Advanced Writing Skills: Dissertation for a Masters of Science Degree

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Advanced Writing Skills Dissertation for a
Masters of Science Degree

• Íde OSullivan and Lawrence Cleary
• Regional Writing Centre, UL
• www.ul.ie/rwc

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A typology of genres in Nursing Midwifery

• Reflective essays
• Care plans
• Case studies
• Care critique
• Portfolios
• Article reviews
• Argumentative Writing

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Dissertation writing

• How will you organise your approach to this
  seemingly sublime, looming task?

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Ways of Ordering

• Writing ProcessPlanning, Drafting, (Discussing /
  Consulting), Revising, Editing and Proofreading.
• Rhetorical Situationpart of the planning stage
  and includes an assessment of the occasion for
  writing, writer, topic, audience and purpose.
• Writing Strategiescognitive, metacognitive,
  affective and social.

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The Composing Process

• Prewriting
• Drafting
• Revising
• Editing and Proofreading
• Logical Choice and Unity

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Prewriting

• Planning
• Evaluating the rhetorical situation, or context,
  into which you write
• Choosing and focusing your topic
• Establishing an organising principle
• Gathering information
• Entering the discourse on your topic
• Taking notes as a strategy to avoid charges of
  plagiarism
• Evaluating sources

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Planning Assessing the Rhetorical Situation

• The Occasion
• The Audience
• The Topic
• The Purpose
• The Writer

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The Occasion

• What has prompted you to write?
• What do I need to know?
• What are my obligations?
• What are the procedures?
• When is it due? How much time do I have?
• Whats involved?

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The Occasion

• My guidelines tell me about procedures that I
  must follow.
• When do I submit a proposal?
• Do I need to submit project reports? When?
• When do I submit my finished document? Do I need
  to defend my discoveries orally?

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The Occasion

• What kind of project will I choose?
• How do I write about it?

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The Occasion

• When we consider the occasion for writing, we
  think about
• What has prompted me to write?
• How much writing do I have to do?
• How much time do I have to do it?
• How much time should I allot for planning and
  organising, and for drafting and revising?
• What tone should I adopt? Formal? Informal?
  Authoritative? Conciliatory? Assertive?

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Audience

• Your audience affects how you write.
• Terms that need not be explained for one
  audience, may need to be explained to other
  audiences.
• General audiences may not have your subject
  knowledge, but they are usually thought of as
  intelligent, thoughtful readers willing to be
  informed or persuaded.
• Your classmates make good audiences. Write for
  them. Let them read your dissertation and give
  you feedback on the ease with which they were
  able to read and understand it.

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Audience

• Who am I writing for?
• Can my peers understand what Im saying?
• Am I fulfilling the criteria established by my
  instructors?
• How much revising and polishing will be necessary
  to meet the instructors standards?
• What format appeals to my audience?
• (from Ebest et al. 1997, 9)

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Topic

• Your topic is something that will have your
  supervisors approval.
• Some things to think about
• How much do you already know about this topic?
• How much am I going to have to know in order to
  do this project and report on it? To say
  something meaningful?
• How much research am I going to have to do?
• How much time do I have to do it?

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Topic

• Strategies for choosing topics and narrowing or
  broadening the coverage you will give it.
• Taking suggestions from your supervisor
• Brainstorming (individually or in groups)
• Listing
• Clustering or mind-mapping
• Free-writing or discussing
• Asking wh-questionswho, what, when, where, how
  and why?

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Topic

• Topics do not stand in isolation. They exist in a
  context.
• What is the relationship of your topic to your
  course of study?
• What are people saying about your topic in the
  literature you have read?
• What are the issues of concern?

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Purpose

• What is your purpose for writing?
• To express your feelings?
• To inform?
• To persuade?
• As you draft, revise and edit, make sure that
  every contribution to your report works to
  realise that purpose.

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Purpose

• If informing is the purpose of your report, then
  the point of order is a triangulation of your
  audience, your topic and your purpose.
• Audience analysis
• Relevance
• Rhetorical appeals

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The Writer

• What do I already know about this topic?
• How quickly do I learn? Read? Write?
• How much writing have I already done?
• Have I developed an academic or authoritative
  voice?
• Have I addressed this audience before?
• What are my weaknesses? What are my strengths?

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The Writer

• Knowing who I am, how much time will it take ME
  to write my dissertation? Am I a ditherer? A
  procrastinator?
• Having assessed and prioritised my weaknesses,
  what should I work on first?
• Knowing my strengths, how can I turn this
  strength to my advantage?

