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Dissertation Advice

I will be writing my English Lit dissertation in a couple of months and I was wondering, for those of you who have already written their dissertations, how did you go about it and what are a few things that I need to consider in order to get the best grade I can get? What are some things you wish you did when you were writing it and things to warn me against? Thank you in advance x
My main tip would be to start early (not sure when yours is due, but it looks like it might already be a bit late for that), and to start writing as soon as you can. I wasted too much time reading and planning when I should have just been writing. Make the most of your supervisions or contact hours; if you're allowed to send in drafts before meetings, make use of that, so that you don't end up discussing vague directions in which you might take your work when you could have been getting valuable feedback on your actual ideas. Best of luck!
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Quaye
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Original post by Kaylee Frye
My main tip would be to start early (not sure when yours is due, but it looks like it might already be a bit late for that), and to start writing as soon as you can. I wasted too much time reading and planning when I should have just been writing. Make the most of your supervisions or contact hours; if you're allowed to send in drafts before meetings, make use of that, so that you don't end up discussing vague directions in which you might take your work when you could have been getting valuable feedback on your actual ideas. Best of luck!

I'm in my second semester of second year so we haven't properly started discussing what needs to be done for the dissertation, but I've noticed I am reading a lot more than I am writing. Thank you so much for the advice! I highly appreciate that!
Original post by Quaye
I'm in my second semester of second year so we haven't properly started discussing what needs to be done for the dissertation, but I've noticed I am reading a lot more than I am writing. Thank you so much for the advice! I highly appreciate that!


Ooh right, sorry about that - because you said you'd be writing it in a few months I assumed you were in your third year, and taking a very chill approach! :lol: You've got plenty of time then! In your case, yes do read a lot now; you need a considerable amount of 'research' time where you're just reading around your subject and figuring out exactly what questions you'd like to be asking, no use in writing that much in advance! My tip is more a general one: always start writing sooner rather than later, as it focuses your thoughts and can take you in directions you hadn't foreseen in your planning. It also teaches you not to get too attached to anything you write, as a second or third draft will always be better than your first attempt. But you're doing very well by already planning and thinking about your work, so you'll be fine!

One final tip: keep an annotated bibliography, and start doing that now. I wasted a lot of time trying to find articles or chapters I'd read almost a year earlier when I was just vaguely browsing around my topic, only to then recover them and realise they weren't as relevant as I'd hoped anyway. Your future self will be grateful if you just keep a list of titles with a few notes on what's useful about each one :smile:

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