• 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.

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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!

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Last week I mailed off the final version of my D.Min. dissertation. It is finished! Finally! Thank you to all of you who have prayed for and encouraged me in this project. Looking back, it has been a long road. I have been thinking about and researching this topic for years, and writing in earnest since last summer. According to MS Word, my dissertation has 57,976 words, although that includes some notes that I have made in a hidden font which do not appear in the final product. Still, it is a sizable work with 233 numbered pages, not including the “front matter” (contents, preface, etc.).

My graduation will be on June 22 in Los Gatos, CA. As my final graduation requirement, I will be giving a public presentation of my research on Saturday 4/19 from 10:00 a.m. to noon at CFC. Anyone who is interested is welcome to attend. Since several people have asked, I will try to have the presentation recorded.

People have been asking me what I will do with all of my “free time” now that I have finished the dissertation. I usually tell them that for the past two years I have often said “I will do X when my dissertation is finished.” I think that by now I have at least 200 things on that list, not to mention my usual church responsibilities. Now I can begin to slowly work though that list.  One of the things that I want to do is to write more regularly here.  I realize that my posts have been few and far between the past few months.

I also hope to find a way to get my research published. I have begun to learn about the world of publishing and what it takes to have a book accepted by a publisher. I will probably write more about that process as I explore the options in this area.

Have a blessed Resurrection Day tomorrow!

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1. A place to collect citations as you do your research
2. A way to build your list of works cited (bibliography) and insert properly formatted footnotes
3. A full-featured word processor for the actual writing.

I was unable to a good tool to handle both the citations and the biblography, so I settled on EndNote for the bibliography and created my own MS Access database for the citations. For word processing, the default standard is MS Word.

EndNote has excellent integration with MS Word, which makes inserting and formatting footnotes a breeze. I added an extra macro to the toolbar to make it even easier. Now all I have to do to insert the proper footnote at the cursor location is (1) switch to EndNote and navigate to the correct source, and (2) click two buttons on my tool bar. To insert the page number of the reference requires one more click on the tool bar and typing in the page number.

The beauty of this arrangement is that the footnotes are always correctly formatted, including the correct form for first and subsequent references to a source. If you rearrange your paragraphs or insert another citation, everything is adjusted to maintain the proper format. If you discover a typo in the book title, you simply need to fix the reference in the EndNote program, and all the reference in your document will be updated. These updates do not necessarily occur immediately, but they will all be updated when you click the “Format Bibliography” button to automatically update the list of works cited. Very cool! It works this magic by attaching a hidden tag to each footnote which links it with the correct reference in the EndNote library.

In order to meet the formatting requirements of your academic institution you will need two things:

1. A MS Word “template”

The MS Word template contains the document styles that you will need to use to format your paper. Using document styles will ensure that your formatting is consistent, and it will also make it very easy to instantly make formatting changes throughout the entire paper. For example, suppose you have level three headings in italics, and your school tells you to make them bold. With styles you simply have to change the formatting of the h3 style, and all the headings with that style will be instantly updated. I like to write with single spaced text so that I can see more lines on my computer screen. When I am ready to print, I simply change the “Body Text” style to double space and all my text paragraphs become double spaced. To read more on this topic, and for links to some excellent tutorials, see my article Using MS Word for Academic Writing.

If you use heading styles (which you should!), you can also use the Document Map to navigate within your paper. The document map displays an outline of your paper in a box on the left, and when you click on any section heading you are taken immediately to that section. It will save you lots of scrolling!

You will need to have a document template that defines all the styles that you need to format your paper. The EndNote web site has a long list of templates designed to meet the requirements of many different schools and journals. If you find the one you need you can simply download it. Otherwise you will need to find something close and modify it to suit your needs.

2. An EndNote “output style”

EndNote uses “output styles” to determine how to format footnotes and the bibliography. The program comes with a long list of output styles, and on the company web site you can download more. If you can’t find exactly what you need, you can find something close and modify it to suit your purpose.

It takes a certain amount of effort to create a MS Word document template and and EndNote output style to meet your needs. It is probably not worth the effort for a single short paper, but for a lengthy dissertation or a series of papers it will save you a lot of formatting work in the long run. I hope that in the future more schools will offer these two types of files, customized to meet their requirements, for their students to download.

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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

From the Plain English press release of 23 March 2004:

Spokesman John Lister said over-used phrases were a barrier to communication. “When readers or listeners come across these tired expressions, they start tuning out and completely miss the message – assuming there is one! Using these terms in daily business is about professional as wearing a novelty tie or having a wacky ringtone on your phone.

