One day, Laura came to me to get help with a few chapters of her dissertation that she was struggling with. She explained that she didn’t think academic writing was her strength and was under a lot of stress with her approaching submission deadline. I started off by discussing with her what her main concerns were and what she had discussed with her supervisors. I then assessed and edited her discussion chapter first, using MS Word’s track changes and adding comments along the way to explain my changes and make suggestions. I identified (but did not correct) some general areas that required strengthening:
- Developing a stronger introduction and topic sentences.
This is truly an important area in academic writing. For a dissertation, it ensures your examiners understand what each chapter and paragraph is about, and that there is a logical flow of ideas. It also ensures that they have confidence that you truly know what you’re arguing and why. In a follow-up draft, taking on board my feedback, Laura began the chapter with a strong, clear statement that posed an argument that was the main thread of the chapter. - Developing a clearer logical structure to the main arguments.
PhD dissertations tend to have one main argument, with sub arguments, or a series of connected arguments. Laura had the latter, but the problem I drew her attention to was that they were not clearly connected in a logical manner. From my feedback, Laura was better able to frame and connect her arguments together.
This made a huge positive difference to the clarity of her discussion chapter.