For doctoral candidates struggling with their dissertations, Challenges in Writing Your Dissertation, by Noelle Sterne, is different from other how-to-write-your-dissertation books: they deal with the structure and contents. Challenges, with lively examples, humor, and provocative questions, addresses the surrounding, often overlooked or ignored but crucial aspects that can seriously delay dissertation completion: emotional, interpersonal, and even spiritual issues.
12 Articles on Writing Your Dissertation: A Curated Collection From Noelle Sterne, PhD
Dissertation coach Noelle Sterne, the author of Writing Your Dissertation: Coping with the Emotional, Interpersonal, and Spiritual Struggles, has contributed more than 30 articles to the TAA Blog over the past 10 years. We’ve curated all of these articles into a new TAA Blog category, Noelle Sterne’s Dissertation Posts, and have included 12 of them here. Enjoy!
Cultivate Your Dissertation Flow
By Noelle Sterne
In your dissertation writing, you’ve probably experienced the all-too-common range of emotions from initial elation to paralyzing fear to plunging despair, and between many starts, stops, and freezes. Here I suggest how to at least cut down on those maddening swings and invite, coax, and, toward more consistent and actually enjoyable writing, entice . . . the Flow.
For Your Most Productive Writing Sessions, Nine Questions
By Noelle Sterne, PhD
When we’re in the middle of a writing project, scholarly or otherwise, it’s hard enough to start, much less continue. I’ve found that asking ourselves some important questions and acting on the answers helps us more easily sneak up on the current project and get started or continue, and even finish.
The questions and answers are completely between you and you, and you have the best and only answers. Whatever other advice you may have read or heard, or however loudly others swear theirs is the only way, it’s your own answers that matter.
Want to Write a Column? Admonitions and Advantages
By Noelle Sterne, PhD
At barbecues with friends or departmental parties with people you want to impress, you love tossing off, eyes modestly lowered, “Oh, I’m a regular columnist for Extreme Anachronisms.” But if you’ve been invited or want to start a column (or regular blog) and continue basking in such glory, realize what you’ve taken on.
A quality column takes consistent effort, thought, faithfulness, and rewriting. Experienced column writers know this. From my experience writing several columns and the advice of several column writers I interviewed, here are ten of the most challenging and important considerations.
When Your Inner Editor Roars
By Noelle Sterne, PhD
You’re writing along like butter, and suddenly a thunderous voice in your head rebukes: “THAT’S THE WORST, MOST HORRIBLE PHRASE SINCE . . . .” And you’re in a hammerlock of immobilization.
Such a message doesn’t have to lay you flat on the mat in a full writing block. Recognize that voice: it’s your ever-present inner editor—often old programming, parental censures, or frustrated-poet English teachers’ decrees. And it proclaims that you’ll never be a writer and you should go sell burner phones (if you don’t already).