Realistically, how quickly would you say it is possible to write a decent dissertation?

[Oly J]

Hi everyone, I'm not so much asking for advice as I am curious what people will say, I'm a 3rd-year uni student, studying Performing Arts, of course for most of my coursemates the ever-present spectre of the dreaded dissertation looms over the third year like the sword of Damocles. But oddly enough, I'm not that worried, despite not really having made any real progress yet, and having about a month and a half left to do so. (I procrastinate like it's my job, except if it were I probably wouldn't. I'm sure any grads here will be intimately familiar with this concept.)

Anyway my research focus, is professional wrestling, more specifically the use of time, pacing and duration in wrestling. Having been a fan of the passtime for almost a decade, (an exhausting fandom to be a part of let me tell you) I have memory of, and access to a great deal of interviews with wrestlers and promoters to cite as research if I need to, (I also have quite a retentive memory) and on the performance side of things any research I would need to do to contextualize I've almost certainly done as part of my course, if not, I shouldn't have trouble getting to it.

This is partly the reason why I'm so confident about it, (I should also mention I have seldom started an essay more than a day before the deadline, and when I have, I even more seldom managed to get anything done) and I have mostly come away with middling to good grades (apart from once, when I had to work in a group that didn't care and either couldn't or didn't meet with me.)

anyway, the point of this is, I have 10,000 words to write by the 27th of April, I've many times finished 2,000 to 3,000 word essays in the span of a night, however that was with the pressure of a rapidly approaching deadline, without which, I appear to be next to useless unless caught in a rare fit of motivation, but they are very rare.

the most I've written in a single day is about 4,500 words, but that was a script with no referencing required and the constant pestering of a friend. Given these details, and your own experience if you've been where I am, how long do you reckon it would take to write a good dissertation? If you've already done it, how long did it take you?

Once again, not asking for advice, just interested in hearing people's opinions and experiences, but if you feel the need to advise I won't stop you, I can't guarantee I'll heed you but I won't stop you.

 

[Zombie_Fish]

First note that as someone who did an undergrad in Computer Science, my experience of a dissertation was probably massively different than what yours will be, as most of my time was not spent writing the dissertation.

With that in mind, going back through the

git

repo I used for my dissertation shows that I started writing the actual report on the 24th of March 2015 and finished it on the 6th of May 2015. But most of that early stuff was just templates and front matter, with the main content writing starting on the 13th of April 2015. So just over a month and a half if you count the small things I did earlier on, or three weeks if you only count from when I started writing actual material. Running it through an online word counter gives an estimate of ~25,000 words. So if writing a dissertation was as simple as hammering out all of those words, then you could probably get away with just over a week of writing for 10,000 words.

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just writing all of those words. Regardless of your motivation to get it done, you will probably lose motivation and become slower at writing it as you write more of it. You will probably need to cut a lot of content to make it fit within the word limit, as the first draft is almost always above the word limit. You will need to read and re-read it to make sure it makes sense and flows well, as well as check for errors and typos that won't necessarily be picked up by your spell checker. When I was writing my dissertation, I got my mum, who was an English teacher for ten years, to proofread the whole document with me, which took two full days alone. It is also beneficial to get academic staff such as your supervisor to read it, which will again probably take a few days to arrange. And then after all of that, by the time that you are so sick of looking at this document that every time you reopen it your eyes start to glaze over, you then need to get a physical copy printed to submit. Printing will, again, take several days, the only exception being if you pay an extortionately high fee to get it printed on the day because every print service knows in that case how desperately you are trying to get your dissertation printed before the deadline.

In summary: Writing a dissertation will just eat up any time you have. You might be able to get away with leaving it until just over a week in advance, but it is seriously beneficial to start working on it sooner rather than later.

EDIT: Also regarding quality for time devoted to it, my dissertation was given the second highest mark of my cohort. So it was pretty decent.

 

[Zombiefish]

My dissertation was in business management. I completed it in 6/7 days. That might sound ridiculous but its true. The first 2 days were dedicated solely to data collection spending on average 10 hrs of interviews. The next 3 were research and data processing, with an average of 14 hrs of work per day. The final 'day' was around 32 hours of constant work with only 10 minute breaks. This was non stop writing totaling about 9000 words, with an additional 14 pages of appendix. I only completed 1 proper draft of the dissertation with only minor changes to improve the flow and structure of my argument.

I achieved a 2:1 for it which is decent in UK standards and I was pleased with the result considering the timescale I wrote it in. I had serious motivational problems throughout my 3rd year at uni and only managed to complete it due to a 'fuck it all' attitude at the last second.

A big part of me being able to finish it so quickly is I already had in my mind a complete plan of exactly what I wanted to argue and how I wanted to structure the argument. I was just lucky the data I collected confirmed my hypothesis. I already had a very good knowledge of the subject too so my research and literature review was easier than most. Business is also very opinion based and open to interpretation rather than grounded in facts so its easier to write a convincing argument at short notice.

So yeah, its possible to write a decent dissertation in 1 week for some courses.

