Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Help!
Do one of you people who has already written a dissertation prospectus want to give me some advice? This shouldn't be that debilitating as I am basing my chapters on seminar papers (I've been asking similar questions to what I want to do for my diss for ages now, building up to the diss, I guess). I know the chapter outline section is the shortest part of the prospectus; half should be the lit review (according to my advisor and samples from our department), but I've been writing about the texts I need to write about for a while now. But I still spend more time staring at a blank computer screen and telling myself not to cry than I do writing actual words. And it's so time to be writing actual words. I've reread my papers, looking for somthing to just pull so I don't have blank pages. Can't find anything. I know there's stuff there, and I know I know this. But I am still struggling.
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3 comments:
I don't know if this will be mind-numbingly obvious or actually helpful: what is your topic about, and why is it important? Do you have a particular image or example or anecdote that encapsulates your argument or gave you the aha! moment to write on this topic? You could start with that. Try making a list of all the key terms you will use in the diss and start showing how they all connect by building sentences around them.
Or: close the word program. Just close it. Open your email and write an email to a friend who is smart but doesn't know about your dissertation. Just tell the friend what the topic is about and why it is so really cool. That's not intimidating at all, is it? And you really do need to go back and forget all the things you now know for a second and just say what the project is and why it is important.
I went through two prospectus drafts of convoluted, crazy and weird historical shit before I realized that I had yet to mention the key word of my dissertation --- the "nosepicking" --- and why I wanted to write a whole book about it.
Thanks, Sisyphus. It does help. My chair has me writing the history of discussion part first, and I think that trying to historicize this discussion is what is paralyzing. There is so much to say, and one of the things I want to do is bring together two conversations that while often made in the same book, aren't usually integrated (my chair's book is the exception to this), and I want to use theory at a level that most of the existing work in this area avoids. So I'm bringing together a lot of things and trying to find a way to do that in the prospectus is a little overwhelming (doing it in the diss should be easier as it's a book and I have more pages to fill).
And I do have an ah-ha moment to go to. I think I'll take your advise and write an email to my mom today. Or maybe one of my rhet grad friends. I have a 1500 word goal to today (1000 for today plus 500 I didn't get to yesterday). I think an email and the ah-ha will do that. Thanks!
Also, while I'm thinking of it, integrating the conversations and using the theory is really obvious to me. I mean, I don't understand at all why it isn't obvious to everyone else. So there's a big fat warrant that I need to explain that I'm still not fully articulating.
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