Book review

Linda Cooley and Jo Lewkowicz, editors. Dissertation Writing in Practice: Turning

Ideas into Text (2003, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong)

One of the more significant challenges for teachers working in the area of academic

literacy is being able to provide students with useful information of a ‘generic nature’

about the writing of a dissertation (or ‘thesis’ as it is referred to in my Australian context).

For one, the dissertation is easily the longest of the various academic genres students are

required to engage with, making the task of working with text samples difficult. Another

problem is that, whilst the genre nomenclature—‘dissertation or thesis’—is used across

the university, we all know from experience, that the contents of this genre—its discourse

structures, written styles and the like—vary considerably across faculties and

disciplines—and even research paradigms within disciplines.

Cooley and Lewkowicz’s book—Dissertation Writing in Practice: Turning Ideas into

Text (henceforth DWIP) is the latest in a line of pedagogical texts that seek to deal with

these challenges—and it does so with a fair degree of success. The book, designed both for

classroom use and self-study, is the product of the authors’ extensive research and

experience working with second language students on dissertation writing courses at the

University of Hong Kong. The authors have opted for a generic account—or

‘multidisciplinary approach’—because it is ‘not feasible’, they say, ‘to run separate

writing classes for different disciplines . within a university’ (p. 4)—of which more later.

DWIP is divided into six chapters. The first four cover the broad sections of a

dissertation, presented in the book in linear sequence—Identifying the research gap;

Making use of source literature; Stating facts, interpreting data and making claims;

Drawing to a close—and the final two cover more general organisational and stylistic

matters—Structuring and signposting; The final touches. Within each chapter, materials

include explanations of discursive and linguistic features pertinent to the various sections

of the dissertation; a range of sample texts used to illustrate these features—taken from

both unpublished dissertations and published articles; and a variety of practice activities.

Many of the latter sensibly ask students to investigate target features in texts from their

own field to find out how much variation there might be with the generic descriptions

offered in the book.

It is difficult to appraise any graduate writing manual without making some reference to

Swales and Feak’s well-known Academic Writing for Graduate Students (1994)—and

to consider what advances, if any, a new publication is able to provide on this earlier

Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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Book review / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 4 (2005) 179–183180

work—for many, the acknowledged ‘gold standard’ in the field. In the case of DWIP, one

clear difference is the scope of the text. Whereas Swales and Feak sought to cover a wide

range of aspects of graduate writing (see also their sequel English in Today’s Research

World, 2000), Cooley and Lewkowicz have confined themselves to detailed descriptions

of the dissertation. This is a commendable delimitation, and has allowed the authors to be

very focussed on the best ways to generalise the multiple forms this genre can take.

Significantly, they have drawn on the notion of ‘rhetorical function’ as their main

organising principle, as seen in chapter titles—Identifying the research gap; Making

claims etc. and also in sub-sections within chapters—e.g. Criticising others; Making

recommendations etc. This in my view is as good a method as any to capture what is

common about the activity across the disciplines. In contrast, Swales and Feak, in

Academic Writing for Graduate Students, opt more for an amalgam of ‘genre’ and ‘text-

type’ approaches—Constructing a research paper, Writing critiques, Data Commentary,

Writing General-Specific texts—which, if any criticism can be made of that work, makes

its curriculum a slightly fragmented one.

Along with identifying these broad overarching functions, Cooley and Lewkowicz also

manage to pay some attention to interdisciplinary variations in the way that dissertations

are put together. This is especially the case in the later chapter on Structuring and

Signposting, where a number of possible templates are outlined. These include the classic

IMRD structure of the single empirical study, but also more complex structures typically

used in ‘multiple study dissertations’, and looser, thematic or ‘topic-based’ structures. This

is a welcome advance on the way that organisational matters have been traditionally

handled in dissertation handbooks, as noted by Paltridge (2002). When, at the conclusion

of his article, Paltridge bemoans the lack of ‘a book on thesis and dissertation writing to

help students understand the range of [structuring] options available to them’ (p.137), one

wonders whether DWIP might indeed be an explicit and very prompt response to the ‘gap’

he has identified.

But whilst DWIP does consider the issue of structural variation, this is at a fairly

rudimentary level, it has to be said. For example, the text usefully contrasts the predictable

outline of chapters of a standard empirical study with the more idiosyncratic headings of a

sample philosophy dissertation, but perhaps from lack of space, does not really explore the

differing logico-rhetorical principles that might have guided their respective constructions.

DWIP has a strong textual focus which fits with the authors’ main objective of ‘[raising]

students’ awareness of the linguistic characteristics of a postgraduate dissertation’ (p. 3).

This is a well-established method in the EAP tradition, and forms the pedagogical basis of

Swales and Feak’s offerings, as well as Weissburg and Buker’s ground-breaking Writing

Up Research: Experimental Research Report Writing for Students of English (1990). In

such an approach, where analysis of authentic text samples is the key to much of the

learning enterprise, there is always a challenge to find an epistemic content that is going to

be both comprehensible and of interest to student readers—especially when their

disciplinary interests will be so varied. In my view this is DWIP’s main weakness. Texts

have been selected, it seems, not really for any intrinsic interest they might have, but

mainly for their ability to reveal certain language and discursive features—and this has

resulted in a fairly esoteric collection of readings. One such example is the following from

a dentistry journal, used to illustrate the first move in Swales’ canonical introduction

Book review / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 4 (2005) 179–183 181

sequence (‘Establish the field’)—and which also happens to be the first textual sample

students encounter in the book:

Pleomorphic adenoma is the most common salivary gland neoplasm and frequently

recurs after simple surgical excision due to incomplete removal of its

unencapsulated portion or to the presence of “satellite nodules”.

