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Authoring a PhD Thesis: How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Dissertation (my reading notes)

One of the books I love the most is “Authoring a PhD Thesis: How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Dissertation” by Dr. Patrick J. Dunleavy. Dr. Dunleavy is a professor of political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in London, England, and someone whose research I deeply respect and admire. Moreover, I have frequently read and referred my own students to his website, Write For Research, and I’ve used his advice myself. So writing my reading notes of “Authoring a PhD” seemed not only like an imperative but also like something I had to do soon.

While I didn’t take as many photographs from the book, I really enjoyed reading it as Dunleavy offers a really solid, step-by-step guide to how to write and complete a doctoral dissertation. I had read his book a while ago, after I completed my PhD and I recommended it to several of my students, but I hadn’t had the time to type my reading notes, which I did this time.

Overall, I really loved re-reading Dunleavy’s book, and Bolker’s. I do think no single book offers everything PhD students need, so they’ll need a combination of these, for sure.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 16, 2018

Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis (my reading notes)

The first book in a series of volumes I have been interested in reading is Joan Bolker’s “Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis“.

Bolker takes a very similar approach to writing to the one that Joli Jensen preaches: you should have constant contact with a writing project (Bolker suggests at least 15 minutes every single day). For me, writing IS a way to get myself out of a writer’s block. For example, I am writing this blog post precisely to get out of a rut and find the headspace again where I can make final edits to a Revise/and/Resubmit (yes, yet another one!)

Bolker is right and that’s why her book works. You MUST write text for your doctoral dissertation at least 15 minutes every single day. This, obviously, doesn’t guarantee that you will finish the dissertation in 3, 4 or 5 years, but like Joli Jensen suggests in her book “Write No Matter What” (which I’ve also written about here on my blog), gives you constant contact with a writing project, and particularly low-stakes kind of contact. Reading Jensen’s Write No Matter What changed my life and cemented the thought that constant contact with a writing project is fundamental.

On the topic of advisors, I strongly disagreed with Bolker, particularly because I am kind of slightly famous on the internet, and therefore I felt like this was a jab at me. I do remember a professor at UBC telling me “you don’t want to do your PhD at Harvard only to have your advisor be travelling the world and forget about you”. I DO travel the world and my schedule is tremendously busy, but my students are my priority and I make sure to give them time, regardless of whether I am at a conference, workshop or doing fieldwork. As I said on Twitter, Elinor Ostrom was SUPER famous and she was an incredibly dedicated advisor. It’s not about the fame, it’s about making yourself (as a PhD advisor) available to answer questions and help your students.

As I said on Twitter, by now I know just about everyone suggests a daily writing practice, even if it is for just a tiny bit of time. Don’t ask me, ask Dr. Joan Bolker, and Stephen King.

I do not champion the 1,500 words or 5-10 pages a day approach. On the contrary, I suggest that we find a different measure of scholarly writing success: filling up sentences, completing paragraphs one idea at a time, and writing small bits and pieces of text (50-100-200 words a day).

The idea of a Dissertation Writing Group is useful. The main shortcoming with Bolker and just about every book I’ve read on writing is that they devote the least time to the final stages of the PhD dissertation (or of writing a book, like the conclusion, and how to put the book together). Yes, the best dissertation is the DONE dissertation but there isn’t a solid roadmap (or I haven’t seen it yet) for a student in the throes of final submission.

This sentence sums up my feelings about Bolker: A MUST READ BOOK for all doctoral candidates.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 16, 2018

Building community online through promoting others’ scholarly work: A Twitter strategy

A lot of scholars who are new to Twitter ask me “can you give me a Twitter 101?” – I figured I should probably post my advice on my blog. As I’ve said before, the reason why I founded #ScholarSunday, co-founded #GetYourManuscriptOut, is that these hashtag-based community-building strategies DO work.

In a previous life, actually co-authored a book on building robust online communities (it’s an e-book) with Arieanna Schweber, so the principles I suggest here are similar to the ones we proposed in our joint work. My approach is to provide content (yes, I know, I hate that word too) that I believe will be useful to my Twitter followers. Here’s the strategy I follow:

When I wrote this Twitter thread I proceeded to do exactly what I suggested: I chose 10 blogs and pre-scheduled tweets that would promote their authors. This is the strategy I follow to avoid being on Twitter all day long. I am well aware that I appear as though I’m online all day. I am not, as my tweets below explain. I pre-schedule content then take time to reply to mentions and conversations.

There are plenty of sources for good academic blogs. I recently came across a listing.

