Storyboard Your Dissertation

For most writing, "just start typing and edit later" works fine. For a ten-page paper, the editing takes an afternoon. But a dissertation is a two-hundred-page argument, and at that scale, discovering a structural problem in editing means restructuring a document the size of a book.  The document is far too big for the standard strategy. 

A more robust way to approach planning out a dissertation borrows from the movie industry - storyboarding. A detailed storyboard might be the single highest-leverage thing you do up front, establishing the structure of your whole dissertation before the structure gets expensive to change. Moving a card takes a second. Moving a chapter takes a week. Planning the shape early means you don't repeat information, don't orphan it, and don't hit the special fatigue of reading your own chapters over and over, hunting for what's out of place.

And if you're a just-start writer, storyboard anyway. This isn't outlining; it's writing. It's an afternoon with index cards, and it works whether you've written zero words or three chapters. Storyboarding a draft you've already started just means finding out now, while the fix is cheap, that chapter two is doing chapter four's job.

Check your storyboard against three questions: Who is this for? What should they walk away with? How does the data make that happen? Every card should serve at least one of those answers. Any card that serves none of them is a card you just saved yourself from writing.

At Data in Plain English, we help you build your storyboard and pressure-test it before you write, so the structure holds and the story satisfies the audience it's built for. An afternoon of cards can save you a season of editing. Deal them out.