Walk Away and Take Time to Re-see Your Work
Does this process sound familiar? Write a draft of a chapter of your dissertation. Submit the draft for review. Get comments back. Rush to address the comments.
Resubmit.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat . . .
In this hurried process, several issues begin to develop.
First, you are held at a superficial level of viewing your writing. This inch-deep way of looking at your writing arises because when you rush to revise, the tendency is to address your chair’s feedback (and hence your manuscript) in a decontextualized way. That is, you do not view your work or ideas comprehensively, and it becomes difficult to pinpoint areas that are unclear, wordy, or disorganized. Instead, you see at the word level, changing the words your chair identified as “wrong” and moving to the next section.
Second, frustration sets in when multiple revisions have been submitted but your chair keeps identifying problems with the document — many that you believe were not identified before or problems that have been already addressed!
Third, with frustration intensified, your ability to be critical of your writing diminishes. The temptation to blame (others, yourself) increases, and the likelihood of losing your momentum skyrockets.
Taking Time Away
Fortunately, there is a solution to this unproductive and frustrating cycle: Before you submit to your chair, pause.
Step away from your writing.
Once you have a completed draft, take time away from the writing before you send it to another reader. During this time, you should continue to think about your ideas, but it is vital that you step away from the words on the page. This break will help you to distance yourself from the nitty-gritty of your words. Thus, you can think globally about your ideas, and examine their logic and cohesiveness. This time away also will position you to be more objective about both the ideas you are conveying and the ideas you want to convey.
I recommend waiting two days to review and revise a section of your writing after finishing a draft. If you want to keep making progress, work on another section, read articles, or work on formatting the table of contents or references.
If at all possible, step away from the document entirely.
Treat yourself to something enjoyable. Your brain will thank you.
Honoring Your Knowledge and Taking Time to Re-See Your Work
When you take the time away from your writing, you can then honor what you know. The dissertation writing process is about becoming an expert on a topic. You do not have to wait until your defense or the final dissertation to feel like an expert. Acknowledging all the work you have done to get to the writing stage of the dissertation is an important step to becoming a critical reader of your own writing. You have reviewed the literature; you have identified the problem. Depending on where you are in the dissertation process, you may have collected and analyzed data and have identified conclusions to your research questions! All of this makes you an expert — a more knowledgeable other.
Louise Rosenblatt (1986) contended that in the act of reading we engage in a transaction with the author, responding in certain ways. Because of the transaction between the author’s ideas and our response, we are different; we have changed; we are more knowing. If I read the text again, I will likely “see” different ideas or come to new or refined realizations.
Applying Rosenblatt’s theory to the dissertation writing process, we also change after having written a section or a chapter. We can glean insights from these changes — if we take the time away from our writing to recognize our expertise and new ways of thinking and knowing. Then, stepping back into the reader role as a more knowledgeable other enables us to re-see our ideas from a different perspective than the perspective of the “dissertation student.” Now we are seeing the ideas as a more knowledgeable reader which will help us be a more knowledgeable writer.
In order to benefit from this new knowledge and to infuse our revisions with our new insights, we must make time for conscious reflection and revisiting of our writing. Hence, the cycle that we need to “repeat, repeat, repeat” is one of reading, writing, re-seeing and revising. This cycle, rather than encouraging surface-level, piecemeal and reactive approaches to revision, nurtures revisions that are deep and meaningful.
So go ahead, doctoral student, step awaaaaaay from your writing.
This blog post was written by Dr. Veronica Richard, Dissertation Coach