Destination Dissertation: A Traveler's Guide to a Done Dissertation

Your dissertation is not a hurdle to jump or a battle to fight; as this handbook makes clear, your dissertation is the first of many destinations on the path of your professional career. Destination Dissertation guides you to the successful completion of your dissertation by framing the process as a stimulating and exciting trip—one that can be completed in fewer than nine months and by following twenty-nine specific steps. Sonja Foss and William Waters—your guides on this trip—explain concrete and efficient processes for completing the parts of the dissertation that tend to cause the most delays: conceptualizing a topic, developing a pre-proposal, writing a literature review, writing a proposal, collecting and analyzing data, and writing the last chapter. This guidebook is crafted for use by students in all disciplines and for both quantitative and qualitative dissertations, and incorporates a wealth of real-life examples from every step of the journey.

Sonja K. Foss is professor of communication at the University of Colorado at Denver. She created and is co-director of Scholars' Retreat, designed to provide intensive, focused, and supervised writing time for dissertations, theses, and other writing projects. William Waters is associate professor of English at the University of Houston, Downtown and co-director of Scholars' Retreat.