WRITING UP THE
DISSERTATION
Mark Philp
Writing to a deadline
• Start at the end!
• Work out what you need to do to get there!
• Due Thursday week 1 Summer Term - by 12 noon – to be
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submitted on-line and to Room 342.
What steps will you identify on the way?
Eg: full penultimate draft 2-3 weeks before the deadline to
allow it to rest and then re-read.
Last chance for a discussion with supervisor before the
end of Term 2
What does that mean for what you do in Reading Week in
term 2, and over the Christmas break? And for this
Reading Week? And for meetings with personal tutors and
seminar leaders?
Job specification
• 9,000 words excl. bibliog and footnotes
• Find out – TNR/12point/double spaced = c 1,000 words in
three pages A4 (chk incl.excl notes)
• Is 9= 4.5x2?
• Journal article length plus c.1K
• Find models – why are they good?
a. org of argument
b. evidence
c. clarity/coherence/cogency
d. experience as a reader
e. quality of writing
f. interest of the topic
Writing up – the metaphor
• Science based
• Kuhn and paradigms
• History and ?
paradigms
discourses
fields
debates
controversies
lacunae
applying X to Y – models, theories etc.
In what are you making an intervention? And, to do that, what
must you lay out?
2 Models
• Identify topic
• Identify area
• Identify:
• Start writing
literature/archive/sources
• Read literature
• Talk to people
• Collect more evidence
• Write thesis
• Talk to people
• Identify and work on
sources etc
• Re-write
• Talk to people
• Read more literature
• Write thesis
Organisation
• Electronic or physical form for documents, articles, material
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from books, etc.
Need a retrieval system –
Need a copy if electronic!
Where do you keep your notes
How do you keep your thinking distinct from what other people
have said – ie how to ensure attribution?
Periodic restructuring – but go back to the basement!
Bibliography – everything you look at – especially everything
you ever take notes from – and keep a reference
Footnote format – undergraduate style guide http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/referencing
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and read subsection on Bibliography
Archival material vs published material.
Now
• Get a notebook and write down your preliminary ideas.
• What question do you want to address?
• In relation to what field?
• In relation to what existing literature?
• Why don’t you like existing work/feel it is inadequate
• Who might you talk to?
• Why do you care about it? Do you do so enough? And do
you do so too much?
• What other deadlines do you have and how will you fit
them in alongside the dissertation?
By the end of this term
• Preliminary title
• Brief outline of your proposed topic
• 50 word version/ 250-400 word version – need to make
sure you’ve registered the related module on eMR – and if
it changes re-register.
• 250-400 word version – need to be able to tell other
people (friends, family, personal tutor) what you are
working on – in a way that conveys your interest and
specific angle. And you need to try it out on them!
• Need to have identified core reading and sources you will
use and need to have done some of the work on the
former – and, ideally, in the first week of the vacation,
some on the latter.
Before Reading Week term 2
• Over Christmas work out a detailed plan; a contents page
or outline of the argument – with some reflections on what
needs to be done – think steps and sections of an
argument, not discrete chapters
• Complete core reading – and identify additional crucial
sources
• TALK TO PEOPLE
• THEN: Draft about half the core of the thesis in reading
week – and work out what else needs to be done!
Elements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Main body of the evidence and argument
• 3. Conclusion
• Order of writing: 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1
• There can be other orders, but the core element is 2- it’s
the evidence, and the main argument about the evidence,
and its central to get that clear.
What works for you?
• A room of ones own
• Library space
• Steeping
• Sleeping on it/exercising on it
• What stint sizes – build them up now –
• What sort of writer are you?
• Keep adding to and going back to your notebook
Discarding the
ladder
What you need to get from
A to B is not necessarily
what you need to get from
B to C, or C to D.
Writing good academic
prose and argument
requires that you start on
a plateau with other
writing in the field. It takes
knowledge and a range of
skills, conceptual
apparatus and control of
evidence to get there.
You don’t have it to start –
so don’t think your first
thought are your best – be
ready to discard and rethink – but keep a record!
Cutting vs writing to length
Writing for Readers
• Who will read it for you – and when? Important to set up
self-help group. You are not competing!
• Be clear what are asking for
• Typos?
• Expertise?
• Clarity and argument
• Two key periods
• First block of substantive writing (reading week term 2)
• Final proof reading
Who will read it to assess it?
• Supervisor
• Additional examiner – with some expertise
• Arbitrating examiner
• Dissertations committee
Don’t write just for supervisor!
What sort of animal is it?
• Creative writing?
NO! Avoid ‘I believe’, ‘I feel’, ‘I think’ – its not the ‘I’
but the subjective state
• Act of reasoned communication advancing a claim or set
of claims about an existing field of study and defending
those claims against competing accounts.
Reading as a stranger
• What do you write on – and what do you read on
• De-familiarise it – print it out and read it as a stranger to it.
And mark what you think is best, and which bits are
central to the way in which the argument develops.
• Topic sentence structure
• Reading as a copy-editor/ vs as a critic
Things not to say
• My printer ran out of ink
• My hard drive collapsed and wiped my notes/drafts/final
version of the thesis
• I left the only electronic copy on a memory stick on the
train
• I didn’t know we had other pieces of work to submit after
Easter
• What’s a dissertation?!