My joyful livelihood for three decades has been as a coach and editor for doctoral candidates in all aspects of their dissertations. So I warn you now—I am partisan. That said, here I’ll describe the (best) duties and functions of a coach, with the basic distinctions too about editing.
5 Key principles to building clear text transitions
A common weakness in novice academic writing is a lack of flow; for readers, this lack of flow means they can’t easily see how one thought follows from another. To combat this problem, we need to learn how to make effective transitions between sentences. Such transitions are usually managed in one of two ways: through transition words or through evident links in the text. Both strategies have a role to play, but novice writers, unfortunately, often see transition words as their main way of moving from sentence to sentence.
How to ease into (and even enjoy) your dissertation writing
We can’t deny it: writing your dissertation is hard. All that time you devote to research is a worthy endeavor but, no matter how many plums you’ve collected, at some point you know you’re stalling. In my longtime dissertation coaching and editing practice, I have witnessed, cautioned, and counseled many dissertation writers on the difficulties of the actual writing. Peter, a new doctoral candidate who came from the corporate world, confided, “I struggle daily with understanding the shift from business and occupational writing to writing as a researcher according to certain expectations and standards.”
6 Tips for proofreading your own academic writing
Academic writing is one of the main things you’ll be judged on as a graduate student. It shows how much you really learned when you were earning that degree. Now that you’re out into the world, things aren’t much different. Every piece of academic writing you do has to be just as good as the ones you wrote in college – if not better. You don’t have a professor to proofread for you anymore, and now the task rests solely in your hands. It’s sometimes difficult, but practice makes perfect.
How to prepare for your (shudder) doctoral dissertation defense
Most universities require a final doctoral defense of your precious work. Almost everyone who has a doctorate has a final defense story. Often they are the worst horror stories one can imagine, short of a bedroom intruder, and emblazoned on the mind of the teller forever.
For example . . . A friend of mine was obviously pregnant at her defense. After she successfully passed, her chair, staring at her bulk, informed her with a tone of incontrovertibility that her entire graduate education had been a “waste.” Outrageous, I know. I’m very glad to say she proved the chair wrong. Later, with two kids, she became an award-winning professor at Brandeis.
Why vision boards work and why you should make one today [for authors]
Visualization is a powerful tool. Athletes have harnessed this power for decades. In fact, visualization stimulates the same regions of the brain as actually performing the action does. This powerful tool, however, isn’t just for athletes. Writers too, can benefit from it. One way to do this, and express your creative self while doing so, is to create a vision board. A vision board is literally a board of some kind that you display images on to help you concentrate and maintain focus on a specific life goal (or goals) you have.