“Beware of a man of one book.” English Proverb Pat Thomson has an interesting post on her website talking about the dangers of uncritically offering and accepting advice when it comes to academic work. She takes a critical look at the “advice ‘market'” and highlights some disturbing cases. For example, people likely overgeneralizing from their own experience to those of others, and people giving advice who haven’t even finished their thesis. Her advice is to check the sources — esp. what they have accomplished, references, etc. — and compare. I mostly agree with her posting. It’s easy to get carried away if you are doing something difficult and suddenly you find something that works for you, that makes the work manageable. Surely it must also work for others, mustn’t it? And I have written a few enthusiastic postings myself, e.g., “How to Write a Dissertation Thesis in a Month: Outlines, Outlines, Outlines” or “Scrivener — A perfect program for dissertation writing“. And I’d still highly recommend both. Well, at least to try them out. But I (hope that I) also stress that these are options and as far as I know I never guarantee success. One of my goals with [...]
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