One of the most difficult things about writing your prospectus is that there isn’t a clear template for what you’re expected to produce. Some of this is for good reason: different fields/sub-fields handle proposed work differently, expect different levels of engagement with prior scholarship and theory, and demand varying levels of justification of your questions…Continue Reading Prospectus Planning Questions
Tag: literature review
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
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