From Student to Scholar

A Guide to Writing Through the Dissertation Stage

Keith Hjortshoj

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351337502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

From Student to Scholar guides graduate students through the "hidden" developmental transition required in writing a dissertation and moving beyond, to become a successful scholar. Identifying common rhetorical challenges across disciplines, author Hjortshoj explains how to accommodate evolving audiences, motivations, standards, writing processes, and timelines. One full chapter is devoted to "writing blocks, " and another offers advice to international students who are non-native speakers of English. The text also offers advice for managing relations with advisors and preparing for the diverse careers that PhDs, trained primarily as research specialists, actually enter. On the basis of more than thirty years of consultations with graduate students, this volume is an important addition to graduate thesis seminars and composition courses, as well as an invaluable reference for writing centers, workshops, and learning support centers.

1 The Hidden Transition

Convenient Myths

When I’ve been laboring for months over drafts of an academic article or book chapter (such as this one) I sometimes remember that as an advanced undergraduate, ages ago, I was able to complete a 20–30-page research paper over a weekend, in essentially one draft, on a typewriter. I often wish I could still write with that speed and reckless stamina, and the memory is now an invitation to kick myself for my plodding indecision until I also recall those desperate feelings of urgency and pressure in the middle of the night under looming deadlines, the metabolic clash of exhaustion and manic delirium fueled by caffeine.

I can no longer write that way and can barely imagine how I did, but I do know why. Because my courses were in the social sciences and humanities, the last weeks of a semester were consumed by these intense, marathon efforts to finish “term papers,” and from research on my students’ writing methods I know that many of them still complete writing assignments with comparable speed, under comparable duress, now with the benefits of search engines and word processors.

When I reread a couple of those old undergraduate research papers I saved, I find that they’re surprisingly coherent, imaginative, but fragile simulations of real scholarship, in need of reconstruction and a good scrubbing. But those research papers and shorter essays, along with their high grades, helped to get me admitted to a doctoral program, where courses in the first two years included similar assignments. I entered graduate school as an experienced, successful student writer and course-taker, as fully prepared as anyone to meet the challenges of writing in graduate seminars. By the end of my first year, however, those fast, fearless, nocturnal methods of undergraduate writing no longer worked. I didn’t understand why, but cleverly constructed simulations of scholarly authority and conviction no longer sufficed. I couldn’t ignore the second thoughts, the doubts and alternative approaches that threatened to derail a first draft, and I learned that I had to begin work on these assignments much earlier in the term if I hoped to finish them.

By the time I began to write my dissertation, after two years of research, those old ways of student writing were remote, almost surreal memories, like those of early childhood. Working several hours a day, I spent the first two or three months trying to draft an introduction that would sustain the development of my following dissertation chapters. With the feeling that I was creating an intellectual and rhetorical labyrinth from which I couldn’t escape, I wrote and rewrote dozens of drafts, and as the alternative passages and impasses of the project multiplied, I often felt that I could never reach the end of it. My advisors seemed passively willing to help, but they were very busy; and as someone who thought he was a capable writer, I was too confused and embarrassed to explain the problems I faced. After a year of fretful, frustrating work on unfinished chapter drafts, I found a way through this maze with the help of three friends and fellow graduate students at the same stage who formed a writing group. In a spirit of generous, constructive candor, we read one another’s draft chapters closely and thoughtfully, identifying dead ends and productive choices for moving forward. All of us finished our dissertations in the same term.

Now—when I’ve offered guidance to some hundreds of dissertation writers in almost every field of research, have studied the process of writing extensively, yet still find academic writing very difficult—I wonder what changed, exactly, in that critical period of my graduate studies when I was still a student, in some respects, but began to write in the role of an aspiring scholar? In this new role of authorship, why did those earlier, exigent strategies of student writing no longer work? Why does professional academic writing become so laborious and time consuming? And how do we learn to move successfully to the end of this complex, convoluted process? If we acknowledge that professional academic writing doesn’t get much easier with cumulative knowledge, skill, and experience, what do experienced, productive scholars learn that can benefit novices—apprentice scholars—in the dissertation stage?

