The Benefits Of Autobiography (Religious Or Otherwise)

A few weeks ago, Michael Utzinger posted about a course he is working on concerning religious autobiography, and about using of Eboo Patel's Acts of Faith for the course. As it happens, I have just finished taking part in a two-part graduate seminar on using autobiography/life-writing in historical research. For the first section, the reading portion, we read through a range of theoretical literature concerning life-writing and considered the potential problems and benefits that come with using these types of sources. The second section, the research component, was based on a straight-forward yet difficult challenge: pick an autobiography (or set of autobiographies) and use it as the core of your primary source base for a standard seminar-length essay. It was a helpful, challenging exercise in source criticism that pushed us to test the limits of a single extended source, and to think more seriously about the nature of historical sources in general. Surprisingly, little of the theoretical literature we reviewed discussed religion or spirituality at all.


In Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, the authors list fifty-two “genres” of life-writing; where one might expect to find religion listed as an explicit theme, such as under the “con narrative” heading, the genre’s description is kept broad and capacious, focused more on a narrative of transformation that specifically religious or spiritual con. The only genre to be overtly linked to religion is the “spiritual life narrative,” very similar to the con narrative, which “typically unfolds as a journey through sin and damnation to a sense of spiritual fulfillment and arrival in a place of sustaining belief.” Although a very helpful text otherwise, Smith and Watson don’t take us very far in considering the distinctive qualities of religious or spiritual autobiography, nor do they (or other scholars) pay especially close attention to religious themes within life-writing generally. Nevertheless, I’ve become something of an advocate for life-writing’s historical usefulness. This data was done by Essay Writers!


I ultimately focused my own work on early-twentieth century liberal Protestant autobiography. Although my research relied primarily on Harry Emerson Fosdick’s autobiography, The Living of These Days, I worked through a range of texts from the period, keeping the “liberal” category pretty fluid, in order to try and trace similarities between each text and the life and experiences each portrayed. I was especially interested in the presentation of con or transformation narratives describing the path from the “traditional” Christianity in which they were raised to the liberal stance they espoused later in life. I got sidetracked along the way, however, by Fosdick’s text, and it seems to me to be an excellent example of what autobiography can do for the careful historian. https://essayfreelancewriters.com/blog/write-an-autobiographical-essay/ jumped out at me for a few reasons.


First, it really asks for Fosdick’s life narrative to be read in at least three ways: as didactic, where Fosdick’s life is held out not necessarily as something to emulate absolutely, but as a life that one can learn from; as representative, where Fosdick’s life doubles as the story of modern liberal Protestantism; and as apologetic or defensive, where Fosdick articulates his own understanding of liberal religion and clarifies it against a variety of criticisms. In the Preface of the text, Fosdick suggests that the problem of his age was the question of how “to be an intelligent modern and a serious Christian.” This dilemma becomes a central theme of the text and is infused into each of the three narratives pursued above. By keeping an eye on each of these readings - by reading them alongside and against each other - the autobiographical text is transformed from a repository of factual content that will have to be verified, to a dynamic intersectional text whose value far transcends the mere facts it it might contain. Style, structure, themes, voice - all become attributes that can be mined for further meaning.



’s story, and thus the story of liberal Protestantism, as a very American story, even a traditional one. He spends a great amount of time establishing his genealogical bona fides, claiming early colonial ancestors from the 1630s. He traces “a strong tradition of nonconformity” on both sides of his family, recounting how one relative was expelled from New England church - “probably for reading heretical Anabaptist books,” and how other relatives challenged religious and social norms of their times. He goes out of his way to praise nonconformity and “rugged individualism” as distinctly American virtues. And these themes resurface throughout his own story and are even tied into the text’s structure, so that his own embrace of liberal faith becomes a story of nonconformity, of rugged individualism, and of tolerance across peculiarities of belief. Although I am still working on pulling these themes out and making sense of them historically, I don’t think that Fosdick is idiosyncratic among the liberals of his time in his attempt to craft a distinctly American identity. The question is why - why does Fosdick go out of his way to do so? ’s a question that I’m not sure I would have thought to ask without engaging the period’s autobiographical literature. Read openly but critically, Fosdick’s autobiography becomes a node of cultural intersections, a measure of both the time he was writing in (the 1950s) and the span of his life. This is a value unique to life-writing, I think, one that emerges from something inherent in the autobiographical act itself. Paul John Eakin has suggested that as we tell stories about our selves, we actually create our selves; we construct our identities through the elaborate and complex narratives we weave. For the historian, the trick is to read such texts from multiple angles, to try and unlock the identity that the autobiography holds and to gauge its historical value.


