The American Idol Dissertation Committee

During the two or three years of doctoral candidates’ course work, caring professors nourish, encourage, and help them with dissertation editing, offering dollops of mentoring advice laced with positive comments on the students’ ability and persistence.

Much like the hometown experience of small town wannabes preparing for American Idol auditions, the students soak up the ladled rays of hope, pack their metaphorical suitcase crammed with novel ideas and pages of notes, and trek to the Idol studio, the office of their newly-appointed dissertation chair. An ominous enclave, the professor’s sparsely furnished office reeks of intellect, dark, heavily oiled wood, and tome after tome with the professor’s name on the spine and frame after frame of degrees and commendations wallpapering the paneled walls. Slightly distracted by the piles of his own work and the eighty-three other dissertation candidates he is supervising that term, the professor smiles and welcomes the student who timidly and obediently takes center stage and begins to ‘sing.’ During the process, the student may assume originality, while the professor may yawn, frown, or check his email.

If the student survives that hurdle, it is on to … THE COMMITTEE … three or four people with the student’s life in their hands. Inevitably, like the American Idol panel of judges, one oozes praise and one receives the work with a Cowell-ish sneer, while the third maintains neutrality. One committee member insists on changing syntax and another deems it better in its original form. One detests this word; another recommends using the word frequently. One suggests deleting all intrusive and irrelevant commas; a second reviewer insists that commas must sprinkle liberally throughout. Another may suggest seeking aid from a professional ‘coach,’ a dissertation editing service, which may be the most productive suggestion.

Although, by the time the student arrives for the dissertation defense, he or she may be a brain-ravaged mass of hysteria, it is all part of the process in securing a pass to the next round, large venue contracts, and a future level of competition, possibly the pursuit of tenure.

–Dr. Joyce, www.edit911.com

To be a Writer, Write

So, you want to be a writer … everyone has a story to tell and everyone can do so. But don’t kid yourself, writing is hard work! It is labor intensive, time consuming, and isolationist. Truthfully, the writing is the easy part; it pours from your unconscious mind in torrents of stream of consciousness, words tumbling over words to create sentences and paragraphs. The difficult part, the conscious part, is the book editing or dissertation editing, the tweaking, the perfecting of those words, and the most difficult part … finding the time to do so.

Writers are an odd group. We observe and jot notes on tiny scraps of available paper – book jackets, department store receipts, lunch napkins. We occasionally ‘wander off’ in mid-conversation [even when we are the ones doing the talking] because the perfect word or extraordinary metaphor has popped into our consciousness and we must jot it down on scraps of available paper. We often hear voices – no, not ‘those’ kinds of voices – but the voice of a character telling his or her side of things or correcting something we may have already written. We often awake in the middle of the night with a persistent image or voice crying out for a scrap of available paper.

As a published author, veteran teacher of writing, and thesis editor for this editing service the best advice I can offer a writer is to write … at every available opportunity, in any locale, on any available scrap of paper.

–Dr. Joyce, www.edit911.com