How to Choose a Topic for a Dissertation

Video Transcript

" Hi, this is Laura Turner and today we're going to talk about how to choose your topic for your dissertation. When I graduated with my BA in English, as a part of my honors requirement I had to write a dissertation, sixty-eight page honors paper. And I had to figure out pretty quickly what I wanted to write about and how I was going to go about doing this huge paper. So very much like a dissertation. And also of course I wrote a play for my thesis in graduate school, so I do know a little bit about picking a topic. What you want to do is you don't want to - what you want to do is try to pick something that will not sort of nail you into a corner. Pick something that's broad enough for you to change later. Do not get married to your topic, first off, because it's probably going to change as you collect more research and figure out what you want to do. For example, my honors paper was on Shakespeare's villains, and Shakespeare has many villains, and so as I was writing it, I had to actually pare it down, and figure out which villains I was going to write about. Even in a sixty-eight page paper, you have to figure out specifically what narrow topics you're going to write about. So pick something that is broad, but not too broad, and something that you are very interested in, that you can work on for a year at least, or more, depending on when you have to pick your dissertation topic. Also look at the research that you're coming across, if you're seeing that you're something similar to your dissertation or your actual dissertation has been written about many different times, consider tweaking it to make it more specific. Try to make it your own. Try to make it feel as though you are writing something new. Try to discover something new with your dissertation topic. And of course, as I said before, pick something you are more interested in, because you're going to be working on this for a long time. And keep your head."