Essay Tips: How To Write A Toulmin Argument

Toulmin Argument is like writing any other method of reasoning. The major difference, however, is that knowing how to write a Toulmin argument requires more of knowing what you are writing about than knowing who you are writing for or against. In one of our examples for Toulmin argument, we see how direct focus is given on the content or subject of the essay. Little concentration, if there is any, is devoted on the anticipation on how readers might respond to, agree with or refute the arguments. Thus, writing a Toulmin argument requires more of a clear understanding of your subject and less of a good anticipation of your reader's reactions. How do you begin writing a Toulmin argument? First, understand your topic. https://essayfreelancewriters.com/blog/position-essay/ to this is carefully researching background information relevant to the subject of your essay or position paper. For example, if your chosen topic is the legalization of euthanasia, research on the historical development of euthanasia as a medical practice, the implications of euthanasia from legal and moral perspectives, relevant statistics concerning the rate of euthanasia practiced across the United States, and existing alternatives to euthanasia, to name a few.


More importantly, identify the issue at hand. With regard to the topic of euthanasia, a possible issue might be: should euthanasia be legalized? There are other more interesting issues. Do not limit yourself to what is obvious or what is already widely talked about. Doing so will make your essay or position paper just another one of the thousands of essays or position papers which have already tackled the same issue. Now that you have researched information most relevant to your topic and identified the issue, what is the next step? The next step is to categorize your researched information according to the following elements of a Toulmin argument: data/grounds, claim, warrants, qualifiers, rebuttals, and backing statements. Refer here to understand more about these elements. After categorizing your researched information according to their appropriate categories in a Toulmin argument, structure your essay or position paper according to the order of decreasing strength of arguments. Place your strongest arguments on the first few body paragraphs of your essay.



Consequently, put your least strong arguments on the latter body paragraphs. You can use a topic sentence in starting your paragraphs so that you can keep track of the flow of your arguments. Provide a conclusion that restates your position on the issue. You may summarize your key points or reiterate your main arguments in support of your position. You may also provide a challenge to your readers, such as writing the negative consequences if your position on the issue is not accepted. Keep in mind a few things. Avoid anticipating how your readers might react. Use more of the logos than ethos. That is, use more appeal to reason than appeal to emotion. Another reminder is to be as specific as possible in mentioning your statistics or numbers. Use credible sources and cite them appropriately. This will give more authority to the points you raise. Effective rebuttals are those which recognize the strength of the objections but overturn them by showing their negative effects when accepted. Content was created with the help of https://essayfreelancewriters.com.


Bowden stresses that the message of Dances With Wolves was not to persuade people from other cultures to give up their own culture and turn to the Lakota ways or as some critics said, “to turn Injun.” The fact that we see Dunbar interacting with the Sioux, gaining a new Sioux name, learning their language, participating in their customs and later eventually intermarrying, does not mean that he has forsaken his culture, as many have interpreted. It simply shows acceptance, respect, tolerance and appreciation for another way of life other than his. Lake Randall agrees with this description, adding that the film attempted to narrate identity and self-discovery among competing cultures but as result of certain, fatal flaws (which are mentioned in the following paragraphs), the film might not have succeeded in doing so. Another issue raised was the authenticity of the movie. According to Larry Bowden, its depiction of native life, according to him is as natural and realistic as possible. He says that the Native Americans we are introduced to in this movie are way different from the savages we have come to expect The Lakota (Sioux) we meet are real human beings.


Effective Papers: Research Paper On Business Ethics

Specifically, it may be useful to examine how such cultural factors as guanxi and mianzi, constructs so intimately related to Asian (particularly Chinese) business, may impact CESR beliefs. Guanxi is generally conceived as the interpersonal connections which an individual attempts to cultivate with relevant parties, while mianzi or face relates to the need to preserve one's social standing. These factors tend to be studied in the Chinese culture although they are not necessarily exclusive to the East. For instance, the "old boys' club," a notion familiar in the West, shares some characteristics as guanxi. However, it is documented that in Chinese communities, both guanxi and mianzi are practiced for long-term personal relationships (Abramson and Ai, 1997; Osland, 1989). Additionally, Brunner and Taoka (1977) suggested that comparative research indicate Chinese to place more emphasis on building relationships than their American counterparts; while Alston (1989) has touted! guanxi as an Asian value. Given the prevalence of these fundamental factors in this region, we argue that they are important considerations in influencing CESR beliefs among Asians. In addition, we analyze the impact of Machiavellianism on CESR beliefs in Asia. This article was done by https://essayfreelancewriters.com!