However I would NOT recommend doing so. It was a HORRIBLE experience. I got almost no sleep and was constantly stressed and under pressure the entire time. It was terribly risky as I could easily have made a mistake and wouldn't have had the time to check it over or correct it. If you cant work without deadline pressure id say two weeks would be a good benchmark where the panic should start to set in.

 

[FalloutJack]

Speaking as a writer who has done a number of things in your venue at college, I would say that "Days" is to be expected on these things. Yes, a good paper can be done in a single night, a number of pages leading up to a few thousand words. That's what I did alot of sunday nights, late at night, the day before the paper was due. Longer assignments require that times three, at least. You find the words one night and you start to write until the inspiration peters out. You see what progress you've made, and hopefully you have some idea of where beginning, middle, and end start and finish on that level of progress. You can never do ALL of that in a single day without obsessive-compulsive tendencies, because the need for food and sleep and the hazard of interruption will always get you, otherwise. So, I would state that one must organize one's thoughts and relevent information to be worked on in dedicated writing several hours a day for three days minimum. "Today I will write the beginning, my opening statements and projected reasoning for my paper, whatever the subject", "Today I will write the middle, my body of knowledge and what that signifies in terms of my field in of itself", and "Today I will write my end, the conclusion of my thoughts and answers based upon the information before, plus closing statements". Colleges frankly prefer this range of organization in a paper so they can consider it concise.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

Days. A whole month really.

Writing my Thesis for college was very difficult for me, because bluntly I never followed the rules. They would always tell me X amount of pages, and I'd hand in more or less depending upon if I felt the point was proven. So suddenly I was told 27 pages I had to fill up, I found it very difficult and I spent days on it just trying to get it there.

I was so fucking glad when it was done. I didn't even care about the grade so long as I passed.

 

[syaoran728]

I found it easiest to do it slowly, bit by bit until you reach a point where you can finish the rest in one go. Whenever I sat down to work, wrote a sentence or two between watching episodes of the current anime season. Then I started doing a paragraph in between episodes, and finally I knocked out the last 12-14 pages out overnight. This doesn't include research time of course. Though I'd say be careful with writing entire papers overnight. One it helps to have time to edit and two I find I'm more prone to bad decisions while recovering from all that fatigue from writing.

 

[Tsun Tzu]

Speaking as someone who always...always...always waited until the last minute to actually write papers (I've never done a dissertation, working on that, but eh- longest I've ever had to do was 10 pages):

Don't.

Do. Not.

No.

Bad.

Nein.

I knocked out that 10 pager in a night and wound up with a B, but seriously, three times that amount? Fuck that noise. Take some days, or weeks even, and chip away at that nonsense in relative "safety" rather than wait until you've hit the point of no return.

 

[Superbeast]

I had already done all of the research, planning and written a few hundred/thousand words, and knocked out my dissertation in a day and a night. I finished writing the thing a couple of hours before it was due in, and by the time I had it printed, bound and travelled to uni had some time under an hour left. Got a First for it because I'm a cheeky git like that.

I don't recommend doing this - nearly every single essay I wrote at uni was done the night before it was due in and every single time I thought "I'm never doing that again". Stress, panic and damn sore hands from all the typing, as well as a huge sleep deficit.

 

[Wrex Brogan]

...personally I'm one of those weird cases who does the work ages in advance and paced out fairly slowly, so I end up finishing the projects a couple weeks before they're due. I only get like... 1000 words done in a week, but my process involves editing as I write, then going back over the whole thing when I'm done and editing it again.

I think the most I've done in a single day is 2500, but I ended up shaving that down to 700 through editing.

One of my partners on the other hand tends to power these things out in 5000+ word chunks in a single day, then get's stuck editing it all. I think he wrote his Honours Thesis (25,000 words) in 4-5 days. Spent a month and a half editing it because, well, Honours, but he's always been pretty good at just churning out content at a ridiculous pace.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

I break it into a day/paragraph ... spend a few hours looking up sources, really nailing that paradigm you're trying to emulate (history) and the perfect point and supporting evidence to nail it home. Depends on the evidence needed naturally, writing something on history might mean travel whereas philosophy mght be done from the constraints of a comfortable chair. So I'd say 2 months of actual formulation. Because honestly, I've rushed essays and other projects and it never feels good. Even if you fluke a credit you're going to feel like shit, you're going to need a day to recov from the all nighter, and it means you're another day or two behind your other work.

It never works out as well as you think it does ... hooray, you balled over that essay in 10 hours, now you have another due in 3 days time and you're tired as fuck and have to go to your part time job ontop of that. I treat projects like motorcycle problems. Sure it's a pain in the arse to spend the time to properly align the wheel and chain tension, leave it for a week however and you've got uneven wearing in the pads, banana'd spokes, and tight spots in your chain.

Better to get a jump start on it, because you ultimately spend less effort for a better piece of work, and the rest of your life doesn't suffer for it.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Hard to say since my experience of writing a dissertation is different from the OP-

We pretty much had the start of the new year (as in the 3rd year as a student) to write a dissertation. The dissertation can be anything as long it falls under "visual culture" and the total words count was 20,000 -25,000. I was studing 3d and media related works like flash and 3d studio max.

