Dissertations aren’t know for their brevity. And yet, there are still limits to the amount of data that a single dissertation can hold and limits to the number of claims that a single dissertation can coherently make.
What that means, then, is that you’ll likely come to a point in the dissertation writing process where you’ll have to decide what stays and what goes. And learning to make cuts at this stage is useful, because you’ll have to make a similar set of hard choices with every future book or paper or research report that you write.
That cutting process can be painful—you worked hard to gather those data or develop those models or run those analyses! The good news, however, is that the work you’ve done isn’t wasted. Because the parts of your work that don’t fit in your dissertation don’t have to stay on the cutting room floor. Instead, if you write strategically, you can turn those extra bits into standalone side projects that you write once you get your dissertation out the door.
Of course, to figure out which claims or analyses or examples you should cut and save to your “future projects” folder, you first have to figure out what kind of story your dissertation is trying to tell. And even if you’re not in a situation where you have too much data or too many claims you can make with those data, identifying the core story of your dissertation is still helpful for making other hard choices, like whether to publish your dissertation as a book or a series of articles (or both), and which parts to try to publish first.
In my experience, there are two primary types of dissertation stories. That includes stories about parts of a process and stories about types of a thing. So let’s talk through each of those in turn.
Parts of a Process
Process stories, as the name implies, usually reveal some sort of process, where each step is contingent on the one before.
Whether they play out in the physical world or the social world or the theoretical one, processes have a tendency to be fairly complicated. Especially if they’re important enough to write a dissertation about. What that means, then, is when you’re writing about a particular process in your dissertation (or book or article), you may have to simplify things somewhat. Instead of trying to describe Steps A through Q of some process, with seventeen sub-steps at each each step along the way, maybe start with Steps A, B, and C (one for each of your core dissertation chapters), and leave the rest for future research. Or, if someone else has already laid the basic groundwork, you might build on what they’ve done and use your dissertation to reveal Steps E, F, and G. Or you might argue that Step B is much more complicated than previous research has suggested, and break it down into B1, B2, and B3.
Essentially, simplifying doesn’t mean ignoring or denying the complexity of the process you’re interested in studying. And it doesn’t mean leaving out data that contradict your central claims. It just means acknowledging that one project can’t do all the things and then stating the scope of your work clearly up front.
Clearly stating the parameters of the process you’re studying makes things easier both for your readers (who may get lost trying to follow all of the details and detours) and for you as the writer to make decisions about which parts won’t fit. If you’re focusing on Steps E, F, and G, for example, then data you have that’s relevant to Step H or higher can get saved for future projects, and data on Step A probably doesn’t need to go in the dissertation at all, except maybe as a brief note acknowledging that your data on Step A align with what previous research has already found (and if they don’t, then you’ve got a whole other we-thought-things-worked-one-way-but-actually-they-might-work-another-way future process story project to write). Or, if you’re focusing on Steps E, F, and G, and you find that Step F has twenty seven sub-steps, then you might try to simplify those sub-steps into three or four categories of sub-steps, leaving the nuance for you or someone else to unpack in future work.
Process stories lend themselves nicely to book-style writing, because there’s a clear narrative flow. For that same reason, however, you might find yourself struggling if your advisor tells you develop a standalone paper from your process story dissertation to submit for journal review.
One solution is to write a summary-style article that covers all the steps you discuss in your dissertation, just in far less detail. The problem with that approach, however, is that it’s hard to do with journal word limits. And it also limits the number of articles that you can publish out of your dissertation—an important consideration as publishing pressures on grad students and recent graduates grow.
Another option, then, is to write a standalone paper based on one of the key steps in the larger process you’re describing—choosing one that is theoretically or empirically interesting in its own right. This option is also helpful if you want to use the same data from your dissertation in both an article and a book. Because, turning back to our Step E, F, G example, the book will tell the story of how we get from Step D to Step G and why that larger process matters, while a standalone article about Step E might mention how Step E fits into the larger process but focus instead on how Step E works in practice, or why Step E works differently from other steps in the process, or how understanding Step E can help us make sense of Step Theta in a totally different process, instead.
