climate change policy, science, and activism; photography; cartography and mapmaking
Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion
A complete dissertation manuscript in LaTeX format is done and in the hands of my committee.
Now, I should get comments from a professor within the department but outside my committee (internal external) and a political scientist from a different university (external external).
Once I address their comments, we can move to the dissertation defence, which my committee is currently expecting in November.
Despite still not being at 100% physically or mentally, I am working through a four-step process for getting through all dissertation-related to-do lists, including emails to self, project tracking spreadsheets, and tasks written on physical notecards:
The target date for the LaTeX version, ready for external examiners, and the new closing pages is the end of August.
This weekend I have been working through a complete draft of my dissertation, with two tasks in mind. Now that the big pieces are in place, I can work on making sure the whole thing is as well-written as possible and flows smoothly. Also, I am incorporating comments from my third committee member on chapters 2-4, most of which are either requests for more substantiation, objections to excessive substantiation, and requests for clearer storytelling.
The aim is to have this next draft finished tomorrow, essentially completing the project of having a draft ready for the internal external examiner by the end of July.
1. Look for square brackets and underscores inside footnotes (2022-07-28)
I haven’t done much of anything lately, aside from the bare necessities of life, other than work toward a version of my dissertation that will be ready for the external examiners.
It has been very hard for me not to have final control over the document, which I have had in every other context since leaving the government.
I suppose the PhD dissertation is the pinacle of scrutiny for a piece of writing — totally different from all the research papers I have written during the program, which just get a grade and some comments from one person. It’s weird for me to have authorship and responsibility for the content of a document, but not the final say about what I can actually put in it and how. I know this is all to make it conform to the norms and standards of a particular and esoteric style of writing, but it’s still a command structure that I keep grating against.
No doubt, the way I keep bumping up against this approach partly explains the delays and frustration on all sides.
I am still fighting toward a complete draft of my dissertation, to go to the external examiners by the end of the month.
The three central chapters — political opportunity, mobilizing structures, and repertoires — have gone to my 3rd committee member, but the other two don’t want to share his comments until we have finished going back and forth on the introduction and conclusion.
I sent a revised conclusion on Monday and am working on the latest comments on the introduction before I switch back. Today I went to the libraries on campus to have another look at Jennifer Hadden’s Networks in Contention, which we are using to situate the project in the scholarly literature.
The next version of the introduction is due at the end of the day tomorrow.
Readers expect to be argued with, and persuaded by. They don’t want to be told, repeatedly, what they already know, and they’re rarely tolerant of being lectured at. Writing happens among; writing is an exchange.
I’ll go further with this point, so bear with me. Readers aren’t just people out there who buy, borrow, or download your written words. Readers engage with texts, giving them a life those texts otherwise lack. Readers, we might even say, create writers. They do this by creating the books that writers make, sort of the way a musician creates a piece of music by playing the notes the composer has set down on paper.
Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 30 (italics in original)
Most of what academics write is intended to persuade other academics of something. That’s true for essayists, too. James Baldwin, when asked if writing an essay was easier than writing a novel, replied, “An essay is essentially an argument. The writer’s point of view in an essay is always absolutely clear. The writer is trying to make the readers see something, trying to convince them of something.” Essays, articles, monographs—the bread and butter of an academic writing life—are about persuasion. Those academic audiences are learned and demanding, and their curiosity is a learned, demanding curiosity. They’re trained to engage complexity (not just positions and speculations but also footnotes, endnotes, appendices, and bibliographic tails of all stripes). They live in expectation of argument and counterargument, of ideas in interesting shapes, laid out to pursue truths in new forms. They may read with their boxing gloves on.
Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 29
Identifiable skills, practical techniques, working notes, instinct, gut feeling, hunches. Though they may sound like an unlikely troupe of players, when you write and revise you call on all of them. But no tool for working your way into a draft is more important than just reading it as carefully as your ears will let you and staying focused on what you intended to say. Say, not just describe or explain, even if your project requires that some things are described and some other things are explained. Revision is less a matter of fixing errors than of saying more clearly, thinking your writing through from the ground up so that you know why you’re doing something, why you’re going somewhere, why you’re taking the reader somewhere with you.
Germano, William. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts. University of Chicago Press, 2021. p. 7 (italics in original)
This is the do-or-die month for the dissertation. Either I will get a full manuscript to the internal external examiner in the next 30 days or the school of graduate studies will kick me out for taking too long.