“Dissertation Practice: A Journal for Writing” shows students how to incorporate writing into daily thought.
After guiding nearly 600 graduate students through writing their dissertations, one would think that Diane Durkin knows a thing or two about the process. She proves so with not one but two books on the topic, the most recent, “Dissertation Practice: A Journal for Learning,” published by Routledge, is aimed at demystifying the writing endeavor that many students dread the most.
Durkin, an adjunct professor in UCLA’s Department of Education, says that one major challenge to students is, “They see dissertation writing as a huge hurdle they face at the end of the process – after they have produced their ideas. They mythologize the process into something upsetting, and so seek simplistic, mechanistic advice, such as “write for 15 minutes a day.”
“What distinguishes [my] books is a whole different approach, that writing is thought, not the final dressing of thought. It is not a linear process, but rather recursive, integral with and promoting thought, and that it can be made natural, everyday, if not necessarily easy.”
The chapters in “Dissertation Practice” provide an interactive resource that promotes journaling as a way to engage in thought. Through exercises and activities, the book aims to instill key writing practices such as imagining, creating, explaining, and rethinking, in order to promote analysis and argument.
Students are invited to enter short pieces of writing in the book’s blank spaces, which provide a safe place for practice and trial, as well as an easy reference to store key thoughts and information that are foundational to their dissertation. This journaling technique encourages the creation of reflections, examples, range of topics, and sample annotations to generate and review thought that will aid in producing the finished product. The book also gives opportunities for self-assessment questions, working with chair boxes, revision practices, and examples of students’ work.
While Durkin does not address artificial intelligence directly in “Dissertation Practice,” she says, “I can see a role for it. There’s nothing in the book that precludes using AI. The only thing that is recommended is to double-check sources. I don’t say this explicitly, but I say it in general: double-check your sources. See where the conversations have been initiated and where they are going so that you can ensure that the people you are citing have done this research and that it is credible.”
“The book really emphasizes evidence and how evidence is related to claims,” notes Durkin. “One of [my] hopes for the book is that students have a better way of handling the very complex relationship of evidence to the claims that they are making. They can’t just make a claim, then offer a piece of evidence, and then wonder how the reader understands the evidence and guesses at how it relates. A really strong point of the text is how to question yourself on what those relationships are, how to establish claims, how to marshal the evidence for those claims, and then, how to connect evidence to those claims.”
She comes back to a key point: “Writing is not the aftermath of thought – it is thought,” says Durkin of the book’s approach. “The book is really teaching them how to think [and] giving them guidance on how to connect.
“They will see writing as thought and use it everyday in big ways and small ways to advance their thinking, [taking] part in a whole movement to make communication clearer and more succinct and targeted and compelling … so that they become better communicators – and better aware of other communicators and their problems with clarity.” Students come back after years of service and say how much this training has helped them in multiple aspects of their careers.
Durkin is also the author of “Writing Strategies for the Education Dissertation,” published by Routledge; and “Seeking Common Cause: Reading and Writing in Action” (with Lisa Gerrard), published by McGraw-Hill, Durkin has taught in UCLA’s Educational Leadership Program (ELP) since 2000.