrition or delay in doctoral programs. For example, the 2008 Council of Graduate Schools report on its elaborate

“PhD Completion Project” makes no explicit reference to writing problems as matters of concern. Instead, categories of potential

“interventions” to improve completion rates and times include selection/matching (meaning admissions), mentoring and advising, financial support and structure, program environments, research experiences, and curricular and administrative processes and procedures. Other studies of doctoral programs have mentioned factors such as family responsibilities, time management, relative isolation, confidence, and adjustment to the culture of a research university, also without direct reference to writing problems per se. To the extent that these problems arise in the process of completing dissertations, they seem inseparable from the unique circumstances of individual doctoral students in diverse programs, where the products of writing vary as well.

Beyond the A Exam at Cornell, the complex processes of completing diverse forms of dissertations therefore appear to be entangled with peculiar features of your own doctoral programs, research projects, special committees, and individual circumstances. These diverse entanglements largely explain why doctoral candidates tend to view normal, widespread writing difficulties as individual, “personal” struggles. Within the narrow contexts of specialized fields and subfields, where your own departments and advisors determine all of the specific expectations you must meet, the challenges of completing a PhD appear to represent unique configurations. Because attrition and delay in PhD programs often occur in the

process of dissertation research and writing, common difficulties in this process must account for a large proportion of the obstacles that individuals encounter. To the extent that doctoral candidates in specific fields seem to be heading off in different directions, in separate little boats into uncharted and potentially troubled waters, these patterns of difficulty across disciplines remain invisible.

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To explain the ways in which you are in the same boat, despite differences among your research programs and experiences,

we need to establish much broader views of writing difficulty and the development of writing ability. For this purpose, imagine a trajectory of academic accomplishment that begins at high school graduation, long before your current position, and extends far beyond it, to the ranks of senior scholars in your fields. How do individuals move from the beginning of this trajectory to the end?

We can observe, first of all, that most do not. About 69 percent of American high school graduates go on to college, but 25 percent of these entering students drop out by the end of their first year, and only 50 percent of them graduate. Only 5 percent of college graduates enter PhD programs. Nationally and across disciplines, about 50 percent of doctoral students complete PhD requirements: 2.5 percent of all college graduates. When we follow the trajectory of higher education in this direction, “defection” is the norm, and those of you who have reached the stage of doctoral candidacy represent an extremely

small proportion of former undergraduates. High percentages of attrition at each stage partly explain the disconnections and necessary adjustments between levels. Very few undergraduates (about 2 out of 100), for example, will actually need to develop the specialized skills and motivations necessary to complete dissertation research and writing.

When we view this trajectory in the opposite direction, however, those of you who have reached the dissertation stage represent a more homogeneous population of individuals who have survived these challenges and share unusual skills, motivations, and experiences. With negligible exceptions, all university professors are former PhD candidates. All PhD candidates are former undergraduates and high school graduates who adapted successfully to the next level. If this path to the PhD were straight and smooth, a lot more of you would remain on it.

But this path is not straight and smooth, and those who believe that it is or should be tend to get lost. A basic premise of this guide is that writing and other dimensions of academic work become most difficult

A Rhetoric of Transition for the End of SchoolingChapter 2. A Rhetoric of Transition for the End of Schooling

To explain the ways in which you are in the same boat, despite differences among your research programs and experiences, we need to establish much broader views of writing difficulty and the development of writing ability. For this purpose, imagine a trajectory of academic accomplishment that begins at high school graduation, long before your current position, and extends far beyond it, to the ranks of senior scholars in your fields. How do individuals move from the beginning of this trajectory to the end?

A Guide to Completing the Dissertation Phase of Doctoral Studies8

and disorienting at turning points—periods of transition—when we write in unfamiliar contexts or forms, to meet new sets of expectations.

To demystify and facilitate dissertation writing, therefore, we should identify the features of the transition that you must now negotiate, as doctoral candidates. What, exactly, are you in transition from and to?

Designating someone who has graduated but remains a student in some respects, the term “graduate student” indicates the transitional nature of this period in your development. Being a good graduate student means that you are effectively becoming something else: a process of transformation from the status of a student to that of a professional research specialist, a scholar, and in many cases a teacher. In a doctoral program, this long period of transition typically continues for five years or more, with changing implications as you complete graduate course requirements, become a doctoral candidate following the A Exam, and pursue dissertation research and writing. The skills and motivations that led you into your PhD program therefore differ from the ones that will lead you out.

In your first two or three years of graduate school, the “school” part probably seemed most appropriate, because you were taking classes with assignments, deadlines, exams, and grades that institutionally regulated your schedules and motivations. Departmental graduate requirements largely defined your use of time: to go to class or to complete readings, papers, problem sets, and other scheduled course assignments. The two or three years preceding the A Exam at Cornell represent academic preparations for dissertation research and real scholarship.

Among Cornell departments, A Exams have diverse forms and functions. Beyond them you will disperse further into offices, library stacks, labs, and field sites to pursue diverse objects of investigation with differing

research methods, conceptual frameworks, and criteria for significance or validity. But these variations obscure the general significance of the A Exam as a major turning point in the lives and careers of doctoral students. “Admission to Candidacy” for the PhD marks the end of schooling after 18 years or more of classroom instruction.

Though still registered as a graduate student, you are finally done with school. Among specialized fields and subfields of research, the following period of metamorphosis produces a great variety of academic creatures. At the end, however, you are all supposed to emerge, dissertations in hand, as blossoming scholars, the vestiges of your student identities left behind you like shed skins.