Machiavellian denotes at least an amoral (if not immoral) way of manipulating others to accomplish one's objectives (Hunt and Chonko, 1984). The construct has been found to correlate negatively with CESR in Western research (Rayburn and Rayburn, 1996; Singhapakdi, 1993). Whether this relationship holds in an Asian setting will be assessed in this study along with the more indigenous cultural variables of guanxi and mianzi. Moreover, it would be beneficial to assess whether beliefs in CESR vary across Asian countries. Possibly, such cross-national differences may arise between Asian countries with different business philosophies and macro-economic management approaches. For example, Hong Kong is known to have a more liberal and laissez faire attitude towards business than Singapore, even though both were former British colonies and are Chinese-dominated. Likewise, the relative impact of the three explanatory variables of interest on CESR beliefs may differ between Asian nations. Finally, while it may be useful to obtain insights from managers who deal with such issues in their work, it would also be helpful to analyze these issues from the perspective of business undergraduates for at least three reasons.



First, while they may lack first-hand knowledge given their relative inexperience, their responses are not likely to be completely arbitrary. This is because such undergraduates would have been exposed to the basic issues involved in this study in their course work. Second, national honor society essay of this research is on theory testing of relationships between constructs. To the extent that the variables of concern are likely to vary within the undergraduate population, their use is justifiable and may also control for such background conditions as company size, job classification, and other factors which may impact the findings if executives were employed instead. Third, should data among youths support the hypotheses, there would be important long-term impli! CESR in the region. Thus, this study has three objectives. First, we examine the impact of guanxi, mianzi, and Machiavellianism on the CESR beliefs of Hong Kong and Singapore business undergraduates. Second, we investigate whether Hong Kong and Singaporean youths vary in their CESR beliefs.


Third, we determine whether nationality interacts with guanxi, mianzi, and Machiavellianism in predicting CESR beliefs. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The literature review next outlines the four concepts of concern in this study as well as formulates hypotheses relating the impact of the explanatory variables on CESR beliefs. Next, the research method employed in the study is detailed, followed by the results of the survey. Finally, implications of the findings are discussed and directions for future research suggested. Corporate values define the standards that guide the external adaptation and internal integration of organizations (Schein, 1985). Corporate ethical values help establish and maintain the standards that delineate the "right" things to do and the things "worth doing" (Jansen and Von Glinow, 1985). Such ethical values require the organization or individual to behave in accordance with carefully thought-out rules of moral philosophy. These include honesty and full disclosure, and engaging in practices that do not break or bend the rules for the sake of profit maximization. Social responsibility concerns the social contract between business and the society in which it operates. This content has been created with Essay Freelance Writers.


How To Write A Travelogue?

With the extensive craze of social media and watching people dive into adventures at different places. There is a huge boom in the travel industry. Crafting travel articles, tourist guides, trip reports, travel journals, and travel memoirs are the topmost priority of most writers. If you wish to be a part of this lucrative profession, then you should know the tricks and tips before beginning with travel writing. Travel writing can be done using many ways, out of which travelogue is the most popular. You need to have a remarkable vocabulary and inspiring thoughts to begin with the one. Also, include photographs and brochures, if required. First of all, what exactly is a travelogue? What is a Travelogue? Travelogue is the diary of a person’s journey overseas or to another place. It can be a narrative story describing personal experiences or a written report including factual details. It is not supposed to be like any other creative writing. It involves emotions and talks with the readers through photos and motion pictures. Travelogue can be written in various formats depending on the type of story you wish to convey to the audience. This data has been generated with Essay Writers!


Writing about travel is not all similar to wiring for academics. Its main objective is to make readers enthusiastic about the location. It is a part of creative writing. Well-written travelogues encourage people to visit the place and stimulate their imagination. Make use of fun facts, jokes and flirt a little with your readers to make it super exciting. Don’t indulge in travel writing if you have not yet visited the place or just know about it as much you have heard from friends, family or seen on the Internet. Better write with your own personal experience, it helps you give an emotional touch to your content and generate live pictures in the minds of the audience. Besides entertainment quotient, travelogues, that help readers to understand the culture, people and other facts of different locations, urge them to visit your article again and again. Include details of prices, transportation and whatever you feel the readers must know.


