A prevalent attitude is that the quality of scholarship does not really matter. Just go through the motions, get your publications, be easy on the younger people, etc... Don't worry about how well it's written. "It's just a dissertation, not a book."
The problem is that when I am the reader for work like that, I get seriously pissed off. Two world views collide.
4 comments:
One of my writing maxims is: never do something that would piss Jonathan Mayhew off.
Going for quality is not the same as being perfectionistic / obsessive / neurotic / etc.
Right. I don't expect anyone to be perfect, myself least of all. I do expect some effort beyond the perfunctory. I read got through reading a book ms. that I wouldn't have passed as a dissertation. I wouldn't have approved a single paragraph of it. The director of the dissertation was someone whose book I recently trashed in a review. Coincidence?
Yes, this is what pisses me off, too.
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