EDAR thesis writing workshop

Doctoral Thesis Writing Workshop

Writing a doctoral thesis is hard work. It is hard for different reasons for different people, but it must be done, not only so that theses emerge into completeness - and hopefully also works of great quality - but also so that students can themselves graduate into competent professionals.
The problem is that the skill sets graduate students have developed over their long years in school very often fail them during their last extended hurdle - the PhD thesis. They can no longer think through their entire project before beginning it. They can no longer write in a mad dash at the end. There are few true deadlines and there is little support for modest advances. On the technical side, it is difficult to make a multipart argument and students often struggle with how to limit data collection (especially in the era of the internet). In general dissertation writing is slower, less satisfying, lonelier and the product often weaker than it has ever been.
The Doctoral Thesis Writing Workshop is designed to guide students through the most common pitfalls of thesis writing. It helps them learn a new set of skills far more appropriate to the task at hand: from developing successful work habits to organizing and structuring the document as a whole. The workshop focuses on practical, technical, and content related issues of dissertation writing and on the less technical, more emotional stumbling blocks that come with completing a big piece of work and a significant phase in students own career development.

The Workshop will run for two days

The language of instruction will be English.

1) General Skills for the successful completions of a PhD Thesis will cover issues difficult for all dissertation writers, most specifically:
- How to Set up and Stick to a daily writing regime
- How to Separate Writing from Research
- Tools for Writing before you Know what to Say
- Tools for Limiting and Managing Data
- How to Make an Argument
- Editing Skills to Live By
- Skills for Limiting and Managing Distractions
- Learning to Rest.

The Dissertation Writing Workshop is designed for graduate students at any stage in the dissertation writing process - from not-a-word-written to full-draft-in-need-of-revisions-completed.

The workshop aims to support students in the writing of their PhD dissertation (whether in the form of a long manuscript or as a cumulative thesis). It is designed to equip the participants with a series of practical tools that can make their thesis writing smoother and better organized. It examines the various issues involved in writing a doctoral thesis: getting started, structure and argumentation, time management and self-motivation, getting and handling feedback, publications, composing a thesis from articles, as well as providing technical tools that can help throughout the process.

The workshop is interactive and includes short lectures on key points, practical exercises, as well as question and discussion time.
The main workshop language is English and the writing conventions we will refer to are those of the English speaking world. However, participants writing in French are welcome to attend too, and comments in French are very welcome throughout the workshop.
The registered participants are required to hand in a 5-6 page text (in relation to their thesis) and a little questionnaire until a week before the workshop. The text should ideally be a draft text written by the participant alone, and should be reasonably understandable also by non specialists of their specific area of interest (it could be a proposal, a portion of an introduction or a section of a data analysis chapter).