Dissertations: Where should you begin?

In my last post, I spoke about the power of dividing and conquering when dealing with a large-scale writing project like a dissertation. 

But after the dividing is done and you have decided on a provisional structure – intro, chapters, and conclusion – what next? What should you do first?

You’ll want to make sure you get the order of operations right, or you might end up having to redo big chunks of it (which, needless to say, is really demotivating).

Make sure you’ve done the preliminary work

I'm assuming you've already done your background reading, or most of it. If you haven't read and made notes on a good dozen academic sources you'll be using (books, articles, or reports), go and do that first. 

Of course, you might find that you need to consult additional sources during writing, but the bulk should be there before the writing begins. 

Never start with the introduction

Once you've written your dissertation, it will have a beginning, a middle, and an end, as do all texts that make any sense. But! It's a mistake to think that the order a text is read in is the order it was written in: these are two fundamentally different things. An introduction is the reader's starting point, not yours. You can't introduce the reader to something you haven't yet created!

Decide on your chapters

Instead of the introduction, start with the main body. Here, it makes sense to write the chapters in order of their appearance, since each chapter will build on what you've already written.  

The trick is deciding how to divide your content into chapters. This is a creative process: if you tell three people to write a dissertation on the exact same topic, each of them will divide their chapters differently. Your own arrangement will ultimately reflect the way you think – and we all think differently.

So if you're struggling to do this or are so panicked by the idea that you haven't even started, you're not alone. Here’s a method I've used for all four of my dissertations:

Notice the threads

Think of the books and articles you've been reading as a beautiful woven cloth:

Every scholarly work, even a short one, will definitely talk about different aspects of its topic. These aspects are the threads that come together to make the cloth. My point here is that different books and articles will use many of the same threads. Find the threads, and you’ve found your chapter topics.

Example dissertation topic: Kitchen design and gender roles in 20th-century Britain.

Example threads you will have come across in your reading:

History of the kitchen: from subterranean workroom reserved for servants to a visible middle-class space.

Changing gender roles: changes in kitchen design accompanies changes in gender roles.

Open-plan kitchens: are they liberating, or do they put more pressure on women to keep the kitchen tidy?

Structure each chapter

Each chapter should discuss what you have read on a thread (topic), but not passively: focus on what scholars disagree on, and don’t sit on the fence – always say which views you find more convincing. Bring the discussion to an overarching conclusion in which you make a final pronouncement on the topic.

Voilà! I hope this helps you begin.