As you can see, I use Buffer and HootSuite to preschedule content and then spend a limited amount of time responding. This enables me to do my academic work without being online all day. This is not something I have not written about. I have explained this strategy plenty of times, both on Twitter and here on my blog. Hopefully, by giving my Twitter thread a more permanent space here on my blog, people will be able to refer to it.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 16, 2018

Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits–to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life (my reading notes)

I’m definitely not someone who reads “pop psych” or “psycho babble” (short monikers for popular psychology, the easily digestible version of scholarly psychological findings), which is how some books on habits, speed reading, speed writing, etc. are categorized. I don’t read self-help books because I think I need them, but because they’re fun reading material, particularly if they relate to routines and systematic repetitions. Because I am a neoinstitutional theorist, rules, norms, habits, routines all lead to the formation of institutions. Thus, my interest in habits.

AcWri while travelling

I was raised with military discipline because my grandparents were in the military. I also love finding new ways to do things that will make my life easier. I wake up at 4 in the morning to write because that’s a habit that I picked up as I made the transition from graduate student to professor and it has given me excellent results in terms of productivity and time spent doing things I love. I have my own “Start Your Day Right” strategies, I spend the first two hours of the day either writing or researching, and I rely on good habits to allow me to break through my lack of focus or writer’s block.

However, many of the good habits I picked up, I did so by learning from others and absorbing their robust working practices. I am very mimetic. I adopt habits that other people have demonstrated are solid, and this is something I did as I grew up.

Since Dr. Andrea Collins and I have very similar interests in academic productivity strategies, I followed her advice and bought Gretchen Rubin’s “Better than Before”. I also must confess that I did so on the cheap.

I got a lot of these self-help books for less than 15 US dollars, and I received them on the week I planned to take a few days off. Since I love reading when I’m on holidays, I got myself about 10 books that I can read over a weekend. Rubin’s Better than Before was one of those 10.

I think part of what makes Gretchen Rubin’s writing so easy to access is 1) she presents ideas I’ve long believed in 2) I know myself well. I have spent decades analyzing myself and my behaviour, even since I was a child, therefore I know what I like, I know what I don’t like, what I can and cannot do, what I am willing to do and what I am unwilling to do. I know which things will motivate me and what will de-motivate me. I’m a morning person who loves starting new projects and writing new text. I hate editing and sometimes I struggle to finish something because I’m a bit (or a lot of) a perfectionist.

One area where the broad-strokes categories that Rubin suggests fail is that you can be something for some areas of your life, since we are all heterogeneous human beings with very different facets of our lives. or example, I’m an Under-Spender for EVERYTHING *except* for books and stationery/office supplies. I save money in everything, but I am a sucker for printed texts and I love, love, love buying new pens, paper, notebooks, highlighters. I KNOW this. I know I am an Under-Spender except for very specific things and therefore, I budget accordingly.

While I agreed with much of Rubin’s texts, there were some major points of disagreement.

I did love, however, Rubin’s strategies to make something LESS appealing.

In the end, as I said on Twitter, Gretchen Rubin’s Better than Before could possibly be (and maybe it is) better than Charles Duggin’s The Power of Habit. Both are very solid books and I would recommend both, with the provisos I made explicit in these reading notes.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 5, 2018

Thinking Like Your Editor (Rabiner & Fortunato) – my reading notes

Thinking Like Your Editor (Rabiner & Fortunato)One of the things I’ve learned through the years is that there is no single panacea for anything. In the line of research I do (comparative public policy), I always find that there are so many different ways of getting governments and individuals to do things and achieve certain goals that there is no single public policy instrument to solve all society’s ailments. The same is true of academic writing. By now, I have read probably a dozen or so books on how to improve scholarly prose, and how to produce better text at a faster rate. I’ve pored over workbooks, short volumes and reference texts in order to find That Magical Piece of Advice on How To Publish More, Higher, and Better. You can find several blog posts that summarize my Reading Notes of each one of these books, under my Resources website tab. The truth is that panacea, information that will make books automagically appear DOES NOT EXIST.

At the very least, it does NOT exist in the form we would like it to exist.

One of the books I’ve recently acquired, and I did so because I have a few books on the go (as in, writing, completing, finishing up), is the Rabiner and Fortunato volume “Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Non-Fiction and Get It Published.“.

There are a number of books for when you want to publish a scholarly book (like William Germano’s Getting It Published), when you want to edit your doctoral dissertation to make it into a university press or scholarly, more general book (like Germano’s From Dissertation to Book), but Rabiner and Fortunato’s volume is specifically for academic trade books.

