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How to Write A Lot (Paul Silvia) – my reading notes

As I’ve said repeatedly in my other blog posts with reading notes of academic writing books, it’s only been since early this year that I started reading books about academic writing. Not even during my PhD did I read a book that would help me write more or less, or better (or worse, as the case may be!)

#AcWri at the SFO airport

Nevertheless, given the way in which many readers of my blog use it, I decided to read more books about academic writing to see if there was anything that I could contribute to the genre (I am writing a book, myself, on academic life, writing, literature reviews, reading strategies, time management, organization, and surviving academia without selling my soul to the Devil – but that’s something that I’ll discuss another time). Also, I am hopeful my reading notes can help readers decide which books to read and use.

In the past month, I’ve bought five or so books on academic writing. Two of them came very well recommended, specifically Zinsser’s On Writing Well and Paul Silvia’s How To Write A Lot. I picked up Silvia’s book first and then ordered his second one, Write It Up.

Paul Silvia is an associate professor of psychology, and someone whose writing sounds youthful. His prose is agile and easy to read, and I found myself enthralled with trying to finish the damn book and thinking to myself “yes, yes, absolutely yes, of course, damn I already have said this on my blog and in my tweets for like, forever and ever“.

I’m definitely not the only one who loved it (Silvia has two books, and as you’ll find out from my reading notes from the other book, I didn’t love it as much as this one). “How To Write A Lot” provides numerous good, actionable and practical tips on how to crank words out.

I think what I loved most about this book was that it was (a) inexpensive (b) pragmatic (c) written from the viewpoint of someone who is an academic who writes a lot. I don’t write about #AcWri because I *study* #AcWri, but because I write a lot, and in a very broad range of fields. I also use my writing tips for my own PhD and Masters and undergraduate students, and to help my colleagues.

I have also read Silvia’s Write It Up, and as my tweet mentions, I think the latter volume (and possibly this one) are best read with the help and guidance of a mentor (like a PhD advisor, for example).

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 26, 2017

Stylish Academic Writing (Helen Sword) – my reading notes

The second book in my list of volumes I’ve been reading which focus on academic writing is “Stylish Academic Writing” by Helen Sword. She has a series of three books, of which I had bought two, the first one being Stylish Academic Writing. A lot of people had recommended this book, on Twitter, when I first started doing Twitter threads on books on academic writing.

#AcWri setup

Trust me when I say that my credit card will be suffering for a long while, because I went on a shopping spree for writing academic articles’ books. I had already read Patricia Goodson’s “Becoming an Academic Writer” and Graf and Birkenstein’s “They Say/I Say“, which I use in my writing policy lab.

I think I got excited about doing these threads because people responded so well to my previous one on Patricia Goodson’s “Becoming an Academic Writer”.

I had previously written about William Zinsser’s book, “On Writing Well”. Sword’s book is very different from Zinsser, not only in tone and focus, but also on the actual premise. Sword did an actual, rigorous, scientific study of stylish academic writers. Like Zinsser, Sword argues (quite correctly) that nobody teaches us how to write academic prose. We are sort of expected to imitate our PhD advisor, I suppose?

Helen Sword, in Stylish Academic Writing, recommends the use of the active voice (“I”). I am a big fan of this mode of writing. I find the passive voice to be an oversimplified model of how we should be writing for a particular target audience. I also find it pseudo-scientific.

One of the things that has become really hard for me to teach my students is how to find the key (foundational) sentence in a paragraph. Most writing courses will encourage you to have it at the very beginning of the sentence. Many academic authors don’t do it, unfortunately.

One of the things I found most useful was the “Creating A Research Space” (CARS), or what Zinsser and others call, “the hook”. Why exactly did you do the research you conducted?

I am a fan of storytelling. I teach my students that “research is stories you share based on rigorous data analysis and robust theoretical grounding” (a very similar model to what I was taught by my PhD supervisor). I’ll confess that I was very disappointed by the little coverage that Sword devoted to Storytelling.

I disagreed with Sword on the politics of citation, and I also had a few minor quibbles here and there, but overall, I loved the book, and I would recommend it to anybody who is interested in academic writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 25, 2017

On Writing Well (William Zinsser) – my reading notes

Before last year, I had actually not read academic writing books. I always loved the idea, but I never wanted to read what others had written about the topic before I developed my own writing practice. This year, I’m doing a concerted effort to read them since I am writing my own book on academic writing, time management, organisation and the life of an academic. This week, I had to pick my Mom up from the airport (she lives 2 hours away from me, by car), and thus I brought along four books I recently purchased, so that I could read them while waiting for her flight, and for her to go through customs.

