Destination Dissertation: A Traveler's Guide To A Done Dissertation Download Free (EPUB, PDF)
Your dissertation is not a hurdle to jump or a battle to fight; as this handbook makes clear, your dissertation is the first of many destinations on the path of your professional career. Destination Dissertation guides you to the successful completion of your dissertation by framing the process as a stimulating and exciting trip—one that can be completed in fewer than nine months and by following twenty-nine specific steps. Sonja Foss and William Waters—your guides on this trip—explain concrete and efficient processes for completing the parts of the dissertation that tend to cause the most delays: conceptualizing a topic, developing a pre-proposal, writing a literature review, writing a proposal, collecting and analyzing data, and writing the last chapter. This guidebook is crafted for use by students in all disciplines and for both quantitative and qualitative dissertations, and incorporates a wealth of real-life examples from every step of the journey.
Paperback: 464 pages
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; 2 edition (October 23, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1442246146
ISBN-13: 978-1442246140
Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.9 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #77,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #47 in Books > Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing > Editing #121 in Books > Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Publishing & Books > Authorship #195 in Books > Reference > Words, Language & Grammar > Grammar
This is probably most helpful for those in the social and hard sciences, as most of the examples come from those fields. The timeline also doesn't seem humanities specific; for example, it takes much longer than 40 hours to collect the relevant material for a humanities dissertation, and much more than 60 hours to read it and code it. While advanced graduate students may already have many quality notes useful for the dissertation, there will inevitably be more to read that a just-qualified student has yet to explore. The coding method also takes some imaginative application to work efficiently for literary, art history, critical theory and historical scholars. I'm unconvinced that the 6-9 month completion promise is applicable to these kinds of dissertations, unless a scholar has already spent a significant amount of time gathering and collecting dissertation-specific research. It's telling that the word "humanities" doesn't appear once throughout the text.
I like the book a lot. I have only read through a portion of it, but the practical advice is very useful and directs you to follow specific and attainable steps. I have only used it for smaller papers so far but plan to use it for my masters thesis next year. I could do with a little less of the fluff - travel metaphors and so on - but the meat of the book is very helpful.
I began my dissertation research and writing in May 2013 and I wish so much that I had known about Foss and Waters' book, Destination Dissertation at that time. In just the past two weeks I have begun reading this book, it has made a major difference in breaking the writer's block I had and has provided clear and concise understanding on how to develop a good literature review. The book has taken the mystic out of the dissertation process and the method's Foss and Waters introduce to their reads are easy to follow - making the research process enjoyable. I highly recommend this book to anyone considering doctoral studies and those embarking into dissertation research.
As a faculty member who guides PhD students, I have used Destination Dissertation as a resource in many ways, including organizing my thinking and recommendations, checklists and steps in dissertation writing, loaning to grad students for their own work. I especially love this 2nd edition with the new explanation of problem statements and research questions, as well as the ladder of abstraction (literature review) to manage research questions. This book is essential for advisors and committee members for grad students.·
Destination Dissertation provides explicit steps for the researcher who is trying to take an idea and move it through the research process. Readers are given strategies for focusing their research questions so that the methods that they have chosen help to answer that question. The writing style helps to demystify the research process in a clear and easily accessible way.
I had the older version of this book and elected to buy update as I am actively in dissertation mode. This book has been and still is a God send. Not sure how progress I'd have made on my own without it.
Great book and very professional yet easy to understand. Really helpful.
This should be required reading for anyone wishing to complete a dissertation or any lengthy research project. Clear, actionable advice from people who know how to get it done. Brilliant!
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