Now that my dissertation is finished, I want to share some grad school humor that I have bookmarked during the process. Here some great strips from the Ph.D. comic. For those marked as “series,” press the “next” button to continue to the end of the series):

• Writing your Thesis Outline
• Your Thesis Title
• Phd Years-to-Thesis Chapter Conversion Chart
• The Thesis (series)
  
• Raiders of the lost dissertation (series)
  

Also, I have just found this hilarious video about dissertation writing. This is done by the same talented guy who helped me make the video of my dissertation presentation.

No Dissertation from ticoneva on Vimeo.

In April I did a 2 hour presentation of a summary of my dissertation research on Reaching the Next Generations in Bilingual Chinese Churches. The audio is finally ready to share with you here.

I have set up the presentation on slideshare.net so that the audio portion is synced to the presentation slides. You can see the presentation here. I hope that this will be of benefit to those of you who were interested in the presentation be were unable to attend. There is one place where the audio seems to skip. That is due to a 40 second section of the file that had been corrupted, which I deleted.

Meanwhile, work is progressing on the video file. When it is ready to be viewed, I will update this post with the link.

Please share any comments or suggestions that you have on the presentation in the comments here.

Update: The video of the presentation is now available: Part I and Part II. Thanks to Vinci for all his hard work in putting this together!

When Jesus was dying on the cross, He cried out “It is finished,” signifying that He had completely paid for our sins (Jn. 19:30). The Greek term that is used in that verse has been found on first century receipts, where it means “paid in full.” Given that yesterday was Good Friday, you might think that the title of this post is a reference to that event, but actually I am writing about something much more mundane.

Read the rest»»

Performancing has an introduction to Using Mindmaps: 5 Steps to Letting Your Blog Posts Write Themselves. The article is about writing blog posts, but you can use mindmaps to organize your thoughts about anything. I used a mindmap to get my thoughts organized when I initially started working on my dissertation. It’s helpful, because you can diagram the relationship between different ideas without forcing them into a linear sequence. For a good introduction to mindmaps, see the wikipedia article. I am using the open source program Freemind to create my mind maps.  If you’ve ever been frustrated with having to force your thoughts into a linear outline, you might give it a try.  Unfortunately, when you write the paper you eventually do need to put your thoughts into a linear sequence, but at least you can be freed from that constraint during the planning phase.

Recently I have been working hard on my dissertation, and I wanted to share a few thoughts about making good use of the writing tools that are available. First of all you will need three things, each of which can be done with the proper software tools:
Read the rest»»

The December 14 issue of the Business Common Sense newsletter includes the results of a survey that identifies the most irritating words and phrases.

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the Plain English Campaign surveyed 5,000 supporters in 70 countries. They voted on the most irritating phrase in the language. The results:

• 1. At the end of the day/li>
• 2. At this moment in time
• 3. the constant use of like as if it were a form of punctuation
• 4. With all due respect

Read the rest»»

Writing well is hard work. I have been trying to improve my writing skills as I work on my dissertation. Dan Edelen, who is working on a novel, lists five Essential Books on Writing. I haven’t read any of the books on his list, but I might check them out.

Dan’s writing project is different than mine, so here are two other books that are helpful for those who are doing academic writing.

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser. As the subtitle says, this is a classic. The current edition is the 30th anniversary edition. The book is divided into four sections, entitled “Principles,” “Methods,” “Forms,” and “Attitudes.” This is a book about the craft of writing rather than a book about grammar (you will need one of those as well). The author shares many examples from a wide range of literature as well as from his own writing projects. Especially helpful are his examples of editing changes that he has made in his own work.

Quality Research Papers by Nancy Jean Vyhmeister is written for those writing research papers in religion and theology. This is a good basic introduction to writing research papers, theses, and dissertations with special attention to those writing theological papers. I have found that other books on research writing are focused on either scientific or social science research, neither of which provide a good model for theological writing. In contrasting theological writing with the social sciences she says “In fact, scholars on that side of the campus may look at the ‘method’ used in seminary research and find only ‘madness’” (p. 26). But that is because that they do not understand that theological truth is discovered through study of the Scriptures rather then through sociological or anthropological field work.