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Rhetorical Appeals

• Logospersuade by appeals to reason
• Ethospersuade by establishing your own
  credibility
• Pathospersuade by appealing to your audiences
  emotional attachment to your topic

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Appeals for Credibility

• Use credible sources of information
• Be authoritative
• Do not use personal, self-reflexive pronouns
• Do not refer to your own mental processes (I
  feel I think I be loving it)
• Do not use conversational markers (, you know?
  or Okay, so.)
• Avoid quotingparaphrase and summarise instead
• Avoid vagueness dont hedge.

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Appeals for Credibility

• Persuasive elements in a report like this are
  largely restricted to the presentation of sound
  evidence, explicitly stated.
• If you need to justify conclusions, use
  observable evidence obtained through sound
  scientific principles such as observation and
  reason.
• Methods of analysis and those used for obtaining
  data should be repeatable (verifiable) and should
  be valued in your discipline.
• Conditions under which data is obtained should be
  free of environmental variables (reliable).

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Drafting your Report

• Try to visualise your report. Work toward that
  vision.
• Begin to structure itestablish your section
  headings give them titles. These do not have to
  be permanent.
• Examine the logical order of ideas reflected in
  those titles.
• Do not get hung up on details elements of the
  draft are subject to change in the revision
  stage.
• Start to write the sections that you are ready to
  write. Dont try to write the Introduction
  because it comes first.

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Drafting

• Continue to reassess your rhetorical situation.
• Does what you have written so far contribute to
  the achievement of your purpose?
• Experiment with organisation and methods of
  development.
• Dont get bogged-down in details focus on the
  big issues organisation and logical flow.

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Drafting

• How should it look? Do you have a vision?
• What should the dissertation look like?
• Do you know what goes in each chapter?
• What chapters can you already title?
• Do you have a general idea of what they will
  contain?

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Revising

• Is your dissertation logically organised?
• A good way to check the logical flow of your
  ideas is to outline your report AFTER youve
  completed your draft.
• How did you introduce your topic? By giving it
  definition? Describing its development?
  Explaining what it is?
• Does each section contribute to your readers
  understanding of your topic? Does your report
  service your purpose, aims, and objectives?

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Revising

• Outline each section. How does each paragraph
  contribute to our understanding of the topic of
  that section?
• Take a close look at paragraphs Does each
  paragraph have a central idea? Does it have
  unity? Is it coherent and well developed?
• Is there a correspondence between the title of
  your report, your section headings and
  sub-headings and the central ideas in your
  paragraphs?

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Revising

• Do the methods used to illuminate your topic lead
  to logical discovery?
• No truths are self-evident.
• Claims have to be defended with evidence.
• Processes have to be described and explained
• Design features and research methods have to be
  justified
• The justification for generalisations and
  conclusions need to be made explicit
• The criteria used to qualify our results also
  needs to be explicitly put forward and evaluated
  for objectivity
• Underlying assumptions need to be evaluated for
  their objectivity.

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Editing and Proofreading

• Once the report is cogent, it must be made to be
  coherent.
• Work methodically, checking one feature at a
  time.
• Do not exclude formatting issues.
• Editing and proofreading is more than just
  grammar and punctuation it is also about voice,
  rhythm, tone, style and clarity.

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Editing and Proofreading

• Check for ambiguity
• Check for comma splices, run-ons, stringy
  sentences and fragments.
• Check for how sentences introduce new
  information is it in the beginning of the
  sentence or at the end?
• Check that you use sentence types that are
  appropriate for your discipline.

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Editing and Proofreading

• Check word order and usage. Are you using an
  indefinite article when a definite article is
  more precise.
• Check for agreement Subject / verb pronoun or
  noun substitute / antecedent or concatenation.
• Check for bias (gender, race, religious, creed,
  persuasion, etc).

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Editing and Proofreading

• Check for obstacles to clarity
• Poorly chosen words
• Vague references
• Clichés and trite language
• Jargon
• Inappropriate connotations

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Editing and Proofreading

• Check for clarity
• Effective subordination and emphasis
• Sentence variety
• Parallel structures
• Choppy writing
• Explicit logical links

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Editing and Proofreading

• Check formatting issues (appropriacy and
  consistency)
• Margins
• Font (size and style)
• Section heading numbers
• Paragraph style (block, semi-block, indented)

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Editing and Proofreading

• Check for plagiarism
• Check the form of your in-text citations and of
  your full references in your References page.
• Check the content of your citations. Is
  everything that should be there there?
• Check that paraphrases are not too close to the
  original.
• Check that all figures, tables and graphs are
  captioned and cited (below figures and graphs
  above tables)
• Check that any borrowed ideas, words or methods
  of organising information are referenced and
  clearly marked.