“George Orwell’s advice from 1946 is still worth following: ‘Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.’”

Other nominations from the Plain English survey:

• 24/7
• absolutely
• address the issue
• around (in place of “about”)
• awesome
• ballpark figure
• basically
• basis (“on a weekly basis” in place of “weekly” and so on)
• bear with me
• between a rock and a hard place
• blue sky (thinking)
• boggles the mind
• bottom line
• crack troops
• diamond geezer
• epicenter (used incorrectly)
• glass half full (or half empty)
• going forward
• I hear what you’re saying …
• in terms of …
• it’s not rocket science
• literally
• move the goal-posts
• ongoing
• prioritize
• pushing the envelope
• singing from the same hymn sheet
• the fact of the matter is
• thinking outside the box
• to be honest/to be honest with you/to be perfectly honest
• touch base
• up to (in place of “about”)
• value-added (in general use)

Now please bear with me as I push the envelope to think outside the box, so that going forward we can touch base about the bottom line. At the end of the day the fact of the matter is that it’s not rocket science.

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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.

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Here is the introduction to my D.Min. dissertation proposal. Now that I am finally actually doing something about it I want to share it with my readers. Let me know your feedback. Now you all can help me with my dissertation

(Please note that this section is designed to describe why this study is needed. I don’t want to be overly negative, but to give a balanced description of some of the tensions and challenges faced in ministry in a bilingual immigrant church.)

It’s not easy living in the gap. The children of immigrants find themselves torn between two cultures. They want to honor the hopes and aspirations of their parents, but at the same time they long for acceptance in the only country that they have ever known. They live out one identity at school and with their friends but put on a different one at home. Meanwhile their parents are concerned about the influence of American culture on their children and worry that they will abandon their native language and ethnic heritage.

These two forces often collide at church. The immigrant generation, after living in an English speaking, culturally American world all week long, look forward to experiencing a taste of their home language and culture at church. But for their children it is a very different experience. On Sundays they feel yanked backwards into a culture that they have worked hard to move beyond during the week so that they can fit in with their friends. Of course it is never that simple, because they often value many aspects of their parents’ culture. But the tension is there.

I have experienced this challenge first hand over the past twelve years at a bilingual Chinese church in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I serve as the English Pastor. Like most ethnic immigrant churches, Chinese churches in North America struggle to find effective ways to reach the children and grandchildren of the immigrant generation. Those serving in other Asian immigrant churches have reported similar challenges.

The phenomenon of immigrants moving to a new country and founding a church is nothing new. The challenges currently facing Chinese churches are similar to those faced by other immigrant churches in the past. I will draw on the experiences of those groups to discover principles that contemporary immigrant churches can apply in their ministry.

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Maybe the problem is that not many academic types are geeks, but it shouldn’t be this difficult. With my background in computer programming I can envision the ideal software for dissertation writing because I know what is possible. It would have the following characteristics:

Source management features:

• a bibliographic database for sources, complete with keywords and the ability to search
• ability remotely log into library catalogers and import bibliographic data directly into the database
• automatic formatting of footnotes according to a wide variety of style requirements
• ability to create new citation styles if necessary
• automatic creation and updating of first reference and subsequent reference footnotes
• automatic creation of a bibliography of works cited

Quotation management features:

• a note card feature for recording research notes and quotations
• link between note cards and bibliographic database so that when the note is pasted into the document the footnote is automatically generated
• searchable keyword categories for the notes
• an outline manager to organize the notes according to the outline for the paper
• a way to track which quotes have been used, and if necessary to locate them in the paper

It may sound like a lot, but this is all very doable. Actually, I have settled on Endnote for my bibliographic software, and it will handle every thing in the first category. But I have not been able to find a satisfactory program for the quotation management, and certainly nothing that integrates the two.

I was tempted to start a programming project and work on the software myself, but I don’t think that I can afford to use my dissertation study time for the next 6 months to develop software. Instead I think I will try out setting up a very simple note card database in Microsoft Access. It won’t be linked to Endnote, but at least I can manage my quotes and set up keywords. I will enter abbreviated reference information on the “card,” and then use Endnote to generate the footnote when I paste the quotation into my document. Hopefully this will be a reasonable work around. I will let you know!

Update: I found out a way to enter Rich Text (i.e. font and formatting) in an Access field.  So now I can correctly enter any bold or italic fonts in my quotations.  My Access application is growing a little bit at a time as I get around to tweaking it.  (3-23-06) 

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