One of the first books I read was William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well”. Since I hadn’t read anything by Zinsser I didn’t know what to expect. I was delighted to find the reasons why so many people love his book(s).

I love that Zinsser takes a light-hearted, easy-to-digest approach to writing about writing (beyond solely academic writing). He basically tells you his life story and how he learned the craft and techniques of writing well.

Zinsser writes short chapters that deal with a broad range of aspects of the craft of writing which are very much applicable to academic prose generation. I particularly loved that he urges his readers to READ so that they can learn to write. I have peer-reviewed hundreds of articles and I have read thousands, and I can tell you, there are very good academic writers and there are some terrible ones. Personally, I find convoluted and jargon-laden prose very boring.

Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” is a book you really ought to read and keep on your shelves for frequent consumption. He writes amazingly well and his book will help you improve your prose.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 25, 2017

Grad school time management: If you *must* work weekends, work on Sunday

When I was in graduate school, right about after my comprehensives, people told me that they were working 100 hours a week. Heck, I was told I needed to work 100 hours a week! There is no way in hell I can put in that much work, to be perfectly honest. While I know many people will shun the idea that academics can work only 40 hours a week and not overwork (which is an idea championed by Dr. Meghan Duffy, Dr. Sherri Rose and Dr. Tanya Golash Boza), I understand that there are times when we need to work beyond the normal workload. Finishing my doctoral dissertation required me to work well beyond 60 hours a week, and closer to 100. To do this, I also had to work on Sundays.

To-Do list handwritten

And YES, I know. I’m the one who champions NOT working on weekends and NOT overworking. I’m the one who advocates against glorifying busy. But I am also well aware that in graduate school, *sometimes* you need to put in a different kind of effort and you may need to work 6 days a week. When I was finishing up, my PhD advisor told me “DO NOT WORK AT LEAST 24 HOURS PER WEEK“. What he meant was, “take at least ONE day fully off“. I usually took Sundays off, so I played volleyball, had brunch with my brother, then spent time with my partner for the rest of the day.

UNTIL… I realized this practice left me really discombobulated because I had no plan for the week ahead. I was arriving to my office on campus and had to start the day off by creating a list of To-Do items. Which of course, took at least a solid hour of my morning and left me even more discombobulated.

So about two years before defending my PhD I changed my habits, and when I need to work 6 days a week I try to do this as well: If I must work on a weekend, I’ll work on the Sunday. The rationale for this is quite simple: I will be tired from the week on Friday, so I’ll need Friday night and Saturday to recover. I can spend Saturday with my parents, and have dinner with my friends on Saturday night. Then, Sunday I can easily have breakfast with my Mom and then drive up to Aguascalientes, land at my office on campus, and work for a few hours, get a few items off of my To-Do list, and head home at a relatively early time (usually I’m home by 5pm, when I arrive to campus at 1pm).

Everything Notebook and travel kit

If I work on a Sunday, I use the last few hours of the day (early night) to write my list of To-Do items in my Everything Notebook, my priorities, check my weekly and monthly calendars, and evaluate where I am. I also catch up on reading on a Sunday. If I try to do work on a Saturday, I know I will be exhausted from the week and my productivity will be very low. That’s why I recommend to my students and colleagues that, IF and only IF they must work on a weekend, they should do so on the Sunday.

If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 10, 2017

How to prepare for doctoral comprehensive (preliminary, qualifying) exams

I often get asked about how did I prepare for my comprehensive exams. This is the process I used, but of course, your mileage may vary. The usual disclaimers apply.

As always, your mileage may vary. This is what worked for me. There are strategies that work for other people. Self-care, resting, and socializing can’t be overstated. You NEED to make sure to take care of yourself, always.

For me, doing my comprehensives along my cohort colleagues was really empowering. It helped me feel that I wasn’t alone.

If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 8, 2017

“The art of letting go of things”: Toilets as places of refusal

The art of letting goEarlier today, I went to the small store around the corner from my Mom’s house. Their magazine exhibit is usually filled with trashy gossip magazines. but as someone who studies sanitation and wastewater governance, the cover of this magazine caught my eye immediately: it’s a photograph of a toilet being flushed (lucky for the readers, it only contained clean water!). The words in Spanish inscribed in the cover say something to the effect of: “The art of letting go of the things that are no longer useful to you: the past, your job, your work and everything that breaks you down“. Toilets have been used as dumpsters for a very, very long time. As Dr. Jamie Benidickson (University of Ottawa) aptly said in the title of his book, “The Culture of Flushing” (published by UBC Press), there is a culture of flushing in developed countries like the US, Canada and the UK.

