Writing Strategies for the Education Dissertation

Writing Strategies for the Education Dissertation offers a unique take on doctoral writing. It uses composition and rhetoric strategies to identify key activities for generating thought to keep students writing. It de-mythologizes the view of writing as a mere skill and promotes the view of writing as thinking. It uses writing to help students invent, think through, write, rethink, and rewrite as they develop and present their innovations. The book opens with this mindset and with the purposes of the task (adding to knowledge); it helps define a "researchable topic," and provides advice on invention ("brainstorming"). It then addresses each of the key sections of the dissertation, from Problem Statement, through Literature Review and Methods, to Findings and Conclusions, while underscoring the iterative nature of this writing. For each chapter, the book provides advice on invention, argument, and arrangement ("organization") - rhetorical elements that are seldom fully addressed in textbooks. Each chapter also looks at possible missteps, offers examples of student writing and revisions, and suggests alternatives, not rules. The text concludes with an inventive approach of its own, addressing style (clarity, economy, and coherence) as persuasion. This book is suitable for all doctoral students of education and others looking for tips and advice on the best dissertation writing.

Diane Bennett Durkin has taught critical thinking and writing at UCLA for over 30 years, publishing textbooks that merge disciplines, and helping education doctoral students understand and use writing processes to generate, organize, and communicate their ideas.

1. De-mythologizing the Process: Changing One's Mindset 2. The Problem Statement: Writing Processes 3. Writing Strategies for the Literature Review 4. Writing the Methods Chapter, Getting Past Preliminary Orals, and Getting Started 5. Collecting and Analyzing Data, then Writing up Results and Findings 6. Writing up the Discussion: Conclusions and Recommendations 7. Revising the Dissertation as a Whole