I hope you don't mind my horning in here, but I actually wrote a diss in English lit, although that was a long time ago. Since then, I've wandered a bit and now teach and do research on writing in "non-academic" settings (to use a highly ethnocentric word), particularly that of engineers, so I feel your pain.
I know the "funnel" and "reverse funnel" are rather cliched but they do work. In your intro, you start broad and narrow to your specific topic, and in the conclusion, you do the opposite. Oddly enough, one of the hardest things for my doctoral students is to have a conclusion that matches their introduction. They create this intro with a good question but the question they answer turns out to be different.
In a book called "Genre Analysis," John Swales lays out the typical structure of a research article in detail. His findings are based on linguistic analysis of lots of articles. I think what he says is helpful for any piece of research, including dissertations. And if you don't use it now, you'll probably have loads of use for it when you publish all your insights. :-)
You probably had this all worked out by now, so you might want to take all this as just making sympathetic noises on my part.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2004-12-21 12:34 pm (UTC)I hope you don't mind my horning in here, but I actually wrote a diss in English lit, although that was a long time ago. Since then, I've wandered a bit and now teach and do research on writing in "non-academic" settings (to use a highly ethnocentric word), particularly that of engineers, so I feel your pain.
I know the "funnel" and "reverse funnel" are rather cliched but they do work. In your intro, you start broad and narrow to your specific topic, and in the conclusion, you do the opposite. Oddly enough, one of the hardest things for my doctoral students is to have a conclusion that matches their introduction. They create this intro with a good question but the question they answer turns out to be different.
In a book called "Genre Analysis," John Swales lays out the typical structure of a research article in detail. His findings are based on linguistic analysis of lots of articles. I think what he says is helpful for any piece of research, including dissertations. And if you don't use it now, you'll probably have loads of use for it when you publish all your insights. :-)
You probably had this all worked out by now, so you might want to take all this as just making sympathetic noises on my part.