Dissertation Tutors versus Skills Tutor

Hi, this week's blog is about the Dissertation Tutor and what they can do for you versus me, the Skills Tutor. Let's be clear, when you have done a lot of reading and thought over your topic carefully and are ready to submit your proposal you should talk to a dissertation tutor in your area of interest. You can find them on Blackboard under "My courses". You should click on dissertation support.

However, there are a lot of students with whom I've spoken who need to spend some time reflecting and reading before they make an appointment to speak to the Dissertation Tutor. The tutor has only got twenty minutes for an appointment.You may need to wait to get your appointment with the dissertation tutor. So, the more focused you are before you speak to her or him, the more you can get out of your interview time. The following is a list of ideas I strongly urge you to consider before you speak to the Dissertation Tutor:

1. Please read the guidelines on Blackboard about the purpose of the dissertation carefully.
2. I compare writing a dissertation to building a brick wall. You are adding a brick to a wall that is already under construction. Your brick helps to fill a gap in the wall. Essentially, you need to find unexplored areas in management literature to find the topic of your choice. Here is an analogy from the field I know best, literature.If, for example, you told me you wanted to write a 100 page MA dissertation on Moby Dick or the works of Charles Dickens, I'd have to ask you to narrow your focus radically. Similarly, if you tell the Dissertation Tutor that you want to write a dissertation on Motivation, you will find that your topic is much too large. Keep reading to find a piece of this topic that works for dissertation proposal.
   
3. Spend time reading, lots of reading. Use the resources available at the University of Leicester online digital library. If you need help, get in touch with the librarians. They love to help people and are very informed about their subject areas. Andrew Dunn is the Management Librarian. Look him up at the University of Leicester library. You can email or phone him.
   
4. Keep track of your journal articles, books, internet resources and other relevant information in a research log from day one. Record every reference. Remember that ideas, not just words, are the intellectual property of the writer who created them. (See other entries in this blog for my guidance on research logs & the university publications on plagiarism.)
5. Mine journal articles, books and other source materials to find the underlying theories in their research. In other words, read bibliographies to find 'literature streams'. These may lead to crucial source readings.
   
6. Give yourself time to get the resources you need from U of Leicester Library. Try not to begin this work at the last minute.
7. Remember a dissertation is not a 'project', as in a consulting project. It is a piece of research, located within a theoretical framework. It has a specific content and addresses a specific research question. It will have sections that will cover the following areas: your theoretical framework, your literature review, your methodology, your data analysis and your conclusions. At the end of this post, I will suggest a few books for guidance. Just so you know, I asked a tutor who is versed in management literature to help put together this bibliography for you.
   
8. Please don't begin to write your dissertation until your dissertation proposal has been approved.
   

I can help you a great deal while you are doing the basic reading that you need to do before you find a dissertation topic. I'm a trained librarian. However, if you are floundering around and want to talk about the specifics of the finance literature with me, I'm going to send you to speak to the Dissertation Tutor. Nevertheless, I can assist you in your efforts to go through that literature in your search for a topic that looks like it will make a suitable proposal. I can also tell you that it takes a lot of reading before you find a dissertation topic.

Needless to say, you can't ask the Dissertation Tutor to pick your topic for you. That isn't their role! However, if you have some ideas and have done extensive reading, they can help you work through what will work for you as a dissertation topic. All my postings in this blog about critical thinking are of relevance here. You will need to think for yourself to find your own dissertation topic. Additionally, every year the University of Leicester School of Management runs a session on dissertations at summer school. If you can go, this may assist you as well.

List of Resources

Bryman, A & E Bell. (2007). Business Research Methods. (2nd ed.) Oxford:Oxford University Press. (Note: This is a hefty volume with numerous chapters. It is useful as a reference for specific issues when you are doing your project.)

Blaxter, Loraine, C Hughes and M Tight. (2006) How to Research. (3rd ed.) Maidenhead: Open University Press.
A good introduction to the research process.

Maylor, Harvey and K Blackmon. (2005). Researching Business and Management. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
This is a good source of material on the dissertation process from start to finish, with exercises and ideas on how to get through the process.

Bell, Judith. (2005) Doing your Research Project: A Guide for first-time researchers in education, health and social science. (4th ed.) Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Another good overview of the process.