Once you flush the toilet you absolutely forget about what you just dumped in it. This is not an uncommon sentiment and approach. On the contrary, it’s pervasive everywhere in the world. Toilets are the places where you go to let go of things, specifically human waste. Access to toilets, as I’ve written elsewhere, is highly political and politicized. It’s also gendered (as Cooper et al show in their 2010 article on New Zealand) and has disability dimensions to it (as Kitchin and Law show in their 2001 Urban Studies article). I’m particularly sensitive to issues of access to toilets because that’s what much of my scholarship has been about, so Kitchin and Law’s work resonates because disabled people face enormous challenges regarding public toilet provision, as they show with their study in an Irish town, Newbridge, County Kildare.

To be perfectly honest, I found the visual imagery and publicity strategy of using a toilet as a metaphor for flushing unwanted things quite offensive. In a world where more than 1 billion people still lack access to the dignity of a toilet, and where the global targets for sanitation improvement are far from being within reach, to flippantly use toilets as metaphors for places of refusal is really uncouth. Also, lack of access to toilets leads to violence against women in countries where open defecation is a regular practice. So, the idea of using a toilet as an amenity where you can simply discard “everything that makes you feel upset” showcases people’s unrecognized and differentiated privilege.

There are many problematic sides to this visualization of toilets but one of the key ones is the assumption that there is infrastructure in place. This is an important, and non-credible assumption. As I have argued before, the act of supplying (or denying) access to toilets is highly political and politicized.

This is where the spatial and geographical elements of sanitation governance come into to play. Toilets become places of refusal. Not only do we generate urban solid waste through our daily activities (anthropogenic garbage is also often called refuse), but we also refuse to keep unwanted stuff within our bodies. Though I hasten to add, the visual I show in the first photograph refers to EMOTIONAL things that you need to let go of and refuse to keep inside yourself. So, in a way, the metaphor becomes embedded within everyday practices: having a toilet allows people with the privilege of access to use it to dispose of things that they are refusing, without even realizing that that’s what they are doing. It’s simple, it’s automatic, and it’s easy to do because it’s there. Just ask people in India where more people have access to cell phones than to toilets.

The most upsetting part of using a toilet as places for refusal is that it implies access (which isn’t a given), agency and ownership. As Dr. Malini Ranganthan (American University) has shown in her research, paying for piped water access in Bangalore was in and of itself a political act that middle-class dwellers engaged in, instead of protesting. In fact, I think that is the part that really annoyed me about the magazine cover I show above: the falsehood of implicitly assuming that everyone has the agency and ability to own and/or access a toilet. This assumption is entirely false.

The latest counts released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) as of July of 2017 indicate that 892 million people defecate in the open.

That’s a wildly high number of people who lack the dignity and agency of accessing a toilet, in many cases, because of lack of ownership. Think about this the next time you feel compelled to use toilets as places of refusal, even as a metaphor.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 2, 2017

The multiple faces of water insecurity

Wherever I go, I’m always “on”. That is, my researcher mind keeps looking for things that are associated with my research, or that seem to defy explanation. As I went into one of our favourite restaurants with my brother (who is visiting) and my Mom, I realized they didn’t have running water. A common hygiene practice before eating food is washing your hands. But I couldn’t do it with water from the tap. The restaurant provided a bucket and a small bowl so we could wash our hands. As someone who has lived in regions and cities where running water hasn’t ever been much of a problem, but also someone who studies water insecurity, I felt the immediate physical impact of water insecurity, within the comfort of a restaurant where I’ve eaten hundreds of times.

Mexico’s urban water infrastructure has been deficient for decades. In my research I have found that water insecurity in Mexico isn’t only the result of poor maintenance and unclean pipes. Water insecurity in Mexico is also an expected outcome of a problematic institutional architecture that puts the onus on municipal governments to provide safe drinking water but where the federal government offers little of the financial, infrastructure and human capital support to ensure that drinking water is safe at the household level.