To that end, if you’re writing about Steps E, F, and G in your dissertation, it usually makes sense to write the Step E paper first. That way you can build on (and cite) that paper in later papers looking at Step F and Step G.
In some cases, however, it might more make sense to start with G or even F. That’s what happened for me with my own dissertation, which looked at how middle- and upper-middle class white students negotiate opportunities that give them unfair advantages in school. The first thing I uncovered with my dissertation research (which started with ethnographic observations in an elementary school) was what I’ll call Step F in that process. More specifically, I observed that middle- and upper-middle-class white kids were asking for (and getting) more help from their teachers at school. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about class differences in help-seeking as part of a larger process. It wasn’t even the thing I set out to study at all.
Observing those differences in help-seeking, however, led me inductively to more questions. Questions like: Why do some kids ask for more help than others? Why aren’t teachers doing more to adjust for these differences? And what other strategies besides help-seeking might middle- and upper-middle-class white kids be using to secure advantages in school? Those questions led me to gather more data, including interviews with parents and students and teachers, and observations of other types of classroom interactions between teachers and students and their peers.
In the end, and as I map out in the video below, I had enough data for two dissertations—one process story and one story about types of a thing. The process story was the dissertation I ended up writing: tracing inequalities in help-seeking from their origins (at home and in teachers’ ambiguous expectations) to their consequences. But there was also another types of a thing story dissertation I could’ve written from the data: highlighting parallel class-based inequalities in help-seeking, accommodation-seeking, and attention-seeking at school. My first book, Negotiating Opportunities, primarily tells this second story, while weaving in relevant bits from the first one as well.
Types of a Thing
To that end, you may find that the story your dissertation is telling is not about a single overarching process but rather about types of a thing. These things could each be processes (e.g., three separate mechanisms that all contribute to some outcome). Or they could be cases of some phenomenon or theme.
Types of a thing stories often lend themselves to article writing—because it’s relatively easy to pull off one mechanism or one case to write about separately without having to discuss all the others. But while it may be easy to publish the first type of the thing from a types-of-a-thing story, the risk of redundancy can make it difficult to publish standalone articles for the other two or three types of the thing, especially if all the types of the thing point to a similar conclusion, just via a slightly different mechanism or through a different case-based lens.
One option, then, is to publish one standalone article (picking your most illustrative case or type of the thing). and then write a book that ties together all the types of the thing. The book might show how, together, the various cases provide even more support for the conclusions that your standalone article has already made. Or the book might outline scope conditions around the argument that you develop in your standalone article, showing how that argument works in some cases but not in others (this model works best if one of your types of a thing is an outlier case).
The Leftover Bits
Once you figure out the story that you’re telling with your dissertation (or book or article), you can also start to identify the parts of your data or your analyses that aren’t relevant to that story that you’re trying to tell. And like the leftovers from a Thanksgiving dinner, you can also use those bits to get creative. You don’t just have to make the same plate again the second day. You can rework them into a Reuben sandwich, a pot-pie, or a turkey soup. Essentially, you can use those extra bits of your dissertation as a chance to stretch in new directions—beyond your original constraints.
That’s what I’ve tried to do with some of the leftover bits from my own dissertation research—the parts that didn’t really fit either in the dissertation itself or in my first book. That includes papers I’ve published on how the myth of meritocracy shapes the way teachers use homework and about how the US education system turns schools into “privilege-dependent institutions” and gives them an incentive to let affluent white kids and their parents get away with breaking the rules.
So, treat your dissertation like Thanksgiving dinner (or, for a different metaphor, a picnic or a family barbecue). You don’t have to fit everything on the first plate (or even the second). And if you plan in advance and bring a few Tupperware containers, you can put the leftovers in the fridge for a while until your stomach has room for more.