Analytical Seminar Series:

Writing and Coaching the One-Draft Thesis

4:15 p.m., 331 Smith Hall

Students and advisors often struggle mightily to get a Ph.D. thesis done. In this colloquium John Carlis will describe a method his graduate students, and others, use to write their theses in one draft. The method includes designing an outline down to paragraph topic sentences, fleshing out those paragraphs, and then incurring only small-scale edits. This method is not magic or luck and does not depend what your birth language is. It is skillfully applied design practice derived from software engineering. It is also relevant if you merely (ha!) need to write a research paper.
      You will get a lot more out the colloquium if you prepare for it by downloading (and, of course, reading) an accompanying paper available at www.cs.umn.edu/~carlis/one-draft.pdf. You might also prepare by 1) spending no more than two hours examining a thesis (from chemistry or anywhere else) looking not at its content but at its form and 2) picking out two research papers, one you enjoyed reading and one that was a trial, and then reverse engineering them to see where the writing caused you pleasure or pain. That is, you can read as a writer.