Much is asked of local water utilities, but little is offered in intergovernmental cash transfers or strengthening water utility operators’ skill level. Even the financial support that is offered through intergovernmental transfers is not enough to improve water supply coverage in many Mexican municipalities. I have found in one of my studies that one of the reasons why why bottled water consumption in Mexico has risen to make the country the global leader in per capita consumption. Capitalizing on the fear of tap water, bottling water companies have fostered quasi-universal consumption of their product within the Mexican population.

As my friend and UConn colleague Dr. Veronica Herrera has also found (and describes in her recent book), the political landscape also hinders safe drinking water provision in Mexico. As her book and research shows, “politics can interfere with reliable water access, but when infrastructure is part of a good-governance platform, politics can also be part of the solution.” (Herrera, 2017).

There are many ways to measure and analyze water insecurity. A recent paper by Drs. Amber Wutich, Wendy Jepson, Shalean Collins, Godfred Boateng and Sera L. Young offers an overview of recent studies of measurement of water insecurity. But what I found interesting is how powerfully did the bucket with a small bowl portray in a very visual and tangible form the challenge of water insecurity in Mexico. Rationing water is a well-known and commonly used strategy that municipalities use to increase reported coverage and offer some degree of access to what should be a human right. But when household infrastructure fails and it is no longer the government’s fault for failing to provide water access, individuals must also engage in other forms of water fetching and rationing.

I often see this during my fieldwork, but seeing this up close during a leisurely outing with my family really hit home hard. There are definitely multiple faces and manifestations of the phenomenon of water insecurity.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 2, 2017

Four strategies to help build an academic writing routine

While I have a couple of blog posts pending (both by request, on how to prepare for comprehensive exams and how to build a research trajectory and a project pipeline for early career scholars), I wanted to write a post on something that I get asked about quite frequently. I arrived to the daily writing routine quite naturally, because I love stationery and more generally, I adore writing. But I always get asked “how do I build a good writing routine?”

As someone who studies institutional theory, I am well aware of the role of habits and routines in creating structures that govern agents’ actions. Repetition creates routines, routines create norms, norms lead to building rules and rules create institutions. So, the basis of governing individual actions resides in repeating a specific routine. I read somewhere that it only takes 21 days to build a habit (though read here, here and here to bust that myth). Whenever I fall out of a routine, it does take me about 3 weeks to regain regularity. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I figured I would offer four strategies to help you build an academic routine. Three come from scholars I respect a lot and who write about academic writing. The fourth (forgive the self-citation) comes from me 🙂

1. Follow a deadline-based calendar (Wendy Belcher)

The first strategy I would recommend anyone who is trying to build an academic routine is to follow the 12 weeks model that Dr. Wendy Belcher suggests in her book. Having a calendar and a set of firm deadlines for when you’re going to get stuff done may help motivate you to write. Deadlines have a very strong power over me!

Workflow: Finishing a paper

2. Use a repertoire of daily writing techniques (Tanya Golash-Boza)

In this post, Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza offers a number of strategies you can use to write every day, from line-editing text you already have produced to drafting new text on a blank page. As Tanya suggests, you can build a daily writing routine by following at least two different kinds of writing strategies a day.

Grunt work: references into Mendeley. Then memorandum. #AcWri

3. Follow a daily prompt, 5 days a week (Raul Pacheco-Vega)

In this post, I suggested five different prompts you could use to “trigger” writing. To build your own academic writing practice, you could test each one of the prompts, one every day. So, for example, on Mondays (when I’m usually very alert), I don’t need a prompt, but I can use one (an unfinished piece of writing from the previous week). On Thursdays I’m usually tired, so I’ll use a table or a dataset to prompt me to write.

Cleaning up Mendeley citations

4. Use a time-based incentive approach: the 15 minute challenge (Jo Van Every)

One of the things that I’ve heard from a lot of people is “I don’t have the time to write!” Well, I would definitely believe you if I didn’t have the same problem as everyone does: I, too, have to commute, travel by bus, sit at my doctor’s office waiting until he/she comes out and look for me. So, Dr. Jo Van Every has encouraged people to try writing 15 minutes a day, at least. Trust me (and her!) – 15 minutes IS A LOT MORE than zero minutes. So, Jo suggests that you should try the 15 Minute #AcWri Challenge. I can assure you, building up to 2 hours every day (as I do) is much easier if you start in increments of 15 minutes. So I would encourage you to take Jo’s challenge and see how many sets of 15 minutes you can do a day. This should be done incrementally, in my view.