Your travelogue is about your experiences, thoughts, and feelings. There is no scope to describe it through a narrator. Readers wish to know your story. Make use of “I”, “me” and “mine”. Also, don’t focus on yourself, it is surely not an autobiography. The best language to use is when you speak, but not with fillers and swearing. Use the language that you would ideally speak. Use simple and no-grammatical-error language. Readers should follow your perception without picking up a dictionary every time to understand your language. Creative writing implements no limitations. Yet travelogue is not a novel or a long poem. It is a mixture of your feelings, beliefs, experiences and what you want your readers to know about the place. Do not exaggerate your thoughts and feelings, maintain a limit. Write in a way that makes readers a part of your journey. The recommended way is to write it in a narrative chronological style. A travelogue is written in an essay-style following all the rules of essay writing. It has 3 major elements: introduction, body, and conclusion.


Attractive introduction persuades your readers to read the whole post. Make it precise and catchy. Use a thrilling photo (not your face) that speaks of your journey. This is the sole of your journey. Avoid writing long paragraphs, instead use smaller ones with attractive headings. You can also use a poetic description in your headline about landscapes, people, and other sights. Finally, express your gratitude to the locals and friends you made there. Talk about their hospitality. End your travelogue on a positive note. Avoid criticism. Encourage narrative essay outline template to visit the place and tell them why you would like to go there next time as well. What Points can be Added to a Travelogue? You might be having so many points and stories to talk about, but here are some general and major points that you need to keep in mind. Most of the readers look for them while reading about your travel journey. Add all the possible places that you think your readers should go while visiting the destination.


Make it exhaustive, such that your readers will not have to surf the Internet to look for additional details such as an address, timings, prices, and other relevant details. Some places are visitable only during a certain time of the year. For example, you would, certainly, not like to visit New York or London in winter seasons, as the temperature may lower down to negative and there are huge problems with the flights as well. Also, visiting New Delhi is also not a good idea in months like June, July or August due to the extremely hot weather. Talk to the locals and ask them about the seasonal events and climate changes occurring during the whole year and in what season, there is the highest number of tourists visiting the place. Describe every season and tell your recommended time to visit the place. Finding the right mode of transportation is the biggest headache that tourists face. Mention all the possible ways your readers can travel across the country or city along with prices and which one is safer at a particular time in a day.



Born In Slavery: Slave Narratives From The Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938

The Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves, today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA, Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. This introductory essay, which accompanied the Library’s initial 2001 release of the collection, was written by Norman R. Yetman, then Chancellors Club Teaching Professor of American Studies and Sociology and Chair of the American Studies Program at the University of Kansas, where he was also Courtesy Professor of African and African-American Studies and co-editor (with David Katzman) of the transdisciplinary journal American Studies. Content was created with the help of Essay Writers!


In 1855, John Little, a fugitive slave who had escaped to Canada, uttered this perceptive commentary upon attempts to convey the realities of the existence that he had fled: "Tisn't he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is--'tis he who has endured." The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who "endured." Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA.


Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the "peculiar institution," to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. The Slave Narrative Collection provides a unique and virtually unsurpassed collective portrait of a historical population. Indeed, historian David Brion Davis has argued that the voluminous number of documented slave testimonies available in the United States "is indisputably unique among former slaveholding nations."2 In addition to the substantial number of life histories it contains, the most compelling feature of the collection is the composition of the sample of people who made up its informants. Although not a representative sample of the slave population, they were a remarkably diverse and inclusive cross-section of former slaves.


Those whose voices are included in the collection ranged in age from one to fifty at the time of emancipation in 1865, which meant that more than two-thirds were over eighty when they were interviewed. Almost all had experienced slavery within the states of the Confederacy and still lived there. narrative essay on friendship represented all the major slave occupations. Moreover, the size of the slave units on which respondents reported living varied considerably, from plantations with over a thousand slaves to situations in which the informant was his or her owner's only slave. The treatment these individuals reported ran the gamut from the most harsh, impersonal, and exploitative to work and living conditions and environments that were intimate and benevolent. In fact, except that most of the informants were relatively young when they experienced slavery (older slaves had died long before these interviews were undertaken), all the major categories of the slave population appear to be well represented in the collection.


