Joan Bolker

Like many self-help books, Joan Bolker invites us, the naive and eager doctoral candidates, into the dissertation writing process and navigation. While this acts more like a demystifying chronicle of the writing process, I believe it falls short of providing a structure to the dissertation. This allowed the large research project to be malleable to each person and young writer, which was a bit of a disadvantage. The perfect companion to this book would be something like "Save the Cat!" by Blake Snyder or "How to Write a Movie in 21 Days" by Viki King. While both of these outwardly deal with movie screenplays, they provide a structure and guide map to develop characters (or theories) and demonstrate their transformations (your placement in the research and field).

In the end, Bolker has provided an extremely useful resource that is better enriched by other writers helping their readers with form and structure. Perhaps there is a project here that 1) conglomerates all of this information into a pointed state for the reader/dissertator and 2) modernizes the language and methodologies since many of these books still use typewriters as the state-of-the-art production tool. Yet, this is for another time.… (more)

[3.75/5] The premise of this book is to present a way to find out your own personal working rhythm, program and style so that you can finish an academic document (thesis /dissertation). Although Bolker does deliver on this promise, the book sometimes feels a bit useless, but not because it's actually bad. I believe that this book is best read twice: once as a regular book, and once more throughout the writing process itself, so that the otherwise excellent advice gets to your attention right when it's needed.

In general, there are many good things to come out of this book, and it's a good (and short enough) read for anyone looking forward to write a thesis. However, as the author says, it's not a magical formula and will require some elbow grease just to figure out what works best for every one. To be read in parts, through your dissertation writing process.… (more)