De-Dissertationizing Your Prose: Stripping Away Academic Language for a Broader Audience

The dissertation is a document designed to satisfy an institutional requirement, and its form follows from that purpose. The five-chapter structure, the exhaustive literature review, the hedged and qualified prose, the methodology chapter that demonstrates awareness of every epistemological debate relevant to the design — each of these exists because a committee needs to see the full apparatus of doctoral training on display. The committee reads to certify that the author has mastered the conventions of scholarly inquiry. That is its job.

A book manuscript serves a different purpose and is evaluated by a different reader. The acquisitions editor at an academic press wants an argument that is original, significant, and written to sustain the attention of a reader who has not been assigned to read it. Those criteria differ from the committee's, and the revision that converts a dissertation into a manuscript ready for a book proposal goes deeper than many new doctoral authors expect. Its governing move is a shift in orientation, from committee to reader. Everything else follows from it.

The first revision is the removal of what might be called the administrative scaffold: the sections of the dissertation that exist to demonstrate procedural compliance. In most dissertations the literature review chapter is the clearest example. It surveys the field, identifies gaps, and positions the study, all of which are committee requirements. A book has no literature review chapter. It engages the existing scholarship as part of making its case, weaving the relevant literature into the chapters where it is needed. Converting the literature review from a quarantined survey chapter into an integrated argument is one of the most significant structural revisions a dissertation-to-book conversion requires.

The methodology chapter. Academic presses publishing in the humanities rarely include a methodology chapter in the books they publish. Social science presses vary. Some fields — sociology, education, public health — have established conventions for including methodological discussion in book-length works. Before deciding what to do with the methodology, the author needs to understand the conventions of the specific press she is targeting. In many cases the methodological information the reader actually needs fits in a few paragraphs in the introduction or in the relevant empirical chapters. The full apparatus can then be removed or placed in an appendix.

Hedging and qualification. Dissertation prose is extensively hedged because the committee evaluates the author's awareness of the argument's limitations along with the argument itself. Book prose is more direct. Its reader is evaluating the argument and has limited patience for qualifications that do not advance it. The rigor carries over; it shows in the quality of the evidence and the precision of the argument.

The revision here is a sorting job. Keep the hedges doing intellectual work, and cut the doctoral-era habits the argument no longer needs.

The opening chapter. The dissertation opens with a problem statement, a purpose statement, research questions, and a significance section, all of which exist to orient the committee to the study's design. A book opens with an argument. It has to give the reader a reason to keep reading. The introductory chapter of the book manuscript should establish the central claim, situate it in the broader conversation the book is entering, and make clear why the question the book is pursuing matters to the reader who has picked it up.