Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis

This book is just wonderfully empathic. A lot of reading materials for PhD students are full of tough love, but this particular author talks about difficult steps with a lot of grace, positive thinking, and a productive take on finishing things for the sake of regaining independence and charting your own path forward as an almost-doctor. Lots of thoughts on how different people write and what works for them. There's a section on struggles with one's advisor. There's a section on hitting a wall while writing. Lots of ideas on starting and getting into the flow of writing. This book really acknowledges that in order to become a PhD, one must first become a writer, and a writer very much alike to those who write actual books of non-fiction. Once a PhD student accepts this and thinks of their thesis as a piece of creative writing with a heavy dose of supporting citations and existing science, things begin to look clearer and more manageable. Also, this review was written by my partner, whose PhD dissertation I survived, and who turned her dissertation proposal into a finished dissertation in exactly 5 weeks, falling onto this book whenever things got tough. She wishes she had gotten a copy 5 years sooner.

Joan Bolker is a clinical psychologist who specializes in helping writers get over their problems. Also she has worked in the Harvard Writing Lab, so she has a great deal of experience with writers of dissertations. This experience really shines in this book. She approached the problem of writing from a psychological angle. She covers some common problems faced by graduate students and gives practical advice for overcoming these obstacles. The key to writing is to write while you are thinking, or even before. If you attempt to write after thinking, you will block out a lot of ideas before they have a chance to mature. The important thing is to get your thoughts out onto paper, then after you collect lots of ideas, go back over what you wrote and pick out the pearls. If you edit yourself while you're writing, you tend to be overly critical and the negativity blocks the flow of the writing process. Actually, I think this book would be great not only for dissertation writers, but for writers of any kind. If you're facing a wall in your writing, this book could help you out a lot.

While I enjoyed this book, it was very repetitive. There are some very good points made and the added checklists make for good reference material. Overall I recommend it, but don’t expect it to be earth shattering.

First time ever writing a review in Amazon.I love this book. I cannot AGREE more on some of the points, such as treating yourself well after writing continuously for a while, etc. The writing is smooth (i.e., like the author is talking to your directly). Examples fit to real life situations. I get out of several (indeed, more than several) pieces of advice for writing my prospectus (this book is good for that as well). Although the author is not an engineer, but as an engineer I agree with most of the opinions that she suggest (recommend for engineer who is pursing a PhD degree).This book will become one of my favorite book in my graduate study. :) I hope you will have no regret of spending several hours of reading this book.FYI: I decide to write this review because the author strongly suggest to keep writing everyday, even at least 10-15 minutes. And she suggests a "messy writing" approach, that is I am experimenting here. :)

This is the kind of book you should check out from the library, not buy. It’s a quick read with good advice, but you can finish it in an hour or two.

I am currently working on my dissertation and one of my committee members recommended this book to me. She said that it saved her during her process of writing her dissertation and I am so thankful that she recommended it to me. The ideas and suggestions that are presented by the authors are very clear and concise. This book has allowed the process of writing my dissertation to seem a lot less scary as it breaks it down into a step by step guide - complete with how-to's and recommendations for further research. It was worth every penny spent and I will never regret my purchase. I highly recommend this to anyone who is working on their dissertation or plans to in the future. I would even go as far as to say that it is a MUST-HAVE!

I like that the book is kinda unconventional. So it starts you off small on writing time & breaks up the writing process for you. It also foregrounds the creative part of the writing vs. scholarly quotes. What really worked for me was the suggestion that you free write and note everything dissertation & phd related that comes to mind- have it stored in your file. That really helps me write everyday- makes me feel like the writing is about stashing my ideas & thoughts- all of it rather than some laborious process every time. I like that I can have fun with naming stuff & titles. Works wonderfully well with Peg Boyle Single's book esp. For the nonconventional, 30+ year old scholar like me for whom schedules don't really work without a fun stake.

Muy buen libro que te da tips para elaborar tu tesis, está más enfocado a tesis de doctorado

Find the personal experiences of the author and her dissertation writing very inspirational and informative. I am puzzled about some of the negative reviews. I am not sure if they were expecting this book to write the dissertation for them.

When I was working on my Master Thesis - on top of a fulltime job, this book really helped me stay on track. There were many helpful ideas, especially how to journal and write down the process of what you are doing right now - and what you need to do as next steps! It helps to break down that big chunk of a paper into small morsels that are easy to digest. I have finished my Masters about two years ago and I am sure, studying this book has contributed greatly to the product. The Investment in buying the book - even though for quite a while, it was just sitting in my bookshelf - was well worth it!

C’est un livre très décontracté, facile à lire, avec plein de bonnes idées. Il m’a vraiment aidé à me motiver pendant plusieurs stades de ma thèse de doctorat. Même si c’était une thèse de science, la plus part des techniques discutées sont quand même applicables. Je l’ai également partagé avec deux collègues en thèse en même temps que moi qui ont aussi apprécié.

this book gives a lot of insight in how you can write your dissertation. I used the book because I wanted to learn more about my writing issue's. It help me a lot.