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Aug. 1st, 2010 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyRevising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors - edited by Beth Luey
Another 'how to write STUFF' book. One reason I wanted to pick this up was because it was published in a new edition in 2008, which is a lot more recent than some of the stuff I've been reading, and I was interested in what sort of a difference that would make. It therefore was interesting to read the advice that trying to write a PhD as if it were a book was a Really Bad Idea, given that dissertations are now public property via electronic means much easier than they were previously, and thus publishers have little to no incentive to publish something already, more or less, available to the general public. So that was a useful little hint, and makes me feel a lot less anxious about revising the earlier chapters of the dissertation up to the quality I know I'd want them to be at this stage. It also answers some of my questions about 'how much legwork do I want to do with this introduction?' - it is perhaps wise not to do all of it at this stage.
That said. Apart from that, most of the advice is pretty much what I've read elsewhere - kill the footnotes, consider expanding out into a more general readership, take out jargon, think about alternative systems of referencing. One good way suggested of revising text was to think about making it as clear as possible, not dumbing it down - whichever chapter it was suggested that a good scholar should be able to communicate their idea clearly in words of two syllables (or words to that effect). Given that I'm always trying to my writing to be as clear and straightforward as possible, whilst still expressing complex ideas, I'm completely behind this as a strategy for revising prose - but it was a bit preaching to the choir.
There was a good section on various ways one could turn a dissertation into a book, although none of them worked particularly well for my project. There were also some good suggestions about how one might go about the revisions process, and making sure you had your own voice. All good sound advice, and I suspect that it would be this book I would send people to rather than Revising Prose or The Thesis and the Book. Hell, after reading this I'm wondering whether there might be a review article in all of this reading for one of the professional magazines about Books On Thesis Work, because I know I would have loved some suggestions about where to go that weren't based solely on me Having A Moment.
Actually, that's not a bad idea.
Anyway.
If you haven't been following along with me in all my reading so far - yes. Read this one. It's got a good friendly tone, a positive attitude and sums up the Received Wisdom in a way that made me have new ideas, even though I've seen a lot of it before.
A Morbid Taste for Bones - Ellis Peters
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mirabehn made me do it. And I'm rather glad she did.
Those of you know are friended on this journal will probably be aware that I'm doing a bit of work with the Rule of St. Benedict at the moment. This book is the first of the Cadfael series, which were phenomenally successful in the 1970s and 1980s; they follow the adventures of the Benedictine monk Brother Cadfael, an herbalist and gardner who used to be a Crusader, pirate and general daring-do-er. I have read these before, when I was a young teenager, and loved them then - but I sated myself on them, as teenagers with indulgent book-buying parents are wont to do, and having a surfeit, turned away. I'm coming back to them, from the beginning as I don't remember anything about the plots at all, with a desire to read them now that I am a bit older and a bit wiser - and a bit better at pacing myself.
You've probably guessed that these are murder mystery books from the title, although they are set in the twelfth century and thus have a bit of period history to them. Not that that turns up much in this book, which is primarily concerned with the transportation of a Welsh saint's bones back to Cadfael's monastery in Shrewsbury, in an attempt to make the monastery more powerful and important in the region. Wales at this point is still feudal, which is quite interesting, and hardly anyone speaks English - hence the presence of the colourful Cadfael as translator to the party of otherwise entirely Respectable Monks (hem hem) trying to convince a Welsh village to give up its saint.
I'm not going to go into too much detail here, as I suspect most people who like this sort of thing will already be persuaded; suffice to say, the plot hangs together nicely and it was a good read to have on my trip to New Brunswick last week. So I'm looking forward to revisiting these over the next few years.
Another 'how to write STUFF' book. One reason I wanted to pick this up was because it was published in a new edition in 2008, which is a lot more recent than some of the stuff I've been reading, and I was interested in what sort of a difference that would make. It therefore was interesting to read the advice that trying to write a PhD as if it were a book was a Really Bad Idea, given that dissertations are now public property via electronic means much easier than they were previously, and thus publishers have little to no incentive to publish something already, more or less, available to the general public. So that was a useful little hint, and makes me feel a lot less anxious about revising the earlier chapters of the dissertation up to the quality I know I'd want them to be at this stage. It also answers some of my questions about 'how much legwork do I want to do with this introduction?' - it is perhaps wise not to do all of it at this stage.
That said. Apart from that, most of the advice is pretty much what I've read elsewhere - kill the footnotes, consider expanding out into a more general readership, take out jargon, think about alternative systems of referencing. One good way suggested of revising text was to think about making it as clear as possible, not dumbing it down - whichever chapter it was suggested that a good scholar should be able to communicate their idea clearly in words of two syllables (or words to that effect). Given that I'm always trying to my writing to be as clear and straightforward as possible, whilst still expressing complex ideas, I'm completely behind this as a strategy for revising prose - but it was a bit preaching to the choir.
There was a good section on various ways one could turn a dissertation into a book, although none of them worked particularly well for my project. There were also some good suggestions about how one might go about the revisions process, and making sure you had your own voice. All good sound advice, and I suspect that it would be this book I would send people to rather than Revising Prose or The Thesis and the Book. Hell, after reading this I'm wondering whether there might be a review article in all of this reading for one of the professional magazines about Books On Thesis Work, because I know I would have loved some suggestions about where to go that weren't based solely on me Having A Moment.
Actually, that's not a bad idea.
Anyway.
If you haven't been following along with me in all my reading so far - yes. Read this one. It's got a good friendly tone, a positive attitude and sums up the Received Wisdom in a way that made me have new ideas, even though I've seen a lot of it before.
A Morbid Taste for Bones - Ellis Peters
mirabehn made me do it. And I'm rather glad she did.Those of you know are friended on this journal will probably be aware that I'm doing a bit of work with the Rule of St. Benedict at the moment. This book is the first of the Cadfael series, which were phenomenally successful in the 1970s and 1980s; they follow the adventures of the Benedictine monk Brother Cadfael, an herbalist and gardner who used to be a Crusader, pirate and general daring-do-er. I have read these before, when I was a young teenager, and loved them then - but I sated myself on them, as teenagers with indulgent book-buying parents are wont to do, and having a surfeit, turned away. I'm coming back to them, from the beginning as I don't remember anything about the plots at all, with a desire to read them now that I am a bit older and a bit wiser - and a bit better at pacing myself.
You've probably guessed that these are murder mystery books from the title, although they are set in the twelfth century and thus have a bit of period history to them. Not that that turns up much in this book, which is primarily concerned with the transportation of a Welsh saint's bones back to Cadfael's monastery in Shrewsbury, in an attempt to make the monastery more powerful and important in the region. Wales at this point is still feudal, which is quite interesting, and hardly anyone speaks English - hence the presence of the colourful Cadfael as translator to the party of otherwise entirely Respectable Monks (hem hem) trying to convince a Welsh village to give up its saint.
I'm not going to go into too much detail here, as I suspect most people who like this sort of thing will already be persuaded; suffice to say, the plot hangs together nicely and it was a good read to have on my trip to New Brunswick last week. So I'm looking forward to revisiting these over the next few years.
