Weave your data story throughout

For most grad students, their dissertation is the largest and longest type of writing they have ever done. As a result, most dissertations aren't written but rather assembled. The literature review is built into one document, the methods into another, the results into a third, and, somewhere near the end, the writer binds them together and hopes the seams aren’t too obvious.

When you're writing a persuasive argument, one of the most counterproductive things you can do is disconnect everything from everything else. Yet that's the default with dissertations: information gets sorted into chapters, and the insights stay isolated inside their chapter walls. As a result the reader experiences five separate documents instead of one cohesive story. 

If a story did that, nobody would read it. A good story flows from chapter to chapter instead. A dissertation that reads as one story leaves reviewers with a lasting impression of the work, and makes them far more likely to act on its ideas.

Once the process is reframed as writing a single story, you gain access to the novelist's toolbox. The best tool in it is foreshadowing.

What would that look like in a dissertation about nurse burnout? Say your literature review notes, almost in passing, that nearly every previous study of nurse burnout surveyed day-shift nurses. Your methods chapter then explains that your sample deliberately includes night shift. By the time your results reveal that night-shift nurses are driving the burnout effect, the reader isn't surprised. They're satisfied. You planted the clue in chapter two, and chapter four paid it off. That's foreshadowing, and it's the difference between a finding that appears out of nowhere and a finding the reader feels they discovered alongside you.

This weaving can happen at either end of the writing process, as foreshadowing works just as well in reverse. If you're a planner, map the through-line before you draft, and write each chapter already knowing what it sets up. But if outlining stalls you, just start writing. Once your results chapter exists, you know precisely what needs to be set up, so you can go back and plant the clues in editing. There is no wrong stage to do this work, only getting it done.

The payoff of this weaving compounds into the editing experience. A dissertation woven this way is a lot more fun to edit because every chapter knows what it's setting up. For the same reason, it is less painful to read.

Data in Plain English helps you find the through-line in your data so every chapter serves one story. You know how it ends. We help you plant the clues.