These are questions I hope to answer in this book, on behalf of new generations of graduate students who, as former student writers and in spite of many changes in graduate education, face the same challenges of adjustment to unfamiliar realms of professional academic discourse. All scholars, in all fields, have to contend with the changes involved in this transition from student writing to knowledge production, and this developmental transition doesn’t always end with the completion of a PhD. Many faculty members, including graduate advisors, are still trying to figure out how to revise their writing strategies in ways that more effectively meet the critical demands of scholarship and publication.

The changes involved in this transition deserve focused inquiry and explanation because they remain largely unacknowledged in higher education—both mysterious and, it seems, institutionally mystified. Convenient myths encourage us to believe that the writing skills and strategies we develop in secondary schools and undergraduate studies should be a stable platform for writing at higher levels, without substantial change or explicit instruction. The writing abilities of the accomplished students admitted to graduate programs should continue to develop more or less naturally, as though by osmosis, in the loftier environs of doctoral programs. Like other complex skills, such as driving, writing should become both easier and more effective with knowledge and experience. We can therefore imagine that for the successful scholars we hope to become, brilliant writing flows almost effortlessly from brilliant minds.

For a variety of reasons, we all wish that these myths were true. Acknowledging the earlier developmental transition from high school to college, higher education concentrates writing instruction at the beginning of the undergraduate curriculum. A large industry (including elaborate writing programs, course requirements, and hundreds of textbooks) has developed around the effort to teach former high school students how to meet the unfamiliar expectations of college teachers. At higher levels of the curriculum, by the beginning of graduate studies, writing instruction rapidly diminishes, nearly to a vanishing point. Educators tend to assume that the small proportion of undergraduates admitted to selective PhD programs should be able to complete dissertations and publications without explicit training. The skills, strategies, and motivations that get these accomplished students into doctoral programs should continue to get the best of them through these programs and beyond, PhDs in hand, as accomplished scholars. Those who run into serious trouble in the process must lack the ability or motivation they need to contend with the rigors of academic professions, where “publish or perish” is not just a cliché.

While they often help to maintain these myths, most scholars know at some level, from their own experience, that they are false. While they assign undergraduate versions of professional writing (referenced essays, research papers, and scientific reports) with strict deadlines in the compressed time frames of course schedules—on the assumption that they are preparing students to think and write like real scholars in their fields—these professors inhabit an alternate reality of academic discourse unknown to most of their students, where writing is a fundamentally different kind of endeavor. Over periods of months or years, most of these teachers have been wrestling with their own writing projects—research articles, proposals, or books—through seemingly endless revisions. In this realm, the possibility of completing a significant writing project in a couple of days, in a single draft, is a childish fantasy. Even if they finish initial drafts fairly quickly, these scholars have just reached the beginning of long processes of revision, before and after submission to publishers. I once asked a large group of professors in diverse fields whether any of them had submitted manuscripts that were accepted without required revisions. The room was silent, until one person said he had heard of such a case but doubted it was true. Most of their submissions had been extensively revised over weeks or months before submission, and for research articles, the average duration of the process they reported was between one and two years. A psychology professor admitted that he had been trying to get one of his articles in print, through several versions, for seven years. While undergraduates usually complete papers on their own (unless an assignment is explicitly collaborative), scholars typically benefit from lots of feedback from colleagues in the process of writing and revision.

These complex realities of professional writing, along with the ways in which individuals adapt to them, are largely hidden from undergraduates, graduate students, and even colleagues in some disciplines. In fields of individual research and authorship, where the dissertation is typically a monograph, the writing process is highly privatized and occurs behind closed doors. In an outburst of frustration, a PhD candidate in political studies once complained to me that while she struggled with her dissertation, without much guidance, her advisor was mysteriously producing books and articles, as though by smoke and mirrors. “I want to see the writer behind the curtain!” she exclaimed. “I want to meet the Wizard of Oz!” And her choice of images indicated her suspicion that the ease with which her advisor seemed to produce all this writing was an illusion.

