Dealing with Dissertations

Final deadlines are looming for many. BA dissertations may well have been submitted. MA dissertations may be required by June or August and some depend on when you initially started for the full 2 years part time or a whole year full time. So the check list would still be useful from my last blog.

Is there more to a dissertation than an essay? Yes. It is your personal research. You have had a particular interest and need to resolve a particular issue. No one else may have tackled exactly what you are doing. It holds value for you at very least. It is wise early on therefore, to look for dissertations on Ethos.bl.uk (The British Library website for all higher degree dissertations) which is often provided as a Moodle link by your institution. Look for closely related dissertations both MA and PhD and the MPhil in between the two. Key words for the search box are from subject matter to scholar's names -for their PhDs.

Do you remember our fictional student - Mirabel- from early blogs on coping with academia.

Well, imagine that Mirabel has come through almost 3 years of BA and is finalising her Dissertation. Shall we continue the story?

Mirabel sat staring at the screen. She had a template in front of her and she had installed some headings from her initial plan. She had added ideas over the months into the various chapters or sections. Quotations were standing next to each other. She checked their references were there. Yes, ready in the footnote form, ready for moving to appropriate paragraphs. She was not going to end up with 'carpet tiles' of quotations slotted next to each other. She determined to make sense of them for her own arguments. She would comment on them, critique them, work on their authors' agendas and argue her case with or against some of them. Even so, it looked like a lot of scattered jigsaw pieces.

Where were the edge pieces to put it together? The Framework? Those headings- did they flow in the argument? It seemed all so reasonable on initially planning it with her supervisor at least 8 months ago. Introduction? She thought she could scribble something down to stop writer's block and revise it at the end. What had the supervisor said was needed there? Purpose, reason for researching this topic, how it would be set up and giving an overview of the whole work, definitions, and methodology. That latter could be a whole chapter in a higher degree but for this purpose a straight forward paragraph might suffice; a mini literature review. Structure all that first and come back to it at the end to check it really did keep to that overview; did the signposting actually work to point the reader in the right direction for the argument?

Then the meat of the subject? Well, first it is good to set the scene. Write a background section providing the context for the issue. Since Mirabel's research is a historical piece of work, researching an individual lady in the Old Testament, she had to give some clue as to when it was written, what the culture was like etc. Ruth lived in very different circumstances to Esther. There are many cultures represented in the Old Testament scriptures. Many were possibly written after the time of the context, even if the actual story had roots in that real history; the application in writing it down by the final writer let alone editor or redactor may have come later. Yes Mirabel had all that material to go at. In fact that was one of the easier chapters to write. She had some of it already there, ready for final editing.

Next chapter? How women were treated and how was Ruth any exception? Should she put that in the background chapter? Probably but it was pertinent to the reason for looking at Ruth in particular as a single woman, a widow, a daughter-in-law and one that was foreign to Israel. She really did not have much going for her in that culture that was so exclusive if Deuteronomic laws were followed. IF? That provides a partial argument. Or should it be tackled from a later era, that of the potential post-exilic reasoning of identity and Israel, among the nations?

Mirabel sat musing. She must write. 'Get something down', she told herself. Several arguments over the midde chapters need clarifying against her key idea -the hypothesis!

The final conclusion? How can she develop a particular argument and thread it through each chapter and then bring a resolution to it? Drawing all the arguments together is quite a skill. If after each section there is a mini-conclusion then those help link things and provide the summary from which the conclusion can be made. Mirabel remembered; do not just summarise what had been written. Make something of it. Draw all the threads together and give a 'therefore' answer.

What days are left to her? Would she find uninterrupted time to write? What if school rang up again and said the kids had to stay home to isolate for the 'nth' time this past year? How could she get the kids to understand she had homework deadlines too? 'It will have to be 5am if not 4am again... or a late night shift!' she mused. She would find those missing pieces. She would put the final piece in place well before the deadline -and check it over thoroughly against that check list!

Is anyone out there reading this struggling with their dissertation? Do contact me!