For the month of January, and in celebration of our two year and 100th post anniversaries, we’re revisiting some of our most viewed columns. Today we’re re-posting why it’s so damn difficult to move between the stages of a PhD program. You’re not stupid if it’s hard. The system is Read more…
For the month of January, and in celebration of our two year and 100th post anniversaries, we’re revisiting some of our most viewed columns. Today we’re re-posting our seven part editing system, sometimes hailed as externalized executive-function. Just follow the steps and Enjoy! Congratulations! You’ve completed your first chapter draft Read more…
For the month of January, and in celebration of our two year and 100th post anniversaries, we’re revisiting some of our most viewed columns. Today we’re re-posting a primer on the difference between your writing and editing brains and how to train them so you can get some sh*t done. Read more…
For the month of January, and in celebration of our two year and 100th post anniversaries, we’re revisiting some of our most viewed columns. Today we’re re-posting our most controversial post of all time on why writing a dissertation in the humanities is so fudging hard. We got a lot Read more…
Happy Halloween! Our goal for this month was to make dissertating feel exciting rather than terrifying. There is, however, a fundamental truth of dissertating which we may have mentioned before: It is hard. Even if you love your project, even if you have the world’s best committee, even if you Read more…
Congratulations! You’ve completed your first chapter draft and are feeling that peculiar mix of excitement and nausea that settles in before sending something to your advisor and/or committee for feedback. Before now and then, however, you want to make sure that everything is as perfect as it can be to Read more…
So far this October we’ve given you some of our best tips to make dissertating feel doable and, dare we say it, exciting!, rather than terrifying. If you are an astute reader (and of course you are, you smart cookie) then you’ve probably noticed that we haven’t talked much about Read more…
When I was in coursework I often had 3 seminar papers due around the same time at the end of the semester. Combined with teaching responsibilities and the rigors of trying to be a person (e.g. cooking, cleaning, showering) I often wrote these papers at the last minute. What I Read more…
Last Wednesday, we asserted that “dissertations are a trash genre.” We stand by this statement However, we’ve also received some great feedback from people who have written dissertations that we wish to add. The most important thing to reiterate is that you absolutely have to write a dissertation. It Read more…
The dissertation. If you want to go from ABD to PhD, or abd2phd, then you have to write a dissertation. You can do all the other things we’ve discussed from prelims to teaching to service work and if you don’t write the damn dissertation then you don’t get the damn Read more…