The five hats of dissertation writing
Each section of your dissertation has a particular job to do. And you can help the writing process along by putting on different ‘hats’ or personas depending on which section you are writing. Here are the five that I’ve come up with…
To write your introduction… be a real estate agent
When you’re writing your introduction, think about it as though you’re showing your examiner around the ‘house’ of your dissertation. What are the different rooms (chapters) in this house? What are the particularly unique features that set this house apart from all the other houses? What do they need to know about the neighbourhood (the existing literature)?
As an estate agent, you’d probably think a little bit about the best way to show the potential buyer around a house. You wouldn’t take them straight to the small, gloomy, single bedroom at the back of the house, nor would you tell them all about the lack of power points in the living room and the dodgy oven. At some point, you will need to mention the limitations, but you don’t lead with them, and when you do, you find a way to put the flaws in a good light. House has an odd layout? It’s quaint! Apartment overlooks a freeway? Easy access to the city! Global pandemic screwed up your fieldwork plans? An unexpected opportunity to explore remote data collection!
In this introductory tour around your dissertation, you want to communicate to the examiner:
a sense of the neighbourhood (the context of your research and the field it is situated in)
what is unique about your dissertation-house (your contribution), and
the key features and layout (an overview of the chapters).
To write your lit review… be a museum curator and tour guide (and an aspiring artist)
For your literature review, you have put together a carefully curated collection of writing that gives your study context. Just like a curator at a gallery, you have looked at a whole load of things and decided which ones to include and which ones to leave out. You have made (often difficult) decisions about which pieces belong in your literature gallery or museum, and in your literature review, you want to indicate how and why you’ve made these decisions.
You then need to show your examiner around your literature museum on a guided tour. You’ll probably want to start with a little spiel that tells your visitor about the different parts of the exhibition (the different areas of literature that you draw from) and how the tour will proceed. You’ll want to walk them around and explain, piece by piece (or group by group), why you’ve included it, what its significance is, how it fits in with the rest of the exhibition, how the different works or artists fit together and so on. You also want to tell your examiner about the strengths and issues with any of the pieces – what works in this one? What doesn’t? How does it represent a change to what came before? Is it a particularly famous piece? Who are the ‘big names’ that you’re featuring in your exhibition? (And, just as importantly, whose voices tend to be left out of these exhibitions?)
This means that you are describing the works (wearing your tour guide hat) and also offering your critical analysis (wearing your curator hat). By doing this, you’ll have a good literature review. For a great literature review, though, your curator/guide needs to have not-so-secret ambitions of being an artist themself.
So, as you walk around your exhibition, you’ll be telling your examiner all about the different works you’ve included – but you’ll also be telling them about your own masterpiece. Where does your work fit in? Which paintings inspired you to create your own one? Are there other paintings that are done in a similar style to yours, or maybe represent the same subject matter as you? Is there a chronological story to be told (was a whole heap of research on a certain subject matter published around about the same time? What are the key pieces that act as landmarks?), or perhaps other artists have used the same medium as you (the same methods in the research context, for example). What does your painting do that these other paintings don’t do? What would your painting add to this exhibition?
So, as a curator/tour guide/artist, you need to use your lit review/exhibition to:
Identify a group of works that together tell a story and tell that story (find and describe the literature which is relevant to your work)
Throw in your own observations and critiques (both good and bad) of the pieces (this is what elevates a descriptive lit review to a critical analysis of the literature, which is what you’re aiming for), and
Explain how your painting relates to these other paintings in the exhibition (what existing work does your dissertation build on? What does it do differently? What does it add to your area of study?)
To write your theory/methods chapter… be an architect
By the time you start writing your theory/methods chapter, you hopefully have a sense of what your research is broadly about, and you’ve probably done some reading about your subject area. In other words, you have had a look around the neighbourhood, found the plot of land that you’re going to build on (or existing structure that you want to add to substantially), and you have some ideas about the kind of house you want to build.
But you can’t just start building. No, first, you need to draw up some plans – a blueprint of the house – and figure out what approach you’re going to take, what materials you need, and how you’re going to go about this whole house-building business. In this step, you’re putting on your architect hat to help you go from the idea of a house to an actual house: from a research plan to a completed piece of research.
You want to give your examiner enough detail both to understand how you’re going to build the house and (broadly) to build one themself if they were so minded. What are the tools they would need? What building methods would they need to know? Where did you find your bricks and the floor planks and cement?
This means that, as the architect of your theory/methods chapter, you need to share a blueprint of how you plan to build your research project. Now, the level of detail you need to go into here will depend a bit on your discipline and the kind of research you’re doing. For reproducible research (where someone should be able to come to the exact same answer as you if they follow the steps you’ve laid out), for example, your blueprint will need to be very precise; your reader needs to know exactly how you built your house so they can build an identical one if they want to (this is admittedly less weird in the research context than someone literally asking you for the blueprint of your house so they can build the same one).
For research in much of the humanities, however, the blueprint you share will be more about how you plan to collect your materials (your data) and how you’ll use them. Have other people used this kind of material before? How did they do it? Can you use the tools that they developed? Is there anything in particular you need to keep in mind when using these (kinds of) materials? Are there any safety provisions you need to put in place, and are your materials ethically sourced?
To write your empirical/findings chapters… be a builder and interior designer
Alrighty, so the architect has drawn up a lovely blueprint, you’ve gone out and collected your materials, and all of the furniture has also been delivered. It’s a bit of a mess, and you are completely overwhelmed and rethinking the whole project as you stare miserably at the piles of data all over the place. There’s probably some stuff in there you weren’t expecting, and it isn’t entirely clear how all of this stuff is going to fit into your 80,000-word house.
It’s okay. It’s all part of the process. Pretty much every research house starts as a big pile of bricks, fixtures and fittings that don’t match, and a researcher who is rethinking every life decision that has brought them to this point.
First, put your builder hat on. You need to work out how to build a really solid structure. Where are you going to put the walls? How many rooms (chapters) do you need, and how big will each room be? Is there a way that you can create a nice flow through the house/dissertation?
You’ll want to have your interior designer hat handy because you’ll be switching back and forth between your builder and interior designer hats. As you put your furniture (data) into each of the rooms (chapters), you might find that some pieces don’t fit as well as you’d expected, some things might work better in a different room, and some rooms might feel a bit empty and need more (or different) furniture.
You’ll find yourself going back and forth, knocking down walls between rooms and rebuilding them in different places, trying out furniture here and there, switching rooms around, and so forth. Some pieces of furniture/data will only work in a specific room/chapter; you might need to experiment a little with how to fit the different pieces of data together. This will take time. You will sometimes need to take a few days away from your house so you can come back to it with fresh eyes. Try out different configurations until everything is in just the right place.
To write your conclusion… be a celebrant
It’s time to mark the end of your dissertation. The research is done. You are probably well and truly fed up and ready to see the back of the whole thing. And you still have a bloody conclusion to write.
Think of your conclusion as a eulogy for your dissertation, with you as its celebrant. Your dissertation-eulogy gives a snapshot of what the dissertation was about, the contributions it made, and its legacy (for example, in terms of policy recommendations or future lines of research). In your conclusion, you want limited engagement with other people’s work; just like a eulogy really focuses on the deceased, so too do you want your conclusion to focus quite tightly on your dissertation. Overall, you want to celebrate the research, though you might wryly acknowledge where things may not have gone quite according to plan.
This is your chance to shape what your examiner remembers from your dissertation, so be really clear about what your findings are, why they matter, and what needs to happen next. If you can get a pithy final sentence in there, all the better.