Word of the Week

Hi, let's talk about words again this week . One of the biggest problem areas is words that sound alike but have different meanings. An example is to, too and two. These are problems for a number of reasons. First, if you don't understand their different meanings.

To - Is always a preposition before a verb - e.g. - He went to the store.
Two - Is an adjective describing quantity - e.g. - There were two eggs in the basket.
Too - Is an adverb and means "as well as" - e.g. - He went too.

This seems simple but when your mind is tired at 3 in the morning, it is tempting just to want to get the assignment done. This can lead to mistakes. Unfortunately, your spell checker will not fix these errors and you will be stuck with them. A simple solution is to re-read your work in the morning or to let someone else help you re-read your work. They will often see the careless error your mind passed over three times.

Let's consider three other commonly misused words: there, they're and their.

The first word there can have a number of functions inside a sentence. Here are a few examples:

There is the book. (Explicative) He found the book lying there. (Adverb)
There is the telephone. (Popular use - Explicative)
There is no evidence to support this theory so we must question its validity. (There + to be, formal use)

The second word they're is always a contraction of the words "they are."
Example: They're going to the theatre tonight.

The third word is always a possessive pronoun.
Example: They bought their house last year.

Let's consider one more common problem, loose and lose. Loose is adjective that describes an object that is not fastened properly. Lose is a verb that means "to misplace" or "not to win". (See Hacker, Diane. The Canadian Writer's Reference. p. 96)

Example - The loose button fell off her jacket.
Example - Jack used a hammer to repair the floorboard because it was loose.

Example: The home team will lose the game.
Example: Lose the attitude. (Colloquial, non standard English, use in dialogue not academic papers)
Example: Did you lose your last dollar?

If you understand the meaning of these words, you will make fewer errors. However, anyone who is overtired, overworked and/or anxious can make grammar mistakes. The best way to eradicate mistakes is not simply to understand how to use the right word in the right place, but to give yourself the time to edit your work properly. Unedited, poorly spelled assignments with bad grammar often create the impression that you don't care, even when you do. Give yourself a break. Finish an assignment and find the time the next day to check for grammar mistakes by re-reading your own work or finding a friend to help you re-read your work, after ensuring your friend's grammar is up to the job.

KB

Time to Think: The route to excellence

Hi! This week I'd like to talk about thinking, the thinking that happens before you begin written work such as your assignments, your dissertation or any other writing project. I'm sure, at some other time, you've read about about using outlines as a tool to plan your work or brainstorming as another tool to examine any possible ideas before you even start your research. Yet, how often do we simply consider the time it takes to think and put together ideas inside your mind. How often do we give ourselves permission to take time to think?

In doing research for an assignment or for a dissertation students expect to go from reading journal articles and papers about their chosen topic to actually choosing the topic without further delay. No time is expected to be given to the process of thinking at all. Yet, thinking is the most important step in discovering what we know about a given topic. This is where many students have difficulty in class where the case method of teaching is used. Why?

When we read three different business cases on, for example, organizations in relation to radical technological change, the end purpose is not the memorization of details about these cases. Even though those details can support a viewpoint we develop from each case, what is crucial here is what we actually think about those cases. The importance of a case study is simply this - what is the case really about? Students frequently focus on the details -- and I say this as someone who really enjoys detail -- yet ignore the wider implications of the work that they are reading. The teaching opportunity of the case study is thus lost and the student gets mired down in a morass of details, instead of focusing on the major issues.

The same thing is true of an assignment or when reading for a dissertation. Reading widely on a topic of interest doesn't immediately give us a good understanding of the subject. We need to think about the topic, understand its underlying theories and ideas and then we can find out how the material we have read relates to those underlying ideas and theories. In fact, it will take many journal articles to understand a given idea or theory from the literature. Taking time to think reveals underlying theories and their importance. Let me give you an example from my field.

A friend of mine used to get annoyed with his English teacher, insisting that the teacher's discussion of "The Great Gatsby" was useless. How was it, he'd ask me, that Daisy - the love interest of the main character Jay Gatsby, could really be symbolized by the green light that Gatsby would use to identify the location of the dock at her house. Of what value was this observation? Of course, his teacher failed to explain why this symbolism was important to the novel. He failed to consider the content of the novel in relation to this symbol.