Whether her advisor actually wrote with ease or with anguish, the nagging question on this student’s mind was “Why doesn’t he teach me how to get these things written?” How do the hundreds of published articles and books you read in your graduate studies get finished? And why aren’t the methods involved in this process a standard component of doctoral education? In her essay “Demystifying the Dissertation,” Karen Cardozo (2006) characterized the dissertation stage in the humanities as a strange, dysfunctional factory in which apprentices are shown the complex finished products they are supposed to construct but aren’t allowed to observe how they are made. “Because it is decentralized and largely privatized,” she argues, “the process remains hidden to most graduate students, leaving them unprepared to negotiate the multifaceted challenges of the dissertation stage” (p. 138).

In most of the sciences and other fields where research and writing are more collaborative (and publications are typically co-authored), graduate students are more likely to observe the process and receive informal mentoring from “principle investigators” and other members of research groups. This collaborative research and writing process partly accounts for significantly higher rates of PhD completion and shorter completion times in the sciences than in fields of the humanities. Even in the sciences, however, the transition from student writing to scholarship—along with the need for explicit training in the unfamiliar, convoluted processes of knowledge production—is weakly acknowledged, and many graduate students have to develop these skills on their own, through trial and error. In all fields of inquiry, experienced scholars have developed their own diverse methods for getting writing projects finished, but few of them know how to explain and teach these methods to novices, and writing strategies are rarely subjects of professional discussion.

If the great majority of entering students in doctoral programs completed their PhDs, one could argue that understanding why individuals succeed or fail was unnecessary. Since the 1960s and probably much earlier, however, average completion rates across American PhD programs have hovered around 50 percent, and in some fields, completion delays of two years or more are very common. For several decades, through significant changes in higher education and academic professions, nearly half of the students admitted to doctoral programs have continued to run into obstacles that prevent or postpone the completion of PhDs. Until the beginning of this century, research universities accepted this enormous waste of time and resources as the routine costs of maintaining rigorous standards in highly selective academic professions, with the unquestioned assumption that the most promising young scholars were the ones who survived. Although scholars at these universities have studied almost everything imaginable, very few of them critically examined the systems through which new members of their own professions are trained, selected, or rejected. When he was writing one of the first self-help books for PhD candidates (How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation), the sociologist David Sternberg (1981) found so little reliable information about completion rates and times in doctoral programs that he had to compile his own estimates and termed this knowledge gap “something akin to a ‘cover-up’” (p. 4)—a tacit, professionally antithetical agreement among scholars not to know. At the time, there were no national statistics even on the number of students enrolled in doctoral programs, and Sternberg concluded that “the dissertation doctorate is certainly the least understood institution in American higher education” (p. 5).

Over the past 20 years or so, the high rates, uneven patterns, and diverse causes of attrition in PhD programs have become matters of focused concern and extensive research, conducted by the American Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) in its elaborate PhD Completion Project, by several foundations, and by individual scholars. This recent attention to the individual and systemic problems that doctoral students encounter resulted from acknowledgement that graduate education is not just a test of individual abilities, to select for “talent,” but also a complex process of socialization and training that some doctoral programs effectively support and others do not. On the basis of this awareness and information, most graduate schools in the United States (often in collaboration with campus teaching and learning centers) have begun to provide support systems, workshops, and services on professional development, dissertation writing, and other challenges that graduate students encounter, along with counseling services to address individual difficulties. Many universities now sponsor “boot camps” for PhD candidates and writing centers specifically for graduate students.