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Logical Choices and Unity of Purpose

• Every choice serves to defend a claim, answer a
  question, or confirm a hypothesis
• Word, phrase, sentence-structure
• Does the choice satisfy audience expectations
• Does it speak to your authorial credibility
• Does it further your argument, analysis,

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Writing is a Social Activity

• Lexical-grammatical choices affect the culture of
  register, which in turn affects the culture of
  genre.
• Illustration (Martin Rose, 2003, p. 254 cited
  in BALEAP 2007).

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Arguments Logic

• A good argument will have, at the very least
• a thesis that declares the writer's position on
  the problem at hand
• an acknowledgment of the opposition that nods to,
  or quibbles with other points of view
• a set of clearly defined premises that illustrate
  the argument's line of reasoning
• evidence that validates the argument's premises
• a conclusion that convinces the reader that the
  argument has been soundly and persuasively made.
• (Dartmouth Writing Program 2005)

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Literature Review Logic

• The Lit. Review that you wrote for your proposal
  will not necessarily be the same review that you
  submit as part of your dissertation.
• Think in terms of your argument and the support
  that you provided for claims
• Include a review of all the literature that you
  read to learn about your topic and the
  particular aspect of your topic that you focus
  on.
• Include a review of the literature on the
  methodologies that you used.

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Methodologies Logic

• When you know what you need to know in order to
  answer a question, then it is logical to choose
  methods of inquiry that will supply the reliable
  verifiable data that you need in order to answer
  the question.
• Dont forget to qualify your datawhat does it
  tell you and what is it unable to tell you?

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Methodologies Credibility

• All data has to be analysed. You need a
  methodology for analyses as well.
• Quantitative data can it be generalised?
• Qualitative data what criteria will be used to
  establish its value?
• Do not overstate your results. An honest, quality
  analysis will speak volumes about your
  credibility, regardless of the quality of the
  data.

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Unity and Coherence

• If information included in your dissertation does
  not contribute to an understanding of the value
  of your conclusions and recommendations, then it
  only serves to befuddle the logic of your piece.
• A unified text is a more coherent text.

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Writing Strategies

• Map your paper
• What sections or subsections are completed
  (keeping in mind you still have to revise),
• Pick one or two of the holes in your paper that
  you would feel comfortable filling,
• Assess the reasons for any anxiety you have over
  the unfinished parts that cause you anxiety
• Do you need to read more?
• Do you need to rethink your paper?

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Writing Strategies

• Outline your paper
• Devise headings and subheadings for uncompleted
  sections
• This helps you see the logical progression (or
  lack of it) of your ideas
• It identifies the main ideas
• It helps detect omissions

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Writing Strategies

• Write about why you are having difficulty making
  advances in your paper
• It gets the fingers tapping and the cerebral
  juices flowing
• An awareness of fears and anxieties helps you to
  develop strategies to overcome those emotional
  roadblocks
• You may discover that the reason that you are
  having difficulty is that there is some chink in
  the logic of your argument that you must either
  fill or that requires a major rethinking of the
  line of reasoning.

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Writing Strategies

• Dont allow yourself to freeze up. When you are
  feeling overwhelmed
• Satisfy yourself with small advances until you
  feel more confident and unstuck
• Seek help. Talk to friends. Talk about how you
  feel, but talk about your ideas as well.
• Eat lots of ice cream and candy

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Works Cited

• Dartmouth Writing Program (2006) Logic and
  Argument Online, available http//www.dartmout
  h.edu/writing/materials/ student/toc.shtml
  accessed 08 Jan. 2008.
• Discourse Community Analysis (n.d.) Discourse
  Community Analysis Assignment Sheet, Center for
  Writing Excellence, West Virginia University
  online, available http//www.as.wva.edu/lbrady
  /202discourse.html accessed 20 Aug. 2008.
• Ebest, S., R., Brusaw, T., Oliu, W., and Alred,
  G. (1997) Writing From A to Z, Mt. View, CA
  Mayfield Publishing.
• Glucksman Library (2007) Cite It Right Guide to
  Harvard Referencing Style, 2nd edition
  University of Limericks Referencing Series
  Online, http//www.ul.ie/library/
  pdf/citeitright.pdf accessed 08 Jan. 2008.

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Works Cited

• University of Hertfordshire (2008) Describing
  Analysing Language Handouts, University of
  Hertfordshire, School of Combined Studies, BA
  (Hons) in English Language for Commercial
  Communication online, available
  http//www.uefap.com/courses/baecc/dal/handouts.ht
  m accessed 08 Jan. 2008.