Here is a template for the individual sections that your dissertation prospectus should include, as well as an explanation of what each section should accomplish. Expectations for the format and length of your dissertation prospectus should be discussed with your advisor. They may also ask that you amend this structure to include other sections….Continue Reading Prospectus Structure
Category: Research Writing
Problems and Academic Problems
This is a bit of a walk, but stick with me. There’s a documentary, This Film is Not Yet Rated, which looks at the MPAA ratings board and the way that filmmakers have to adapt their work to make it through the fairly opaque process of review (at least as of 2006, I don’t know…Continue Reading Problems and Academic Problems
Finding Secondary Sources Online
The internet will surely be the end of us all, but while it’s around you should get good at using it for research. If you ever have trouble finding resources for your papers (navigating results on the library website, getting too much garbage, not finding enough sources, figuring out whether a source is reliable or…Continue Reading Finding Secondary Sources Online
Introductions and Literature Reviews
Writing literature reviews is one of the trickiest things you’ll have to do in graduate school. It is even more tricky because a lot of professors will want you to do things that are pedagogically valuable but so tailored to the specific class they are teaching that it can be hard to generalize the lessons…Continue Reading Introductions and Literature Reviews
APA 7th Edition General Information and Tips
Professors, like many of us, are not always direct when expressing their wants. Nowhere is this more true than when a professor tells you that your paper should adhere to APA formatting/style guidelines. “My professor wants my paper to be in APA style…” If you’ve never seen a physical copy of the Publication Manual of…Continue Reading APA 7th Edition General Information and Tips
Reading Checklist Worksheet
Rather than going into your weekly readings looking to be surprised, you may have an easier time if you identify what you need to get out of those readings first. Remember, your job in graduate school isn’t just to retain content. You want to be able to understand your various readings in relation to each…Continue Reading Reading Checklist Worksheet
Academic Journals 1/x: How Things Work
The process of submitting to and hopefully being published in an academic journal can be opaque. Every journal has it’s own rules; different editors communicate (or don’t) differently; and the advice that you receive from different academic advisors might be vague or conflicting. If you’ve been given some hard and fast rules for how-to and…Continue Reading Academic Journals 1/x: How Things Work
Editing Techniques for Graduate Writing: AXES Highlighting
If the hardest thing about writing is starting, then editing is probably a close second. YOU wrote the thing — if you could have written it differently, you would have, right? Editing is especially challenging if you approach it in the same way that you approach writing a first draft. The way that a good…Continue Reading Editing Techniques for Graduate Writing: AXES Highlighting
Using Grammarly Effectively
If you’ve worked with someone on your writing–either me, another writing coach, or a consultant at the USC Dornsife Writing Center–you might have noticed that we tend to focus on “big picture” concerns (sometimes called higher-order issues) like argument, structure, and organization over discrete grammatical issues. I think this is important because, unless a grammatical…Continue Reading Using Grammarly Effectively
Outlining Your Prospectus
Your dissertation committee will be in charge of the specific guidelines of your proposal (length, format, expected scope, etc.). That being said, all effective proposals do at least four things: Contextualize and ask an answerable question; identify what existing scholarship has and has not done to address that question; explain how the researcher will answer…Continue Reading Outlining Your Prospectus