Recent research helps to illuminate common patterns of difficulty that were previously hidden in the shadows of specialized programs, where they were typically viewed as the individual struggles of weak candidates. But this expanding knowledge has also exposed its own limited potential to inform and improve graduate education within the central contexts that determine doctoral students’ experiences: their own programs and relations with advisors. Like the self-help books and online forums that have emerged in recent years, the extracurricular services that graduate schools now provide partly compensate for the absence of professional development in many doctoral programs, but they haven’t substantially altered the decentralized, unregulated systems in which these problems arise. The faculty members who administer graduate programs and advise their students are largely oblivious to current research and debate concerning problems in doctoral education at large. Most of them remain unaware of average PhD completion rates and times in their own programs; and because these programs function as nearly autonomous units that central administrations and graduate schools have little power to alter, occasions for faculty exchanges of information and strategies across disciplines are rare.

This fragmentation of knowledge and practices increases in the dissertation stage of doctoral work, when individual advisors, forming loosely structured committees, assume primary responsibility for guiding candidates through the remaining processes of research and writing. Because faculty advising has remained largely unregulated and individualized throughout the history of graduate education, there is no coherent, common body of knowledge, or even folklore, about best practices or shared experiences that advisors can pass on to successive generations of doctoral candidates in their programs. In focus groups with a total of 276 professors who had collectively supervised (as principle advisors) 3470 dissertation projects in 74 departments representing ten disciplines, Barbara Lovitts (2007) tried to elicit clear criteria for what these scholars considered to be “good dissertations” in their fields. The standards they initially offered were highly generalized and vague (on the order of “original, significant contributions” to knowledge), and a frequent comment was simply, “You know it when you see it.” Subsequent prompted and highly structured questions gradually elicited more detailed criteria, critical assessments, and rubrics that Lovitts presented in her book Making the Implicit Explicit (2007). While the resulting agreements and variations she extracted from this research might be used to formulate standards for finished dissertations within or across disciplines, this study also revealed that in practice there were no common, explicit standards for good dissertations. The vast experience these scholars collectively brought to their focus groups was fragmented and unformulated—encrypted personal knowledge—of limited use to the novice scholars who faced the unfamiliar task of producing an acceptable dissertation. And because this ambitious study focused on the qualities of finished dissertations, it shed less light on the challenges that inexperienced scholars encounter in the complex processes of writing one.

From Lovitts’ broader studies and other research, however, we know that successful completion of a PhD requires substantial changes in the ways of thinking, learning, and writing with which accomplished students enter doctoral programs. Admissions criteria and credentials do not reliably predict who will succeed or fail in these programs. Although faculty members continue to believe that the “smartest” and most “talented” candidates are the ones who survive, comparative research has found no significant differences in credentials and perceived potential between entering doctoral students who go on to complete PhDs and those who do not. Especially in the dissertation stage, the most capable and highly motivated PhD candidates often run into the most trouble. Success actually results from effective adjustments to the unfamiliar, changing demands of real scholarship. Because being a good graduate student is a process of becoming something else—a good scholar— individuals are most likely to succeed in program environments and advising systems that acknowledge the difficulties of this transition and provide the most support through the process. Varying levels and qualities of support largely account for differences in completion rates of more than 30 percent among PhD programs in the same fields at different institutions (Denecke, 2005, p. 7).

In the midst of this new research on doctoral education, self-help books and online support sites for dissertation writers have proliferated because writing difficulties have remained largely absent from the acknowledged causes of struggle and failure in PhD programs. Addressing writing problems was not included among the areas of concern and intervention that the CGS listed in its report on findings of the PhD Completion Project (Sowell, 2008), and direct references to struggles in the writing process are scarce in other critical assessments of doctoral education as well. Because the process of getting a dissertation written is by definition the ultimate remaining challenge for “ABDs” and an obvious cause of anguish and failure in the dissertation stage, this blind spot seems mysterious. While educators have begun to recognize that systemic weaknesses in doctoral programs prevent many capable, motivated students from co...