Home office in Aguascalientes at night

In the end, I believe the only way to build an academic writing routine is to create a set of habits that will enable you to derive a reward from writing. For me, the best reward is seeing paragraphs filled, pages completed, etc.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 29, 2017

A full-engagement-based approach to research

Earlier today I was asked about whether my memorandums play a role in how I approach my research, and what my overall strategy is.

I woke up a little bit earlier than usual and figured I could answer this question in a quick blog post. While getting a shower, I reflected on what exactly would I call (if it were to call it in any way) my approach to research. I guess the best description of my research strategy is that I use a full-engagement-based approach.

Personal July 2017 017

For me, conducting research implicitly means generating new data, analyzing old data in new ways, theorizing and producing new knowledge. I would assume this is the way in which other researchers work. HOWEVER, for me, the generative component of research is always there. Without engaging in actor-network theory, I enjoy the physicality of research output generation. I scribble notes on the margins of papers. I highlight with different colours. I learn better when there’s a physical component to how I do research, how I study. I write synthetic notes and full-fledged memorandums, I fill rows in my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump. Every time I do something research-related, there’s a very physical component to it. I need to PRODUCE something as I interact with a piece of scholarship. That’s why the process I use to write papers has so many “productive” components.

Personal July 2017 033That’s why I read deeply and fully engaged. While I also skim articles, books and book chapters, and I’ve suggested that students and academics should use the AIC Content Extraction method to undertake quick overviews of a body of literature, my reading is usually fully engaged, and as a result, I do it in a way that is methodical and generates something that makes me learn (that’s why my marginalia usually include comments on other bodies of literature and linkages across scholarly fields). That’s precisely why the vast majority of my reading is deeply engaged. I usually write on the margins, highlight and THEN dump my notes into either a row of my Conceptual Synthesis Excel dump, or in my Everything Notebook, or even more importantly, I write a synthetic note or a full-fledged memorandum.

In the case I show in the photo above, it’s clear that if I generated so many notes about the text, it’s an important (key) piece of scholarship and I should engage with it by writing a memorandum. Obviously, I know that the text from this memorandum may end up in one of my papers.

That’s also why, despite my interest in using productivity software and online tools to make my work better, and despite the fact that I store PDFs on Dropbox and upload them on to Mendeley for easy access and quick paper writing, I still read paper-based journals. I still subscribe and pay for the actual physical copy. There’s a feeling I can’t quite describe associated with reading paper-based materials.

Printed journals

But as I was pondering how the memorandums fit within my own strategy, I figured I didn’t want to call this “a physicality-based approach to research”. Because much as I like the physical aspect of creating research materials, like a memo, writing the memorandum is part of fully engaging with the research. Writing synthetic notes and memorandums out of a synthetic note, rhetorical precis, creating annotated bibliographies, analyzing data and typing the analysis into a memorandum, all are part of this full engagement with the research process.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 25, 2017

Identifying what an undergraduate thesis, a Masters’ thesis and a doctoral dissertation entail, and based on that, narrowing the research thesis topic

As I was leaving my office to head to the airport to fly to Mexico City for a workshop on conflicts in extractive industries, I saw the completed printout of Rafael’s dissertation sitting on my desk. Rafael is my soon-to-graduate PhD student. I felt an extreme amount of pride, while also realizing what an enormous amount of work this doctoral dissertation has entailed. Rafa did ethnographic fieldwork for two years analyzing three cases of water conflict, plus a quantitative analysis of a global dataset. I think it’s a testament to his effort that his thesis is already being referenced as a key source for the topic. But reaching the point where we could narrow his topic wasn’t easy. Most of my students have extremely ambitious goals for their undergraduate honors and graduate (Masters and PhD) thesis. Often, I worry if this is because I’m a demanding supervisor and they feel they need to do grandiose, ambitious, all-encompassing projects or because we all face a challenge trying to narrow a topic. I think it’s more the latter than the former. We all tend to want to do research that is broad in scope.

My office at CIDE Region Centro during and after writing a paper

This morning, I mused on Twitter that I found my students to be over-eager and really excited about their research topics, and that they often want to “solve the world’s problems” with their theses/final papers/dissertations. You can read my Twitter thread here and the excellent responses to it.

Obviously, there are a few things that I want to highlight about doing a supervised research project that I think are worth remembering, in particular because my students often ask me “so, how narrow is narrow?”. This is a question that necessitates an in-depth discussion between each individual student and their advisors.