Before you asked what subjects/ topics I choose to write about, I went with computer games as in dicussing that artist triangle graph (the one with the points on realistic/ cartoony and abtract) and the uncanny valley (I was able to find many articles on it and my original pitch on machima or Western "anime" didn't fall through).

Ok I didn't start on it straight away or rather just compile alot of researchs like saving website article links and hunting down any relevent books in the University Library.

Since I was type who NEVER leave it at the last moment and I was able to keep a schedule like I spend two hours on uni work, take a hour or two break and continue until I ran out of steam in the evenning, I got it done with ease. Well ok it wasb't super difficult for me since they had provide several classes on how to write a dissertation and selling booklets on how to credit an author works (Jesus Christ, why does it had to be set out that way just to mention people?). To top it all off, I even took my brother dissertation as reference (I mean they hand you a book version of your work)! Also NO I didn't not copy his works as his topic was using cinematic in videogames but his layout was quite handy!

All in all, I got it all down months ahead of the dealine. I was just finetuning my work to the point that I decided to add two images related to my dicussion on the title page! Oh I end up with a B+ which I did better among my cicle of friends (they end up with C's).

 

[maninahat]

Although I'm not one to talk (I ended my third year writing 15,000 words worth in combined essays, two days before the deadline), the sooner you start a dissertation the better. Whilst You could plausibly do the same thing as I did, realistically you will need time to get books for references, to proof read, to get someone else to proof read, and to set a decent amount of time in which you stay away from your "finished" essay, just so you can come run back to it and change a bunch of stuff at the last minute. This should take you a week. (But please, start writing it long before that for Christ's sake).

It's annoying, because some of the essays I have spent the most time producing are also the ones that get the most mediocre marks, where as some of my bests were ones were I was basically winging it at the last minute. Whilst generally putting more time into something is important, I think being in the right frame of mind during that time you have committed is perhaps even more important. There is no point sitting down to an essay a month in advance if you aren't even prepared to think about it. Sort out your frame of mind, as well as your timing.

EDIT: another basic point. People who put the effort in do get the recognition. Every other student in your university also has the same dilemma, most will procrastinate and throw something out at the last minute. If you put more time into it, you will easily stand out head and shoulders above a lot of classmates.

 

[K12]

I've done two dissertations one for psychology and one for philosophy and my experience was very different.

A lot of my philosophy dissertation was wasted work because I changed the question and focus part way through and had to throw out shit loads and work and re-write it in about 2 and half weeks... so 2 and a half weeks.

I generally find the actually writing bit to not be that hard and I can write a pretty good essay overnight if I've done the research and thinking beforehand. Writing a dissertation that's three or five times longer than an essay takes much longer than three to five times as long to write.

 

[Silvanus]

It also depends highly on your field of study, I'm afraid. What applies for a Scientific subject does not apply for History, which does not apply for Drama, etcetera.

If we're talking about solely the writing, I would say about ten days at minimum. Sure, you can crack out 3,000 words for an essay in a single day & night if circumstances force you, but you definitely cannot keep that up for four days straight. No way.

Research & planning time cannot be quantified, I'm afraid, and is even likely to crop up and blindside you once you're writing, when you realise you need some other supporting evidence or something to make your argument work halfway through the damn thing.

I'd say a month, but it's really better if you come at it earlier and slower.

 

[Pseudonym]

Depends on how good you want it to be. If you are writing a masters thesis in mathematics and you really want that PHD position, then I hear a year doing only study and writing, provided you already were a good student, is recommended.

A bachelors thesis in performing arts. Idunno. I'm assuming that to be about easier than my own bachelorsthesis in philosophy, but standards for bachelorstheses vary strongly. I've met psychology students who had to do jack squat for their thesis (5000 words for 20ECTS. Seriously.) and I've read theses that seemed like a lot more work than mine has been. Assuming you don't really care about delivering something actually impressive but merely about getting a 7/10, it should still take you at least a month of writing, having others (including whomever is tutoring your bachelorsthesis) proofread it, and rewriting it after that. Even if you don't have anything else to do, I recommend taking your time and not hammering the thing out in one go. The preliminary reading and research is also important and is best spread out over a longer time. I'm hoping you have that mostly sorted out with 6 weeks to go. If not, I'd start reading now.

Coming back to that person tutoring your thesis. Does such a person exist in your case? Have they not asked where you are with your studies or perhaps demanded some early chapters and plans from you if you want to/have to turn it in in a month or two?

I would recommend taking a full year for a thesis, or else something like a quarter of a year when you don't have a lot of courses where you work on it intensively. I'm currently already doing some early reading for the thesis of my second bachelor next year. (mathematics) Mostly looking into what subject I might find interesting and going over how I would set up the thesis in my head for certain given subjects. I certainly don't intent to start with only a month or so left.

Then again, I know some people can write decent theses in a short timeframe. If that works for you, then good for you. I wouldn't recommend it, though.