It’s important to decide which one you want to write (or when revising your dissertation to become a book, which book you want to produce). I really enjoyed that Rabiner and Fortunato showcase acquisitions editors’ thinking and decision-making processes.

For anyone who wants to write a book proposal, having the answers (and good responses, specifically!) to The Big Five is fundamental.

Something I noted in a Twitter thread on publishing I posted a couple of weeks ago that Rabiner and Fortunato make clear: your book proposal should tell what’s different.

How does your book change our thinking about something?

Why are previous treatments of the subject insufficient to provide a fuller picture?

One of the best ways to learn how to write the answers to these questions is, as I’ve noted in this thread, to read book introductions.

As I’ve noted in earlier threads, you should read A TON of book introductions to see the stylistic manoeuvring that comes with showing a gap. For example, as I noted on Twitter, this would be a way to write about how a book on subnational Mexican water laws improves our understanding of water governance above and beyond what we already know.

“Gomez and Gonzalez showcase how Mexican water laws evolved. However, their analysis lacked subnational comparisons, which I do here”.

As I noted on Twitter, I love that Rabiner & Fortunato provide so many concrete examples that they work the reader and prospective author through, asking them “now, YOU go and do it“. Academic writers need LOTS of examples, and at least I can say I learn better when shown how I should be doing things.

Something disappointing from books about academic writing, as I noted on Twitter and here too, is that there isn’t a book about How To Write A Book. They all compress lessons.

I was also impressed by the abundance of examples and walk-throughs that Rabiner and Fortunato offer. For me the most impressive of them all was their Full Sample Submission Package. Germano does this too, in both of his books, but I found Rabiner and Fortunato’s submission package really useful to think about mine.

Truth be told, I am beginning to understand why the market for books on academic and non-fiction (and fiction!) writing keep getting sold. There’s always SOMETHING that you can learn from each one. In this case, I learned A LOT from Rabiner and Fortunato for the kind of books I want to publish later in my career (academic trade books). Definitely worth reading.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 29, 2018

On the importance of teaching the mechanics of doing research

I enjoy writing my blog because I can then use my blog posts to teach my own students and research assistants every technique I need them to know. As I said on Twitter the other day, my writings on this blog are a shared knowledge base. I just opened the knowledge base to everyone in the world who might need it.

What has surprised me as more and more students, and even early career scholars and seasoned professors have emailed me and tweeted at me about how they’ve found my blog helpful was – I *thought* professors taught this stuff. This was my belief up until, well, I got to graduate school, and then I realized that NOBODY was teaching this stuff, the mechanics of doing research.

AcWri highlighting and scribbling while on airplanes

Graduate students seem to be expected to learn how to do research by osmosis or some kind of magic process. As for how I learned, I have always been inquisitive, and my professors at UBC were kind enough to mentor me and share techniques with me, but a great deal of how I learned to do research was also intuitive, reading books, and looking at professors I admired and seeing how they worked and interviewing them about their daily process. Lucky for me, they were very open and direct about how their writing and research process worked. Also, I will have to acknowledge that my qualitative research methods professor was very specific about how to write memorandums and do thematic coding.

I am always frustrated to find that there are incredibly high and ridiculous expectations placed on students by their professors that they should know a lot of stuff that they were never exposed to in high school, undergraduate and even graduate programmes. This, and knowing that my blog is helpful to people, are very strong drivers for me to keep doing what I do.

I know for a fact that many students don’t know how to write a literature review, an annotated bibliography, or how to contextualize their research.

These techniques (the mechanics of how to do research) can’t be learned through osmosis. We need to do better and teach our students how we get things done.

In the end, we are all better off if we are able to train our students on how to conduct research, and walk them through the process. Even if the process we document isn’t perfect, it can still help others figure out methods and techniques for their own research strategies.

Posted in academia, research, research methods.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 21, 2018

Providing better student feedback: Avoid the “think hard” trap

When I was in graduate school, I often heard from professors that I should “think hard” about issues, about the literature, about how to process information, etc. I understand that there are various models of student feedback, but the phrase that absolutely makes my blood boil and want to smash tables is a request to “think hard”. “Think hard” is, in my view, the most unhelpful phrase that a professor can utter to a struggling student.

During graduate school, I had a number of instances of interaction with professors where they told me that I had to “think hard” about something, and I usually left those meeting puzzled and discombobulated, and even more confused than when I arrived.

To me, there are better ways to provide feedback to students. One of the ways in which I try to help my students think through issues is enabling them and encouraging them to spend time reflecting.

