Everything I Learned About Dissertation Writing, I Learned in FYComp

It’s been a solid year and a half since I’ve been in a classroom to teach. I took a break from teaching after the Spring 2019 semester to explore other GA work opportunities at NIU; this is how I came to be in the Thesis and Dissertation Office. During that time, I’ve been working on my dissertation proposal and struggling mostly with how to structure the document. When I began work on my master’s thesis in 2015, I wrote a proposal which I defended, and while I realized that my scope was a little broad, my advisors’ comments were helpful in narrowing my focus to something manageable for that project.

In recent revisions of my dissertation proposal, and looking ahead to what will eventually become the dissertation itself, it’s been helpful to review a few tips from past experiences, particularly from teaching first-year composition (FYComp), to regain a clearer sense of how to go about revising my work into something defendable.

NIU FYComp Students in Spring 2014. Retrieved from Students: apply to become First Year Composition peer advocates - NIU Today

First, your introduction should be as much a map of your argument for yourself as for your reader. Regarding abstracts, one of my favorite pieces of advice to give students is to think of their abstract as the most concise version of their paper that can possibly exist; in some regard, the introduction paragraph/section is then an extension of the abstract, albeit slightly more detailed. And yet both should communicate to readers exactly how the thesis will be argued and what those paragraphs will more or less look like. In other words, there’s no pressure to reinvent the wheel with structuring your dissertation proposal: a conventional approach to outlining can be helpful in keeping you focused and communicating to your advisors what you plan to do.

Another thing I find helpful from FYComp is practicing genre analysis by reading others’ dissertations and proposals. I’ve had the good experience this semester of picking up some side work as an editor for a few Ed.D. students at Aurora University, where I also work as a writing tutor, so I’ve spent some time reading others’ capstone papers and getting a better sense of how these things tend to be structured and paced. Although the papers I have looked at were written for a different type of doctorate than the one I am studying for, it is still helpful to see not only how these dissertations are structured but also how they work – in other words, what purpose they serve, which is to make an original contribution to knowledge in the discipline. Unless your project is a mixed-media work – perhaps incorporating audio or film – you don’t need to do anything radical with form; content is the thing. Rely on tried and true conventions of those who came before you.

Building off that last point, it is still important to think about ways you can creatively present your research in a way that reinforces key ideas from your thesis. I try to keep up with emerging trends in FYComp and am excited to see that there is a shift toward multimedia writing projects such as videos, podcasts, and the like. Composition is so much more than just writing text in an essay format. As students and teachers spend more time online, we should think about how to make the best use of all affordances available to us as well as how we can work within the limitations of a given medium or set of media. Furthermore, we should think about ways to push the boundaries of how we can write and present research to others, even if that means we break some of the old rules that we take for granted. This isn’t to say that an all-text dissertation is bad or outdated (this blog post is mostly text, after all), but it’s not the only way to share our contributions to knowledge.

For example, my dissertation is on greentext stories. I am trying to think of ways that I can strategically share stories throughout the paper to support certain arguments but also to comment on the research itself. Greentext stories are folkloric, and thus they mainly spread either by copy/pasting or through repeated cues and archetypes. Since I will be duplicating some of the stories throughout the dissertation and even the proposal, I realize it is important to consider how else I can use them – perhaps in place of epigraphs to illustrate key themes discussed later in a section. In this way, I’m actually taking part in the folkloric process by reproducing these stories, so I will need to think critically about how I use them in this new context and what meaning they will convey.

Regarding your own thesis or diss project, regardless of where you are in the process, I encourage you to do two things: whenever you feel lost, recall the basics of FYComp and use those conventions to orient yourself, and then once you feel you’re moving in the right direction, think about novel, exciting ways you can share your new knowledge using the new tools.