In What Order Did You Write Your Dissertation

[DoK]

I wonder if this even matters at all. I am definitely not writing mine in order of Intro, Literature, Methods etc. or the variants. But I wanted to hear from others. Specifically, as I'm working on the literature review/theoretical background chapter and I know that by the time I am done with the dissertation, much more newer works would have been published. So I'm curious, do you leave this chapter till the very end or do most people update as they go?

[Hope.for.the.best]

Same here. I did not write mine in that order, but rather going to and forth between chapters. It is common to come up with new ideas and ways to organise your paragraphs as you go. I would not leave the intro till the very end, as you need a good background to justify your research. Have a framework and get the chapter done. Then when you finish other chapters, have a quick search and include newly published studies where applicable. 

[AP]

On 6/11/2019 at 11:49 AM, DoK said:

I wonder if this even matters at all. I am definitely not writing mine in order of Intro, Literature, Methods etc. or the variants. But I wanted to hear from others. Specifically, as I'm working on the literature review/theoretical background chapter and I know that by the time I am done with the dissertation, much more newer works would have been published. So I'm curious, do you leave this chapter till the very end or do most people update as they go?

Great question!

No, you NEVER write your intro first, for anything because you cannot introduce what you haven't written. 

My dissertation has five chapters, intro and epilogue. 

• I wrote chapter 2 first, because it was the one that I was most familiar with in terms of sources and literature. While I wrote it I presented it at a conference. 
• I wrote chapters 1, 3, and 5.
• Finally, I wrote chapter 4. Chapter 4 was always the most difficult chapter for me. I had no idea what it was about and once I had good chapters 3 and 5, chapter 4 kind of fell into place. 
• While the committee read the whole dissertation I wrote the intro.
• Doing the revisions after writing the intro proved to be a huge plus. Some readers mentioned in the chapters that I should discuss X, but now X was discussed in the intro, so that made my revisions easier. 
• And then, the epilogue. 

One of my biggest struggles was were to include the literature review. In the end, I decided to include discussions at the beginning of the chapters but then reminding the readers of what was the theoretical debate and how I was using it. 

Best of luck!

[Adelaide9216]

I'm a qualitative researcher and I believe that it's often an interative process (going back and forth). A lot of people talk about the IMRaD strategy (Intro, Methods, Results and Discussion). I would add stuff to my literature review as I was going along, especially when I was doing data analysis. I rarely heard people writing their chapters in the order they are being presented though. 

Edited July 7, 2019 by Adelaide9216

[juilletmercredi]

I wrote my methods section first, because it was the easiest to write and by the time I was writing, I had already finished my data collection. I was doing data analysis simultaneously, so that part happened more iteratively - as I conducted my analyses I went back and edited sections to make them accurate to what I did.

I wrote the results next, as that was second-easiest. Methods, data analysis, and results altogether took me from early September through mid-December to complete (including reviews of drafts and consultation with my advisers), so around 2.5 months.

I wrote the intro/literature review next. (In mine, the intro and the literature review are two separate sections, but the intro is very short - like 6 pages). It took me about 2-3 months to do this, so I worked on it from January to March-ish. It was easier to do this because now I knew what I was introducing, so I tailored my lit review to refer very specifically to previous research/theoretical work that pointed to the precise kind of research and analyses I ended up doing. If you write your lit review before doing your methods and results, you may have to go back and edit a lot to tailor your lit review to your work.

I didn't do an iterative review process with this - I drafted the entire thing and sent it as a huge complete chunk to my adviser. Perhaps risky, but I knew from previous experience that I wouldn't have months and months of comments back, so that's what I did.

Then I wrote the discussion. This was the hardest part to write for me and I hated it, but I think it took me about a month - so I was done in April-ish.

That was just enough time for me to get the comments from my lit review back, which I addressed in like 2-3 weeks, and then comments for my discussion, which I also addressed in maybe 1-2 weeks. I did not update my lit review unless I was aware that a new work had been published - so I didn't go looking for works that had been published in the last 2 months since I had submitted my draft. But I was receiving article alerts from journals and people also sometimes sent me articles, so if I received something and I knew where it would fit well, I wove it in.

[Miss Brightside]

I'm currently writing my dissertation. Its structure is 3 parts, each consisting of 3 chapters. I started with chapter number 1, then moved on to chapter number 2, and then wrote another version of chapter 1 because I felt it didn't click. I'm now continuing writing one chapter after another. The Intro will be the last thing I'll write.