Many students come to me wanting to do broad-ranging, ambitious topics. I always tell them to be focused on a narrowly defined project. I find that it’s easier to expand the scope of a project than to narrow it. I also worry when the project is vaguely defined and unclear. There are clear differences between types of research and writing projects.

1. A doctoral dissertation

In my view, a doctoral dissertation is a long-term piece of research that demonstrates competency in conducting independent, in-depth scholarly investigations where the domain knowledge is broad, and where the research contribution is original and quite clear. This is challenging for a lot of students because the “what is a contribution” question pops up. I believe you can make theoretical and empirical contributions, and PhD dissertations often have both, but they need at least one of these. One reason why the 3 papers model for a PhD thesis is so popular is because it allows the student to demonstrate competency, depth and originality in a broad range of topics. Depth and breadth of insight are usually tested through doctoral qualifying/comprehensive exams (though I’m well aware of the British model that doesn’t involve comprehensives).

In my view, two elements are fundamental to the development of a doctoral dissertation: independence and degree of dominion of the knowledge domain. As a doctoral researcher, you should be able to conduct your research independently, even if the advisor is there to guide you. You should also have covered the literature broadly and deeply enough. At the doctoral thesis’ defence, it should be obvious that the student has now become the master at the topic.

The SOCK test (specific, original contribution to knowledge) is a good one that should be applied to doctoral theses all around.

2. A Masters’ thesis

In my view, a Masters’ thesis (as its name indicates) is supposed to demonstrate mastery. We may define mastery in different ways, but I do believe you need to show that you’re competent at investigating a particular research topic and at undertaking theoretical or empirical work that moves our understanding of a phenomenon forward. For example, for me, a Masters-level thesis is an empirical examination of patterns of bottled water consumption. Or a collated and analysed set of stories about consuming bottled water and the rationales behind them (both of these are Masters’ theses of two of my students).

The problem with Masters’ students wanting to do PhD-level kind of work (or too broad of a project) is that they are often given a shorter time frame, which often requires them to rush through courses and do their thesis under financial duress and time constraints. Thus the importance of narrowing the research topic.

It’s also important that the Masters’ student supervisor/advisor is realistic in terms of expectations and ability to achieve goals within the shortened time frame, and often within tight budgets or the risk of facing a shortage of funds.

While it’s important that the topic is adequately covered and that the contribution is original, it doesn’t need to be a grandiose or far-ranging contribution. As Dr. Prieto indicates in her response to my tweet, an in-depth case study or an application of a theory to a different dataset could be an original contribution.

It IS important that the topic of the Masters thesis is narrow in scope, but competently executed.

3. An undergraduate (honors) thesis.

I teach in the undergraduate program in public policy at CIDE. My undergraduate students tend to be REALLY ambitious and want to change the world, and I am grateful for that. But that’s not the goal with their undergraduate theses. For me, an undergraduate thesis can be a systematic literature review, an application of a research technique to an interesting topic, a test of a theory or an empirically-inclined paper using data that are often not available. An undergraduate thesis doesn’t necessitate an original contribution in the sense of a Masters’ or PhD- level one.

There are various reasons why undergraduate students (or even graduate ones) want to do very broad topics, resulting in thesis that are not narrow enough.

But as discussed above, you can do a perfectly competent undergraduate honours thesis just by doing a systematic policy analysis, a solid literature review, an interesting exploration of a known quantitative or qualitative research technique, an empirical (or descriptive) case study, etc.

4. A seminar research paper

Seminar research papers tend to also be overly ambitious, as Dr. McConnaughy indicates below.

What I have done in my seminar courses is create a blueprint, a template for students to do their final papers. That way, I define the scope of the project in very narrow terms, I give them the tools they need to apply and I let them do the empirical testing or the archival or secondary source searches (though some students of mine even collect primary data!)

A few other things to consider and pieces of advice to remember:

Narrowing the research topic should entail a conversation with your advisor. You can start reading broadly, but you should be able to pare down the topic asking a few questions such as:

  • Can this study be undertaken within a reasonable (12 months/24 months) time frame?
  • Do I have the necessary funding for the entire period of time that this study will require me to do work/fieldwork/laboratory experiments?
  • Am I trying to do more cases than needed to prove the hypotheses I’m testing or answer the research questions I’ve posited?
  • Are the research questions posited aligned with time, budgetary and resource constraints?

Again, and let me reiterate this: narrowing the topic should be a dialogue with your supervisor. You’re not alone in the process.

If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 15, 2017