How Scott Should Write His Dissertation, by Rich Puchalsky

(Elevated from the comments because, well, because it's a damn fine idea.)

1. Write a chapter as if it's one big blog post. If psychologically necessary, write within the same software used for blogging. If a chapter is too long to hold the mental state of blog-writing, write each piece of the chapter as a blog post.
2. Put pieces of the chapter together into Word, and imagine that an inexperienced student has turned this in as an academic paper. Red-pen/edit the thing into academese.

In this way, it should be able to be done within writing styles with proven productivity already, rather than the new and uncertain dissertation one. After one or two chapters done this way, you should be able to merge everything into a new style and skip the intervening steps.

If you do try this, the next chapter is the obvious candidate, since you're probably nearly done with this one and want no excuse to re-write the whole thing. If you actually try this and it doesn't work, setting you back horribly, well, you should have known better to take advice from some guy on the Internet.

Comments

[N. Pepperell]

I've actually done things like this... If writing for a conference talk, the eventual editing isn't even that extreme...

[Rich Puchalsky]

Another evidence of my worrying talent for instant advising; I'm one of those people who can hear a tale of woe and a couple of seconds later come out with a reasonable-sounding but wholly unconsidered plan for what to do. Many is the person at some drop-in writing group who has been given a shiny plan for improvement of their poem, or something. I have no idea what happens after they go home. Thankfully, medical problems are outside my scope of non-expertise.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I have no idea what happens after they go home.

Surely nothing too terrible. I should add: one way I overcome writer's block is to switch mediums, as you recommended. About half of my material originates in emails I send to myself, since that's a format in which I can be rambling and disorganized.

[Luther Blissett]

In an undergrad philosophy of language course, we had to write a letter to our grandparents about Wittgenstein. Our grandparents had to be able to understand what we were talking about -- insofar as a young, long-haired philosophy professor could pretend to be our grandparents. In any case, I've used this assignment before in my own rhet/comp courses. It stops students from trying to write what they think academic prose looks and sounds like (which is somehow even worse than academic prose *really* looks and sounds like).

[Ancrene Wiseass]

Good advice: I may co-opt it myself, if you don't mind!

[bill benzon]

About half of my material originates in emails I send to myself, since that's a format in which I can be rambling and disorganized.

I rarely write emails to myself. I often write longish emails to people I know as a way of thinking "out loud." I don't expect them to reply at comparable length. Often enough, they don't reply at all, and that's OK. But I do find addressing myself to some specific person whom I know is very helpful. Even when I'm just thinking without any specific notion of getting those thoughts in written form, I address myself to someone I know, though not necessarily someone I know well.

[Mrs. Coulter]

I've been known to compose long written works in my email client, which is, for some reason, much less intimidating than Word.