In the novel, Daisy, whom Gatsby loves, lets him down in the end, sells him out for stolid domestic life with her idle, rich husband because Jay is a bootlegger and not a member of the respectable upper-class society to which she belongs. The romantic vision of Daisy, as a beautiful green light, is not what Daisy is about at all. The elusive and beautiful Daisy is hardly worth Gatsby's time. In the end, she is complicit in his death, a death that happens because of a murder she herself committed. Daisy, ultimately, is anti-romantic and cruelly self-interested.

So, the symbolism of the green light is has very little to do with Daisy. In fact, it is simply a tool that the the writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses to show the society of 1920's as a place of social decadence and a growing anti-romanticism. This is something that my friend's English teacher clearly failed to convey. Great works of literature clearly require more thought than the simple realization of "Ah yes, here we have a symbol - a green light." A symbol is unimportant without considering the meaning of the novel, and the novel's attitudes toward more important issues such as social change, love or social class.

The same thing is true of business articles. They too, are reflections of their underlying theories on business practices as part of the greater society. In reading articles, we begin to see, for example, the theories that guide them on organizational behaviour, organizational change, leadership or decision-making. Yet, we must think past the details into the theory to understand what the writers are trying to say. This takes time. We need to allow ourselves to take this time before we expect to either chose a topic or write about a topic. Time to think and reflect.

If we take the time to think, it does not make us weak students. After all, if we already knew the subject material, why would we need to reflect and study and what would we gain from it? Nothing. Only a student who thinks can be an active learner and excellent student.

What is a sentence? Nouns & Pronouns/Verbs

In the blog before the last one, we talked about the structure of paragraphs in "academic writing." We discussed how you use each paragraph to develop your idea in the four or five sentence paragraph. In this blog, we're going to look at basics - the sentences you use in your paragraphs. It makes sense that if you can't write a good sentence, you're going to have trouble writing paragraphs.

Sentence Structure
In academic writing, a sentence must have a subject and a main verb. This subject can be a noun or pronoun. Moreover, each sentence begins with a capital and ends with a full stop(period), question or exclamation mark. A noun or pronoun (the subject) is a word that names a thing such as: tree, house, boy, apple or road or a concept such as happiness, luck, or love. A pronoun, he, she, I, you, we, or they can be used to substitute the subject in the place of nouns. For example:
Sentence 1 - John went to the store with Joe.
Sentence 2 - He went to the store with him.
In sentence 2, he replaces John and him replaces Joe.

Different forms of pronouns replace nouns, depending on whether they are at the beginning of the sentence (subjective case) before the verb or whether they are after the verb at the end of the sentence (objective case). The table below demonstrates the correct use of the pronoun in the subjective and objective forms.

Person Subjective Objective
First person singular I/me
Examples: I went to the store. He gave the pencil to me.

Second person singular you/you
Examples: You went to the store. He gave the pencil to you.

Third person singular he/she; him/her
Examples: He/she went to the store. He gave the pencil to him/her.

First person plural we/us
Examples: We went to the store He gave the pencils to us.

Second person plural you/you
Examples: You went to the store. He gave the pencils to you.

Third person plural they/them
They went to the store. He gave the pencils to them.

I will briefly touch on verbs here. I will discuss of verbs active and passive verbs in our next post as well as active sentences. However, for the purposes this discussion, a verb is a word that denotes an action. Every sentence must have a verb.
Example - Jane carried (note: the verb is to carry) the cake home from the store.
For a more involved discussion on verb agreement and tenses, please go to Purdue University's OWL resource at:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/
Some students may wish to spend some time here perusing special problems related to verbs. Conversely, you may also email me for special resources that I will be happy to suggest.

Sentence Structures
Simple Sentences
Simple sentences such as:
Example 1 - John kicked the ball between the goal posts. Example 2 - Without wine, life would be unbearable.
are composed of one independent clause. A clause is a part of the sentence that has a subject (a main noun) and a predicate (a main verb). In the above sentence, the whole sentence is one independent clause, in other words it "stands alone" (Hacker, 376). This is true of any independent clause.

