Some people say, "A dissertation is something you'll only write once, so save yourself some trouble and write your dissertation as a book." Here's why that's bad advice.
(Some thoughts as I revise my own diss into a book)
(Some thoughts as I revise my own diss into a book)
Dissertation & book have fundamentally different aims. One is to demonstrate what you know to a small group of experts, the other is to pass on that knowledge to a broader audience. The first group reads for errors, the second group reads for information.
A dissertation is about credentialing. Does this person have what it takes to be earn a PhD? If the degree is to mean anything, the committee must enforce high standards. This isn't a bad thing.
However, it does mean that the candidate will write the diss in a state of mild paranoia. This leads to all the things people hate about academic prose: lots of hedging, overabundance of notes, mountains of extraneous evidence, long-winded lit reviews, 80-page chapters, etc.
A book, by contrast, has to sell, or at least not drive its publishers into bankruptcy. So the voice needs to sound confident, the prose snappy, the chapters short, the external references brief, etc.
A dissertation written like a book is not sufficiently rigorous. A book written like a dissertation is not sufficiently readable.
My point is: turning a diss into a book isn't hard because you're a bad book-writer. It's hard because you're trying to adapt something one genre into another.
And just as some good novels make bad films, and some good songs make bad poems, and some good podcasts make bad sitcoms, so too some good dissertations make bad books.
Moving from one genre to another really is a process of rewriting, not a process of revising.
