If Dissertations Could Talk, What Would They Say?

By WILLIAM GERMANO

You open a young scholar's first book, the one based on his doctoral thesis. You begin in earnest. Your intentions are the best. But before long, you're flipping ahead to see just how many pages there are. It's a diversion tactic, and you know it. The maneuver only postpones the inevitable realization -- neither your heart nor the author's is really in this.

Why are dissertations, the firstborn of the academic tribe, so dull? What does it mean when the best minds can create book-length work that commands so little interest? The answer, as we all know, is that dullness is safe.

The dullness question, which Pope might have skewered in an elegant couplet, is one I've fumbled over in the course of writing a book about revising the doctoral dissertation. A bodice-ripper, you're thinking. But if you believe, as I do, that academics are having a hard time figuring out what they're supposed to be doing these days, the doctoral thesis can't not be an interesting place to look for trouble.

A professor I spoke to recently called the dissertation "a paranoid genre," and rightly so. The manuscript you produce as a degree requirement needs to demonstrate that you know the history of your field, that you have propitiated various deities, that you've found the right giant on whose shoulders you can climb and wave your tiny hat. Maybe that isn't paranoia quite, but it's at least a conservatism born of fear. The result is that many a dissertation inters its subject when it should be bringing it to light instead.

There are some signs of change out there, but they're not without problems. "I'm writing my dissertation as a book," a Ph.D. candidate reports confidently. Publishers are hearing that more and more often, but we remain skeptical. A dissertation isn't "already a book." At best it's a book-length manuscript, and confusing a dissertation with a book is the source of most of the unhappiness that new Ph.D.'s face as they gear up for publication.

Practically every dissertation sags beneath prose that no one would read if they didn't have to -- and so they don't. Many social scientists persist in believing that providing a reference in the middle of a sentence is exactly what the reader wants. Who ever yearned for [Simpson, 1999] smack in the middle of a carefully argued idea? When did the citation outweigh the thought formation that caused it in the first place?

Scholars in the humanities are just as likely to pursue the dream of objectivity to its anesthetizing extreme. Consider the astounding overuse of the passive voice, which not only eradicates the author but sucks the remaining life out of the author's prose. It would seem that many a young scholar in history, to choose one field, has been urged to produce chapters 60 pages long or longer. Outsized chapters may be impressive in a dissertation, but they become a trial for a voluntary reader. Other writing sins beset the dissertation, all of which are there, it seems, to add a patina of professionalism to the young scholar's work. Such exercises don't build book-writing skills.

A dissertation fulfills an academic requirement; a book fulfills a desire to speak broadly. A dissertation rehearses scholarship in the field; a book has absorbed that scholarship. A dissertation can be as long as the author likes; a book's length is strategically arranged for optimal marketability. A dissertation suppresses an authorial voice; a book creates and sustains one. A dissertation's structure demonstrates the author's analytic skills; a book's structure demonstrates the author's command of extended narrative. A dissertation stops; a book concludes.

Most crucially, a dissertation is written for a committee (that powerful audience of three or four), a book for the world. Yours might be a small world, like the total population of specialists in Etruscan inscriptions, but it's a population that extends beyond the folks you know personally and on into the future. If you want to be made nervous, don't think about what your dissertation director will say when the book version comes out; think instead that, if you're very lucky, someone will be dusting off your work after you're dead.

The fault within the genre can't be disentangled from the institution that summons the genre into being to begin with. Too many manuscripts are produced by having the author find the smallest corner of the field and burrow in -- and do so in the discipline's very special dissertationese. Why encourage a doctoral student in literature, for example, to produce yet one more manuscript that nudges forward some sort of theory in the big opening number, followed by four or five chapters, each of which is a close reading of a single text, purportedly reinforcing what was proposed at the start? If the dissertation is true to form, there won't even be a concluding chapter. When the last reading is finished, the work is declared complete. If you're writing such a dissertation, you'll have a hard time publishing it. If you're advising someone's dissertation and it looks like that, don't expect to see it on the shelves at the Harvard Book Store.

There is of course the other view: The purpose of the dissertation is to demonstrate the analytic skills necessary for professional-level work, rather than to produce such work. Fair enough, but in a job market as competitive as today's is, what new Ph.D. wants to be told that her doctoral work is merely promising? If I can judge from my editorial desk, that Ph.D. is being told to do something concrete with her dissertation, and to do it fast.