If we think of the A Exam as a turning point away from schooling and toward real scholarship, many of the writing and learning strategies developed for schooling will become unreliable for the development of scholarship. The end of schooling also marks the end of what composition specialists call “school writing”: almost all the written work you have produced for teachers and classes throughout your formal education. You are now obliged to produce writing that resembles professional scholarship in your fields. To understand the changes this task requires, we should identify the underlying factors that distinguish school writing from professional writing—factors that remain consistent across wide variations among specialized fields.

These factors can be best described as rhetorical variations. The term “rhetoric” has diverse meanings, but in this guide the term will refer both to the features of written texts (their forms, levels of complexity, styles, and so on) and to the circumstances in which they are written (including their audiences, purposes, perceived standards, and other contextual factors). We can think of the rhetorical features of a writing task as

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answers to a series of questions:

• What are you writing? • Why you are writing it? • For whom? • With what voice and authority as the

author, in relation to this audience?

Answers to these questions raise some other relevant questions about methods, time frames, and standards. In other words, when you understand the nature of a writing task, how can you get it done effectively and efficiently, in the broader contexts of your lives, in ways that meet standards for finished writing of this kind? Without considering these rhetorical changes, you will tend to drift into dissertation work with an approach to writing and a sense of yourself as a writer based on past experience. New difficulties you encounter can then seem to represent unique circumstances or insurmountable limits of your ability rather than common, identifiable problems you can solve by deliberately altering your writing strategies.

The normal difficulties of dissertation writing often result from the rhetorical ambiguities of your transitional status, as a former student who is still becoming a certified member of your academic profession. We can reduce this ambiguity by considering the roles and strategies you must leave behind and the ones you are moving toward. Trying to write as a graduate student, between these positions, tends to underscore the ambiguity, and we often prefer familiar strategies to the potential hazards of the unknown.

The clearest reference points and models for your work should lie ahead. Greater awareness of approaches you used as student writers will show you, like rear view mirrors, what you should have left behind.

What Is a Dissertation? In response to the What? question, we

can think of a dissertation as a continuation

of student writing, used to demonstrate acquired knowledge, or as a form of professional writing, used to produce and convey knowledge. Because dissertations represent your potential for professional scholarship, they should resemble forms of professional writing in your fields, with corresponding writing methods, styles, motivations, and other rhetorical factors. Finished dissertations in many programs will resemble academic book manuscripts. In other cases, in the sciences or social sciences, a dissertation may resemble an expanded version of a research article or manuscripts for two or more related research articles, in formats required for submission to journals. You can reasonably expect that, with some further revision, your dissertations will become submitted manuscripts for publication.

Thinking of your dissertations as forms of professional writing—as working drafts of books or articles—generally corresponds with the expectations of graduate advisors and departments. Most graduate advisors look back at their own dissertations as necessary stepping-stones or working drafts for later, more refined books and articles. As a rule, standards for dissertations are somewhat lower than those for publications, even at the submission stage, and the audience and focus for a book-length dissertation are usually narrower than those for a scholarly book in the same field. Remember that your committee members will almost certainly recommend revisions both before and after your B Exam, just as editors and reviewers will require changes to submitted manuscripts. In most cases, therefore, you can think of your dissertation as a finished, promising draft of a book manuscript or set of research articles. This orientation toward professional writing provides readily available models for dissertations in specialized fields, in academic books and research articles. You can also clarify the form, style, and scope

A Guide to Completing the Dissertation Phase of Doctoral Studies10

of a dissertation in your field by examining finished dissertations on file, as close as possible to the type of research you are doing and preferably those approved by your own advisors.

Your dissertation will remain at all stages a work in progress, providing working drafts, data, and ideas for future publications. Efforts to avoid further revision at every stage or to include everything you know about the subject represent student writing strategies that will make the process unnecessarily slow and frustrating. In following sections, we will extend this analysis to other differences between student writing and professional writing, with attention to focus, frame of reference, time management, and other factors relevant to getting complex writing projects done.

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In American research universities, the boundaries and rhetorical shifts between undergraduate and graduate studies

are somewhat blurred. Like professional academic writing, student writing takes many forms, most of them based on the kinds of writing that college teachers do. Undergraduate lab reports resemble scientific research articles. Student research papers for literature, history, or sociology courses resemble research articles in those fields. Doctoral programs and advanced research facilities coexist in the same departments with undergraduate studies. Graduate advisors in these departments also teach and advise undergraduates. Some courses enroll both advanced undergraduates and entering graduate students. And many of you serve as teaching assistants in undergraduate courses. Undergraduates sometimes begin to adopt approaches to writing characteristic of real scholarship, especially in honors projects or co-authored articles with advisors. In turn, rhetorical features of “school writing” often continue into graduate studies, in papers and projects assigned in graduate-level courses.

The following contrasts therefore polarize rhetorical factors that can be difficult to observe in intermediate, overlapping contexts. Their purpose is not to criticize student writing or to distinguish good approaches from bad ones. As a rule, undergraduates produce writing in the way they do because the situations in which they write favor those approaches, not because their methods and motivations are “wrong.” Descriptions of these contrasting positions will include some discussion of their implications for dissertation writers, who are moving between them.

The Rhetorical Features of Student Writing

Because assignments across the disciplines ask undergraduates to produce many types of writing, the What? question we posed earlier is most difficult to answer. Writing assignments in diverse courses, however, share some underlying rhetorical features that condition the ways students typically complete them.

Rhetorical Differences Between Student and Professional Writing Chapter 3. Rhetorical Differences Between Student and Professional Writing

In American research universities, the boundaries and rhetorical shifts between undergraduate and graduate studies are somewhat blurred. Like professional academic writing, student writing takes many forms, most of them based on the kinds of writing that college teachers do. Undergraduate lab

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