Because the actual occupational distribution of the slave population is unknown, assurance of total randomness in this sample is impossible. But there appears little reason to believe that the processes involved in the selection of interviewees produced a sample that systematically diverged from the larger population. At least the sample biases that characterized the universe of antebellum slave autobiographies--the disproportionate number of runaways, individuals who had purchased their freedom or had been freed, males, craftsmen, and individuals from border states--are absent. While not totally eliminated, the methodological problem of sample bias that inevitably confronts the historian is substantially reduced in this sample of the ex-slave universe. The WPA narratives thus constitute an illuminating and invaluable source of data about antebellum and post-Emancipation Southern life, the institution of slavery, and, most important, the reactions and perspectives of those who had been enslaved. 1. For the sake of brevity, I have omitted many references in this essay. More extensive and detailed discussion and documentation can be found in two articles that I have previously published on which I have drawn substantially in my discussion here: "The Background of the Slave Narrative Collection," American Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Fall 1967), 534-53, and "Ex-Slave Interviews and the Historiography of Slavery," American Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1984), 181-210. Reproduced with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.



English 1B: September 2020

The Known World. The first essay will use The Classical Model of Argument. The second essay will use the Toulmin Model and the last Rogerian. I will give students models and/or templates for each essay assignment. The first essay will be due Tuesday, October 5. Bring in a completed Initial Planning Sheet and an outline. We will have a peer review that day and students will present their essay on Thursday, October 7. I said the essay could be 2-4 pages, but I don't know if you can do justice to your topic in two pages, so I have changed the assignment to 3-4 pages, plus a works cited. Students will use the same evidence for all the essays and the same thesis , all that will change will be the arrangement and form of the essay. We'll practice writing an argument in class next week together. Follow the narrative and your essay will be fine. I also mentioned going to the sunrise ceremony on Alcatraz Island, Monday, October 11, 5 AM. We also practiced developing signal phrases using a workbook I distributed. Many of the students borrowed the book. Please return next Thursday. Write on a separate sheet of paper. Bring in your novel you'd like to read for the class next week, so I can approve it. We'll read a play in class and conclude the semester with a profile on an artist who is using their creativity to challenge inequity in society. The portfolio is due Dec. 9 electronically. We will begin assembling it Dec. 2 and 7. This is the end of the course.

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Given this fact it is remarkable that Jewel narrates only once in the whole novel even though he is a main actor in the story. This lack of verbal participation is partly a reflection of the nature of the character. He is a man of action and remains silent on many occasions throughout the story, which does not mean that he does not have an opinion. The point of view of the illegitimate child of Addie is made clear by his thoughts on Cash’s building of his mother’s coffin right under her window (Faulkner, page 5). He interprets this as a gesture of flaunting of the work he is doing for his dying mother. Although Jewel’s silence may seem to express stubbornness it may be one of the attributes which his mother values him for. According to Novel Guide’s interpretation, words versus actions is one of the underlying themes in the novel. The fact that Darl is a man of many words and Jewel is one of few, who acts decisively, is also reflected in the attitude of their mother toward them.


She herself is not fond of words. She states in her narrative that she learned that words are “no good” at expressing what they aim to(Faulkner, page 73). The theme of words without action is present throughout the story in the face of the two brothers Darl and Jewel as well as in Anse who does not do, but rater talks. check this list is most vividly expressed by his idle standing by the river when the carriage and mules along with his wife’s coffin tip over. He is there rather to instruct his sons on what to do rather than to offer a helping hand. This is in sharp contrast with Jewel’s constant activity. He is always on the move and even managed to earn money for his very own horse without letting anyone know. The funeral procession of Addie Bundren is a journey of epic proportions for the family, but its outcome and nature remind us more of an ironic account of life’s ill fortune and people’s spiteful nature, so it might be more appropriate to call the journey a mock epic one.



The various acts of bravery and sacrifice such as Cash’s heroic withstanding of the pain caused by his broken leg, or the ambiguous burning of the barn by Darl are testimony to the somewhat epic yet absurd character of the novel. Cash’s denial of his suffering turns somewhat ridiculous when it becomes clear that he is indeed very hurt and needs help. As for Darl’s burning of the barn this can be viewed from two perspectives, one being a heroic act of salvation for his mother’s body from the humiliation of the journey, and another being his trauma and loneliness due to the journey and the rejection of his mother. Another motive which supports the theme of the epic journey of the Bundrens is the role of Jewel in the quest to bury his mother. He appears to be the decisive and bold action taker, the knight in shining armour who Addie predicted would rescue her from the water and fire of her journey toward her final resting place (Novel Guide).


