George Lakoff's suggestions for finishing a dissertation

I take a lot of notes and write a lot in many different files that get put aside for one reason or another. I was going through old files recently, looking to see what had been forgotten. Among other things I found some notes that I made to a dissertation writer about four years ago. The notes reported a conversation I had had with George Lakoff, professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at Berkeley.

Lakoff makes six points. Following the six points are the notes that I wrote to the writer, who had written a complete draft that had been deemed unsatisfactory by her committee.

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(Aug. 2004) Yesterday afternoon I ran into a professor I used to work with.
He asked me what I was up to and I told him I was helping people who were trying to finish their dissertations.
He offered me his advice of what he tells his students: and here it is in a nutshell--three main points and three lesser points. I may have forgotten something, but most of what he said agreed with beliefs I held anyway (I was his student, after all).

Here are his recommendations:

1) It’s not you. It’s just a piece of work.
2) It’s just the first step.
3) Tell a story

Additional suggestions:
1) make it so it can be your book
2) make it 200 – 250 pages
3) avoid jargon

For a moment, I want to just focus on point 1 in the first list: It's not you. The dissertation is just a project you're working with. You've worked with it longer than any other project in your life, but it's just a project. If you wrote a five page paper and thought it needed to be rewritten, you'd rewrite it. But with the dissertation there's the thought "I spent four months writing that draft/section/chapter." The dissertation is still only a project. Suggestions about the dissertation are not a reflection on you, but rather on how to change your project, so that you can get it done.

You have grown and learned during the process of writing. The efforts that went into writing that draft have shaped you, have helped you grow. If all the copies of your dissertation were destroyed and you had to write it from the blank page, you still would not be working from scratch but from a wealth of knowledge gained through the project. And that wealth of knowledge would help you write a new version better.

Well, thankfully, you don't have to write from scratch, but still, don't let attachment to the products of your past labors stand in the way of taking advantage of what you learned from those labors.
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That note only really addressed the first of the six points. But points two and three deserve equal discussion. The last three points--the lesser points--are mostly self-explanatory.

I don't want to get into too much writing here, since I want to go back to seeing what the excavation of the depths of my disk drive has to offer.

Briefly, then. Point 2: The dissertation is just a first step on a career. Whether you are writing to become an academic (as Lakoff assumed), or writing to gain a credential, the dissertation is only a step in a career path. Take the step quickly. Point 3: I don't know quite how to interpret this, or to paraphrase it quickly. This is probably a gross injustice, but: Give the work a sense of direction and flow; guide the reader through the discussion in a way that helps the reader see the scope of the work (just as in a story, we can follow the whole of the work).

Ethics and Expediency

Two days ago, I wrote about a hypothetical question of "bad research."
I argued that "bad research" was not necessarily an appropriate description of the specific situation described (writing a dissertation as if it had been aimed to find what was actually a post hoc discovery). I argued the point primarily from the perspective that research is essentially post hoc--that it must be if it is to have a truly open and exploratory character, and that research has no claim to purity, either from a historical analysis or a logical one (following Paul Feyerabend).

But on a related note, we also want to ask about the general question of expediency and ethics. What if it were "bad research" to present a post hoc analysis?

Each person must answer the ethical question individually, and for each of us, relativist, or absolutist, we make our decision to act according to some calculation when the situation is ambiguous. To take an extreme example, a person following an absolute moral code (e.g., "Thou shalt not kill") may still find a situation where something else is of higher moral valuation such that violating that code is morally acceptable.

Different acts have different values. In academia, plagiarism is a primary crime, as is inventing data or altering data to get desired results. Compared to such violations of academic ethics, even a position that holds that post hoc analysis is "bad", would not consider it a violation of research ethics on the same order of magnitude.

Balanced against these ethical issues, we need to ask also about expediency: we want to finish the project. Following the recommendations of our committee is almost always expedient (but most definitely not always), and it would be wise to follow suggestions whenever possible. One does not wish to compromise one's ethics for expediency, of course.

There's no clear answer. We each make our own answer. As a coach, I tend to lean towards expediency when matters are small. I would never recommend plagiarism or data faking as an expedient route: the potential backlash is too great; the potential for a real disaster (being kicked out of an academic program and destroying one's potential academic or professional career). But "bad research"? How highly must one balance "bad research" against expediency as an ethical issue?