In my teaching experience, highly specialised material such as this tends to hold the

attention of only the most dedicated of ‘textual analysts’—usually those students from

language-based disciplines who, like we EAP practitioners, have an abiding interest in

discourse and language per se. For other ESL graduate students (many of whom may be

having difficulty enough with the literature in their own field), there is a danger that such

material may serve as just another source of mystification in their research activities.

A student’s impression

As mentioned, the authors indicate that DWIP can be used as much for self-study as for

classroom use. It is a difficult matter for a teacher to adjudicate on how helpful a resource

like this might be for a student using it for their own independent study. Thus, as part of the

review process, I decided to pass DWIP on to a postgraduate student with whom I had been

working, Solveig Ludtke, to get her impressions.

By way of background—Solveig is a native speaker of German, who has been doing

doctoral research in Australia for almost a year. Her work, of a cross-disciplinary nature

taking in cultural studies and linguistics, is concerned with analysing the lyrics of hip hop

music from a several countries (English and German-speaking) as a basis for investigating

broader issues of transnational cultural flows among youth. Her research is of a decidedly

qualitative nature. At this early stage in her work, Solveig’s main writing interests were

how to structure her work—and also how to set up an introduction. These were the sections

of the text that she consulted.

Solveig was generally positive about the text. She found the explanations clear and

thought the book pitched at the right level for a second language student like herself. She

said that she found a guide like DWIP particularly useful to help her find her way through

possible discourse structures of the dissertation genre, noting that such guidance was

almost completely lacking in her previous experience as a Master’s student in Germany.

Solveig thought there was a general contrast to be made here between the German and

English speaking academic cultures. In the former, writing matters are considerably more

open, she suggested, and students are left largely to themselves to work out how to present

their research. Solveig pointed to DWIP’s focus on the ‘identifying of the research gap’ as

particularly useful—not only for the writing up of her research, but also for the shaping of

her project overall.

Solveig’s main reservations were similar to the ones I had. Chief among these was the

general ‘inaccessibility’ of many of the sample texts used to illustrate aspects of the

dissertation. She commented on their very technical contents, which she said discouraged

her from attempting any follow-up practice tasks—and this, she thought, limited how

much she got out of the book. Her other main reservation was a sense that the textbook,

Book review / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 4 (2005) 179–183182

despite its efforts to be otherwise, was oriented towards writing in more quantitative

paradigms. She noted for example, that the concept of a ‘hypothesis’ (given some

coverage in the chapter on Introductions) was quite alien to the qualitative work she was

doing. She felt also that in the structuring section, the IMRD model was presented

ultimately as the archetype, and thought this may lead some students to adopt it

‘uncritically’ for their own work. In her own dissertation, Solveig was expecting to opt for

a more ‘thematic’ organisation of chapters, but felt that the text provided only limited

guidance for these more ‘creative’ formats.

Overall, Solveig thought that in working with DWIP, she was able to get perhaps a

clearer picture of what her thesis would not be like, than what it would. She insisted

however, that this was not a criticism. Indeed, engaging with the materials had encouraged

her, she said, to think hard about what would be distinctive about her own work—and also

motivated her to seek out dissertation samples in her own field. This would seem to be a

good outcome—and indeed for the authors of DWIP was one of their chief objectives in

putting the book together (p. 4).

The research gap is a central motif in DWIP. My impressions of the text—and also

those of my student reviewer—suggest several ‘gaps’ in the graduate writing textbook

field that could do with some filling. The first is the need for course materials aimed at

specific discipline areas. Although Cooley and Lewkowicz’s experience is that such

courses are generally ‘not feasible’ within universities, there would seem to be a trend in

some quarters increasingly away from the generic approach. Indeed in the unit in which I

work at a large Australian university, declining student interest in our cross-faculty

graduate writing programs has lead us in recent times to rework these, and offer them on a

faculty—or even better—discipline basis.

The other gap concerns the lack of dissertation writing materials related to non-

quantitative, and non-empirical methods of research. Not only is there a dearth of such

materials, but there has also been a lack of careful monitoring, it seems, of the dynamic

ways that research writing has changed in recent times (Paltridge, 2002). Hodge (1998)

notes here the pervasive influence of post-modernist paradigms of research—which not

only have their own distinctive written styles, but also explicitly challenge the

epistemological assumptions that underlie established empirical forms of writing.

Increasingly we are beginning to see second language students moving into these areas

of the ‘new humanities’. The need for them to be able to write about such matters in

credible and coherent ways is, in my experience, a fairly urgent one.

References

Hodge, B. (1998). Monstrous knowledge: Doing PhDs in the ‘new humanities’. In A. Lee, & B. Green (Eds.),

Postgraduate studies: Postgraduate pedagogy (pp. 113–128). Sydney: Centre for Language and Literacy,

Faculty of Education, University of Technology, 113–128.

Paltridge, B. (2002). Thesis and dissertation writing: An examination of published advice and actual practice.

English for Specific Purposes, 21, 125–143.

Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (1994). Academic writing for graduate students: A course for non-native speakers of

English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Book review / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 4 (2005) 179–183 183

Swales, J. M., & Feak, C. B. (2000). English in today’s research world: A writing guide. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press.

Weissburg, R., & Buker, S. (1990). Writing up research: Experimental research report writing for students of

English. Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

Tim Moore*

Language and Learning Unit, Faculty of Arts,

Monash University, Clayton 3800, Australia

Solveig Ludtke

School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts,

Monash University, Clayton 3800, Australia

E-mail addresses: tim.moore@celts.monash.edu.au, slud2@student.monash.edu.au

*Corresponding author.