Format For Writing Thesis Dissertation

Your comment You are on thesis and dissertation, thesis dissertation Edit posts? Thesis dissertation is the longest taking assignment in a person’s life, this is why it s requires a well done research work to come up with something extra ordinary and interesting. It is good to remember that a thesis dissertation is not merely about writing a simple introduction, body and conclusion but rather it is more than that. It involves different stages of writing which are enlisted below with little description of each. Abstract is generally not included in the word count of thesis dissertation and should not exceed from 300 to 400 words. It’s a short description of what a reader should expect in the coming paragraphs. Some part of it should describe what are your goals of the dissertations are while the rest of the abstract should suggest some future research work. This should comprise of the ten percent of your dissertation, Introduce the topic f your dissertation in the beginning then highlight the major goals of your thesis writing and the points that will be discussed in the thesis and dissertation. This should comprise of the 20% of your thesis and dissertation, you should keep in mind that a literature review is not the review of any book as it names suggests. Make sure you are using at least ten references in your thesis and some theories that will be discussed later on in the dissertation and the research question as well. 3. Compare and contrast method of investigation. Wrap up your work here, this will also be divided into two segments, first; conclusion, second; recommendations for the future research. Provide a concise summary of what you have done in the dissertation. For help with essay, please contact https://essayfreelancewriters.com!


This proved to be a great way to let all IT managers visualize the top priority work during Release Planning sessions. These monthly client meetings were frequently held in the conference room where the VPs could easily see the scope of the IT workload and where their own CRs were queued up. Conclusion/Transition The Intake and Release Planning cycle operated with friendly precision. People did not miss meetings. Everyone actively participated within their role because it was efficient. The Release Manager performed all record keeping, and was acknowledged for the accuracy and timeliness of the Change Request Log as a "routable" of THE WALL. But whenever anyone in the organization wanted a comprehensive appreciation of the whole business, they would sneak into the conference room and read THE WALL. The CIO would occasionally bring in the President to demonstrate where everything stood. This was truly an information radiator (thank you Alistair Cockburn). The rest, they say, is "agile" history. To learn what happens next for Releases, our story continues with PRODUCTION CHANGE CONTROL.


First paragraph of the abstract will undergo changes as you further crystallize the sequence in which you arrive at the problem statement through your literature survey. As described in the post Literature Review of a PhD Dissertation: Synthesis vs Listing, the path from the general problem area to the specific articulation of your Problem Statement is often not clearly understood unless it is written down and revised several times. Each such major revision may result in tweaking of one or more terms used in the abstract. This is the time that you need to get rid of any superfluous statements from your literature survey. The guiding rule is that any discussion in literature survey that is not helping the reader in understanding the problem statement or Thesis Statement should be thrown away. It is often painful to throwaway the material that you may have taken a long time to write and improve. But writing of that material had served its purpose.



It has told you what is important to your research and what is not. You are expected to keep only the things that are helping in placing your research in the context of the existing research. Literature survey is often the most painful part of the dissertation. The relevant research that you are describing or quoting was written by their authors to help elucidate their problem statement and their thesis statement. Your literature survey is supposed to be helping your reader to understand your problem statement and your thesis statement. Writing of literature survey chapter should be from the point of view of your problem and thesis statement and not from their point of view. Literature survey is often long. Therefore, to keep the reader focused you need to abstract the literature survey is an overview table that describes the flow of discussion in the literature survey. These tables can be supported by some other tables that summarize the literature in individual sections.


The whole idea is not to keep the reader in suspense. What to keep in abstract and what not is often very difficult for the methodology chapter and results. There are much too many steps, and too many tables that you want to describe. However, https://essayfreelancewriters.com/blog/how-to-write-a-literature-review/ of the abstract helps you in focusing on the main flow of methodology. It is always a good idea to explain the alternatives that you have chosen and the alternatives that you considered but left them. This is the Rigor of PhD Research. It is best explained through tables which describes the reasons why particular alternatives were chosen. The few sentences of the abstract which refer to the discussion are your pointer to the thrust of your discussion chapter. Interpretation of results and their explanations is often the most important thing for the evaluators. Why the results are as they are. If items are dropped, or certain factors are not behaving the way they were supposed to are important from the point of view of insights that they provide. Key insights need to be part of the discussion chapter connecting your thesis statement with the results. Conclusions and Significance of your research as well as its limitations and delimitations are important in alerting the reader to the extent of your understanding of the research significance. They also point to the care you took in research and also the usefulness of your research to researchers, and practitioners. Finally, remember nothing in the dissertation is rigid. Abstract and ordering of the discussion keeps on changing. The paramount consideration is the readability of your dissertation or is it making sense or not. This is explained in the post on flipping the assumptions and conclusions Flipping the Thread of Argument in your PhD Thesis. This has been created with the help of Essay Writers!