Luckily my thread resonated with fellow academics.

Hopefully, as educators, we will be able to reconsider how we provide feedback to students and peers. For example, I was reading an article this morning on how to be supportive to a grieving friend, and found the author (Celeste Headlee)’s suggestions quite helpful to consider for how I can provide feedback to students. We really owe it to them and to ourselves to improve the ways in which we provide constructive, thoughtful, well-thought-out feedback.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 21, 2018

12 tips to give a solid scholarly talk within a short time frame

One of the things I’ve noticed at conferences, workshops and seminars is that we tend to overestimate our abilities to give a talk within a short time frame. I see this at MPSA, ISA, AAG, and all other scholarly conferences I attend. We KNOW in advance that we have only 10 minutes, 12 minutes at the very most, and yet we still want to cram a 90 minute talk in 10 minutes.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega at CIESAS workshop

Since I just completed three weeks of back-to-back-to-back academic conferences, I thought I’d offer some tips (to see my entire Twitter thread, just click anywhere on the tweet I show below).

These tips, obviously, are intended to help presenters give better talks. An additional commentary that I think is valuable and I didn’t include at the moment of tweeting include the notion of rehearsing the talk beforehand. This is particularly important because it allows the presenter to learn how long their presentation will really take.

I noticed I made a mistake and did a 9) and 10) TWICE, so here are the other 2 tips, which complete the set of 12 tips.

Hopefully these tips will be useful to fellow academics.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 20, 2018

Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books (William Germano) – my reading notes

Before I left for ISA 2018 and AAG 2018, I purchased a ton of books. I have been doing way more work on waste (not only human manure but also municipal garbage) and while my water library is spectacularly well populated, I didn’t have enough books on waste, so my poor credit card took a big hit and I started purchasing a ton of books that I thought I might need. Along the way, I found a few books on academic writing that were inexpensive and that I thought would make the shipping costs worth it.

Yes, I admit it: I buy academic books sometimes as “order padders” so when I pay for shipping I don’t feel as bad. So, anyway, I wanted to read William Germano’s book for new authors and thus I purchased it (“Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books“). This book is not for authors who are PhD graduates and want to revise their dissertations as books. For that purpose, Germano wrote “From Dissertation to Book“, which I’ve also written about here on my blog.

This is my concluding tweet from a long-ish thread on Germano’s book. I think this is an endorsement if there’s ever one.

I usually don’t endorse books, but I found William Germano’s books so useful I really learned A LOT from them. In my Twitter thread (which you can read in its entirety by clicking anywhere on the tweet shown below) I embedded recommendations of other academic writing books that I’ve read.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 16, 2018

The “Accomplish Two Things Before Anything Else” approach: Dealing with academic life under pressure

As I’ve stated before, I’m a professor at a very small university with wonderful colleagues so I enjoy the privilege of having smaller class sizes and a lower teaching load. However, I feel the same pressures to publish, teach, do service as many others because the expectation in my institution is that we behave as though we are in an R1, which puts enormous levels of pressure on our performance.

AcWri while travelling

I am currently chairing two searches for new tenure-track faculty and thus I can’t use my No Email Before Noon rule at least until the searches are completed, so I’ve been trying to find a way in which I can continue doing my research without letting down my institution and job candidates. To do this, I try to follow even more closely my “Accomplish Two Things Before Anything Else” approach. I usually do this on a regular basis, but now that I’m under more pressure to respond to emails in the morning and throughout the day, it’s become even more important that I do it.

The Accomplish Two Things Before Anything Else approach is quite simple. I set out to write SOMETHING and read SOMETHING every day. Even if it’s writing 25 words of a new memorandum, or just the first page or abstract of a new-to-me research article or book chapter, I try to write and read every day.

Every. Single. Day.

I don’t get out of the house nor do I open my email before I get *some* writing done and *some* reading done. That’s why I champion smaller goals. During crunch time, I can’t stay sitting at my computer until I crank 1,500 words. So, I set out to accomplish at least two little things. This approach liberates me from the guilt of “you’re not doing your research” and frees my mind to enable me to do the work that I need to do.

I tweeted about this approach so you can open my Twitter thread by clicking anywhere on the tweet below.

And while today I was lucky to write 787 words, other days I write 65 words and that should be enough. Today I’ll do an AIC-CSED combo, because I have enough time, but I could just as easily simply read an article’s abstract because I don’t have any more time. It’s kind of a simplified version of my Quick Wins approach. Two Quick Wins: write a few words, read ONE article. Hopefully this approach works for other people!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 16, 2018