Envisioning the Thesis as a Whole

Abstract

What is your dissertation about? And what contribution do you aim to achieve? What will be new or different about your work? How would you justify the time and resources that you will devote to it? These fundamental questions will seem very pressing in the beginning stages of your research, as Yeats’ intangible process of locking you into a long-run project begins. But they do not go away later on. You can often push such issues into the background in the central stages of the thesis, during field visits, case studies or the hard slog of library or archive work or data collection and analysis. But they tend to return during the ‘mid-term slump’ in morale that often afflicts dissertation authors. And they invariably crop up again when you have a first draft of your complete thesis, and have to fashion it into a polished and defensible final version. This chapter is about the importance of thinking through some reasonable answers before you invest too heavily in a particular research topic and approach. I consider first how to define one or several questions that will inform your project as a whole. The second section looks at the demands of doing ‘original’ and interesting research.

In dreams begin responsibility.

W. B. Yeats ¹