a step-by-step guide to post-graduate writing
Many students find the idea of writing a masters dissertation at postgraduate level a daunting prospect. And that’s quite understandable. They will probably never before have had to produce a work of 10,000 to 15,000 words; they will be uncertain about its content; and they will almost certainly never have seen what a dissertation looks like. John Biggam’s book is a guide to the entire process of developing postgraduate writing skills, from start to finish, and the most useful aspect of his approach is that he breaks the procedure down into separate steps and explains each of them in detail.
He starts from what is often the most puzzling stage of all – defining the project. Many students know the topic which interests them most, but turning this into a research proposal can be a long and frustrating process. It’s easy to lose a lot of time changing your mind and pursuing ideas which shift amorphously the very moment you think you have pinned them down.
He offers templates to help solve this problem, outlines the key issues at each stage, and even points to the most common traps that students fall into. This is valuable advice – and it comes from a research supervisor who has seen hundreds and hundreds of examples.
His chapters follow the stages of the process of producing the dissertation itself. How to define the project; making a start with the writing; doing a literature review; choosing the right research methods; dealing with the evidence and producing a conclusion; writing an abstract; and how to present the finished work.
Embedded within all this there are other important issues such as how to create structure, how to define your terms, and how to link one part of your writing to the next so as to create a continuous argument.
He also deals with the issue which many students right up to PhD level find difficult – how to quote from secondary sources and use a referencing system accu rately. He recommends the Harvard system as being popular with both students and tutors alike. Also included is how to conduct both qualitative and quantitative surveys, and what to do with the results when they have been assembled.
One of the suggestions he makes more than once which I thought very useful is that students should make their claims clearly and boldly. Your piece of research may be modestly (and wisely) limited in scope, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t treat it as something important, even if it is only to make your purpose clear to the person reading and assessing it.
He also offers some very good tips for dealing with the oral defence of your work – the viva – and he ends with what many students will probably find the most useful of all – sample extracts of introductions, literature reviews, research methods, project structures, and questionnaires.
Read the advice, follow it, even use the book as a source of reference, and I’m fairly confident that it will help you to produce a masters dissertation that succeeds. Just like it says on the tin.
© Roy Johnson 2008
John Biggam, Succeeding with your Masters Dissertation, Berkshire: Open University Press, 2008, pp.268, ISBN 0335227198
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Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) is a classic novella – half way between a long story and a short novel. It’s a wonderfully condensed tale of the relationship between art and life, love and death. Venice provides the background for the story of a famous German writer who departs from his usual routines, falls in love with a young boy, and gets caught up in a subtle downward spiral of indulgence. The novella is constructed on a framework of references to Greek mythology, and the unity of themes, form, and motifs are superbly realised – even though Mann wrote this when he was quite young. Later in life, Mann was to declare – ‘Nothing in Death in Venice was invented’. The story was turned into a superb film by Luchino Visconti and an opera by Benjamin Britten.
Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1856) deals with a tragic incident at sea, and is based on a true occurence. It is a nautical recasting of the Fall, a parable of good and evil, a meditation on justice and political governance, and a searching portrait of three men caught in a deadly triangle. Billy is the handsome innocent, Claggart his cruel tormentor, and Captain Vere the man who must judge in the conflict between them. The narrative is variously interpreted in Biblical terms, or in terms of representations of male homosexual desire and the mechanisms of prohibition against this desire. His other great novellas Benito Cereno, The Encantadas and Bartelby the Scrivener (all in this collection) show Melville as a master of irony, point-of-view, and tone. These fables ripple out in nearly endless circles of meaning and ambiguities.
Artistically, the novella is often unified by the use of powerful symbols which hold together the events of the story. The novella requires a very strong sense of form – that is, the shape and essence of what makes it distinct as a literary genre. It is difficult to think of a great novella which has not been written by a great novelist (though Kate Chopin’s The Awakening might be considered an exception). Another curious feature of the novella is that it is almost always very serious. It’s equally difficult to think of a great comic novella – though Saul Bellow’s excellent Seize the Day has some lighter moments.
Seize the Day (1956) focusses on one day in the life of one man, Tommy Wilhelm. A fading charmer who is now separated from his wife and his children, he has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of havoc. In the course of one climatic day, he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise. Some people might wish to argue that this is a short novel, but it is held together by the sort of concentrated sense of unity which is the hallmark of a novella. It is now generally regarded as the first of Bellow’s great works, even though he went on to write a number of successful and much longer novels – for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976.
Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1897) is a classic novella, and a ghost story which defies easy interpretation. A governess in a remote country house is in charge of two children who appear to be haunted by former employees who are now supposed to be dead. But are they? The story is drenched in complexities – including the central issue of the reliability of the person who is telling the tale. This can be seen as a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the traditional haunted house theme in Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease. Or is it simply, “the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read”? This collection also includes James’s other ghost stories – Sir Edmund Orme, Owen Wingrave, and The Friends of the Friends.
The Aspern Papers (1888) also by Henry James, is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s private correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer seeks a husband for her plain niece, whereas the potential purchaser of the letters she possesses is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who wins out? Henry James keeps readers guessing until the very end. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in the outcome. This collection of stories also includes The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion which is another classic novella.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of late nineteenth century imperialism and the colonial process. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement. It is certainly regarded as a classic of the novella form, and a high point of twentieth century literature – even though it was written at its beginning. This volume also contains the story An Outpost of Progress – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’. The differences between a story and a novella are readily apparent here if you read both texts and compare them.
Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is the account of a young salesman who wakes up to find he has been transformed into a giant insect. His family are bewildered, find it difficult to deal with him, and despite the good human intentions struggling underneath his insect carapace, they eventually let him die of neglect. He eventually expires with a rotting apple lodged in his side. This particular collection also includes Kafka’s other masterly transformations of the short story form – ‘The Great Wall of China’, ‘Investigations of a Dog’, ‘The Burrow’, and the story in which he predicted the horrors of the concentration camps – ‘In the Penal Colony’.