Compound Sentences
These sentences are composed of two or more independent clauses with no subordinate clauses. These clauses are usually joined by a word such as: and, or, but, nor, for so, yet or maybe joined by a semi colon.
Example 1 - You can redo your assignment but you still need to understand the underlying problems to fix it.
Example 2 - All assignments are improved with a grammar text in one hand and an Oxford Dictionary in the other.
Example 3 - Spock could not save the survivors from Vulcan and save his mother at the same time.
Example 4 - Master grammar first; this will help you complete your assignments for the MBA programme.

The bolded words in the three sentences, but and and, allow the writer to join two separate independent clauses to make one sentence. This allows the writer to juxtapose two ideas of equal value. The sentence in the fourth example above has done just this with two complete sentences, each with their own subject and verb. Instead of placing a full stop between them, the semi colon signals that these ideas are closely related but are in two complete sentences. This is a substitute for using the word and between these sentences. It creates variety in your sentences and maintains reader interest, especially if you have a tendency to overuse the word and.

Note: The clause in the second half of each example is independent because these sentences could each stand alone as separate sentences. They do not require the joining word to indicate a relationship between the two ideas to make them complete.

Complex sentences/Sometimes called Compound/Complex Sentences
A complex sentence has at least one main clause and at least one subordinate clause.
A subordinate clause contains a predicate (a verb) and a subject (a noun), but it "functions in the sentence as an adjective, adverb, or a noun; it cannot stand alone (Hacker, 376)." So, the clause cannot be a separate sentence as in the examples above.

Example 1 - Your assignments show steady signs of improvement, an optimistic development.
Example 2 - Although I used to work for Apple I have worked for Microsoft as a programmer since 2007.
Example 3 - When Jim Kirk became the Captain of the Enterprise, he learned the names of every crewman.

The subordinate clauses above in bold cannot stand on their own as independent sentences, they are tied to the idea in the main clause. For example, in the third sentence, the clause "When Jim Kirk became the Captain of the Enterprise" is clearly tied to his actions in the main body of the sentence, he learned the names of every crewman. It is subordinate in fact to the main idea that he learned the names of every crewman.

I have also inverted the word order in some of these sentences. This, like the sentence with semi colon under the compound sentences, creates variety for the reader. When you use a variety of simple, compound and complex sentences in your assignments, they improve. Readers, whether they are reading exams or assignments, wake up when they encounter an exam or an assignment that has a variety of sentences. In writing sentences, take the advice of Fowler (see The King's English) and make your sentences clear and concise. Use precise words. First, however make sure each sentence is complete with a main verb and main subject.

Let's be clear here, clauses - whether they are independent or subordinate - are only important so we can make sure that our writing is clear. Grammar without writing is an empty pursuit. An example of this is, that when I was in grade school, I'd spend hours parsing sentences for no apparent reason. I still had to learn grammar later. I want to spare you this problem.

Steven King, the writer, taught grammar at a college before he wrote horror novels. A large part of his success lies in his understanding of the gerund. He has actually said this in his book on creative writing. Read Harry Potter and you will see that Rowling knows her grammar. There are writers, and I've read some of their work, whose grammar is shaky but I imagine their editors go on red alert when they turn their manuscripts in. You don't have a staff of editors to fix your work, and increasingly in the real world, people have less time for people who can't present an idea clearly in as few words as possible.

However, assignments and exams arrive on tutors' desks every day without a main subject/noun or a main verb. Many students believe this is a sentence: Flying down to Rio. Flying is a participle, not a verb. Down is not a verb either, it is a preposition. We will discuss this later, just believe me for now. The rest of you who have been reading this post will quickly realize that there is no main subject in this sentence either. Rules can be broken in creative writing but I believe you need to understand them to know why you are breaking them, even in dialogue. Language is not subjective and arbitrary. Words have meaning; language has structure. So, even if you can't remember which clause is called independent and which is called subordinate, if you have a main idea and main verb, you have a complete sentence. For problems such as subject/verb agreement, I refer you to the many excellent resources I have cited in this post and future discussions of these problems.

For a comprehensive discussion of sentences and how to improve them, I recommend How to Write Better English by Robert Allen (Penguin Books, 2005) which has helped me immeasurably in writing this post. I also recommend Diana Hacker's A Canadian Writer's Reference (Nelson, 2001). For those of you who are interested in my reference to the gerund above, Steven King's book is called "On Writing". It is about creative writing. OWL also discusses the gerund in detail, for those who are interested. (See website above)