2.2 Working Plans

A second very useful tool, that can be used alongside research diaries, is using a Working Plan as an evolving planning and draft structure document. The aim is to create a skeleton outline of your dissertation, either section-by-section or paragraph-by-paragraph according to preference, and add information as you conduct your research. The Working Plan will evolve along with your thinking, analysis and reading, with the desired outcome to allowing you to capture your evolving thoughts and provide a detailed plan to follow when writing up your dissertation.

A simple editable word-document or text-file is usually sufficient for this.

We can work through a typical section of an Example Working Plan to demonstrate one way to use the concept. We can begin with a rough draft of one section of a dissertation and add initial ideas with inspiration from Game of Thrones.

Literature Review 2.x Plan: Do Wolves make good guard dogs?

Define question, use good quote (maybe Sansa 2001?)

Establish contextual information, has any culture used wolves as guard animals? (Find this out)

Find different perspectives from academics (search for journal articles)

Keeping notes in the body of your Working Plan is important, will help you quickly and accurately integrate new material while keeping track of your structure and ideas. Tracking conflicting or complementary sources will also allow you the ability to connect information together and decide how to integrate it into the body of your essay. It can also act as an important filter to keep out unsuitable information or sources, helping trim your word count.

Research and reading should drive your plan – do not ignore academic reading that calls your assumptions or plan into question. Remember that academia is full of debates, finding contradictory perspectives does not mean you should ignore one and pick the other. Instead you should seek nuance and integrate objections when appropriate, i.e. in most cases, largely, with some exceptions, etc.

We can expand our previous examples but looking at journal articles that are relevant to the topic.

Journal Article (1) by Tywin Lannister (2006) presenting information that wolves can be very vulnerable to swords and sharp objects

Journal Article (2) by Robb Stark (2005) arguing that wolves can terrify people and are good at growling and biting

We can now assess these two sources (see 2.4 of this guide for more detail on how to assess sources for integration as well as validity).

Lannister (2006) indirectly addresses question, from a reliable source, is only applicable in certain contexts, accounts for some objections

Stark (2005) directly addresses question, from a reliable source, is applicable in any context, does not attempt to account for any objections

From this we can integrate them into our Working plan

Literature Review 2.x Plan: Do Wolves make good guard dogs?

Define question, use good quote (maybe Sansa 2001?)

Establish contextual information, has any culture used wolves as guard animals? (Find this out)

First use Stark (2005) to establish facts that wolves terrify people, can bite hard

Then use Lannister (2006) to question Stark’s findings by introducing a context in which wolves can be easily incapacitated

Conclude

Doing this for most (if not all) of your Dissertation will mean that A) you are unlikely to forget or miss important elements when your are writing up your actual dissertation and B) you will be doing the hard work of figuring out how to integrate your research and your structure and argument while the reading is fresh in your mind.

Further reading

Using a thesis blueprint to plan your structure

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