It has been a bit of a marathon since submitting the revised lit review as I mentioned in my previous post. I did indeed receive a final grade of full credit for the submission, though, in this last dissertation part of my program, the grades are (and should be) relatively binary. It is either done or not. Past that, I haven’t gotten a whole lot done on the dissertation as I had to shift the majority of my attention to finishing up the semester at my full-time undergrad faculty role, finishing out the last week of classes, and then finals week this week.
I did however send off my draft of my lit review to a couple of colleagues for initial thoughts and comments – and today managed to start taking a look at that initial feedback. It was along the lines of what I expected, with the organization being the biggest issue noted. (Crash doubling the page count trashed the organization, so was expecting that.) The most entertaining comment of “most of your ideas are islands…” had been completely accurate, and entertaining.
At this point I likened the expanded lit review to a Monster Cookie, lots of tasty snacks – all shoved together with some sketchy oatmeal.
Over the break, I plan on incorporating the pretty solid set of pointers I got. The two sets of notes, while not extensive, both met my request of noting trends that an outsider saw in the dissertations literature review, so helped me overall. Fix those elements and clean up the organization, and should end up with a fairly solid base for the rest of the dissertation to work from. On another interesting note, I found it useful to have both of those reviewers be outside of my field, forcing them to look at the technical aspects and noting where something was overly jargon or otherwise not understandable to someone outside of my niche. I believe that will also help clean things up as it progresses to ensure flow and clarity.