Many doctoral students interpret their struggles with revision, editorial choice, and unfamiliar conventions to mean they are “bad writers.” As a doctoral student, you understand that writing is a process, but you are just now discovering how long that process can take. You need a new baseline for your writing experiences. Hearing about others’ experiences can help create that new baseline.

Many doctoral students know how to navigate their discipline’s style guide, but they do not always know that they are required to follow their university’s style guide or their program’s dissertation style guide as well. This blog both explains how a discipline’s style guide works with a dissertation style guide and outlines some of the advice I’ve given to doctoral students in the writing center for using these two guides together.

Changes to dissertation research are expected. In fact, these changes can make your project better.