A lot of dissertations think they're specialized when they aren't even that. To be specialized in the good sense means to have a nugget vital to a small population of scholars. Many a thesis doesn't break any ground at all, not even a small and distant patch. The typical dissertation achieves its majority by subjugating a vast and unwieldy critical literature. That variety of doctoral thesis -- the product of hundreds and hundreds of previously published artifacts -- is often no more than a great big book report. Too long. Too exquisitely secondary to the big cheeses of the discipline. Too tentative. There may be something of value in there, but it would take a lot of work to find it, and the stamina and time required -- by publishers, by other scholars, by potential purchasers -- just isn't there. No publisher can afford to add such books to its list because no one wants to buy them. And libraries, on whom we have all depended for decades, are no longer supported to provide that service.

There has to be a balance between the ends of scholarship and the market for books. Scholarship is about tiny discoveries and corrections. Just before he went and made Oprah angry, Jonathan Franzen wrote quite a good novel in which the idea of corrections (a word that under a little pressure nicely yields a lot) came to stand, ironically and not so, for life's small and great changes. When a scholar breaks even a modest patch of ground, a correction can take place. But it may take time to get the news out in a printed book, at least under the current economic rules. Small scholarly achievements may soon be consigned to electronic files only. The big books take care of themselves. But think about getting published right now, and you'll see that the broad middle -- where most scholarship is written up -- has become a scary place.

Like any good scholarly problem, this one can happily be described as complex. But the heart of the matter is simpler: Many dissertations fail because they're badly written, even as works of scholarship. Graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s have reminded me often enough that there are two things they're not taught and yet are expected to be able to do. (Time's up. The correct answers are: teach and write.)

Every graduate student needs and deserves instruction in writing an article for publication, instruction in planning a thesis that someone other than a committee might care about, instruction in how to maneuver quickly and safely through book publishing's hoops, instruction in how to revise one's work five times, not get sick of it, and understand that the result is worth every grindingly tedious moment spent. There are more attempts to provide those tools than there were 20 years ago, but the university has a long way to go and not much time to get there. Every graduate department or program, as well as every graduate-school administration, should be taking those fundamental tasks and building them into their core programs.

Most dissertations are dry as toast and not as tasty, but it would be unfair to suggest that there aren't exceptions. Some brilliant -- or maybe just cagey -- young scholars have been writing work that's book quality or near book quality while still graduate students. You may be able to name some in your field. What separates the sheep from the sheep dip is most often a command of writing itself.

The manuscript that an editor wants to see on her desk is one she can't not read. We're inundated by work that is trying, painfully, to sound grown-up, when what we most want is work that conveys genuine belief. But belief in what? Not in the validity of a theory or the judiciousness of a political view, though that might be what gets the author out of bed in the morning. More fundamental than either is a belief in writing's power: belief in the story within the manuscript, in the existence of an interested audience, in the author's ability to reach those readers.

A real book manuscript doesn't look over its shoulder, worrying that Foucault is running after it in a hockey mask. It has the confidence not to tell everything, like a tedious old uncle at a family reunion, but instead chooses which part of the story to tell even while knowing much, much more. Most important, a book manuscript doesn't suppress the author's commitment to the subject. That commitment might even be love.

If dissertations could talk, most would mumble a few words and expire. I can hear a self-punishing academic responding, "Of course, I'll save writing well for the trade book I hope to finish up one day." But why should that scholar be deprived of writing as well as she or he can right now, whether in a chapter or the humblest of monographs? If I sound impatient with the unexamined conventions of academese, it's because I see, every day, the work of scholars who want to bring what they're excited about to readers in their fields and beyond. Those authors, especially those of the rising generation, need the encouragement that only the rest of the academic community -- fellow scholars, department chairs, journal editors, book publishers, readers -- can provide. However modest the patch of scholarly ground -- the story of a brave little phoneme, anyone? -- there are worse and also better ways to write, ways to tell not everything you know, but everything the reader needs to hear from you and in your words.

William Germano, vice president and publishing director at Routledge, is the author of Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books (University of Chicago Press, 2001). His new book, on what to do with your dissertation, will be published next year by Chicago.

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