1. Developing Your Study Skills Alan Glasper and Colin Rees How to Write Your Nursing Dissertation, First Edition. Alan Glasper and Colin Rees. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

2. Dissertations and multi-skilling Consider the following range of skills involved in producing a dissertation: organising self, searching the literature, critical analysis, reading fast and accurately, reflection, writing clearly, planning, scheduling, seeing the bigger picture, etc; all those show the enormous demands required to produce one piece of work. It is study skills that brings these together to achieve a relatively smooth journey to submission day.

3. Model of key skills areas in producing your dissertation Writing C Critical analysis Organising and coordinating activities Reading

4. The components of study skills The key components of study skills can be seen in the previous slide. It will help you if at an early stage you can identify your strong study skills, and the areas you need to develop to increase the quality of your dissertation. The aim of this presentation is to highlight some of the key points covered in Chapter 11.

5. Reading Dissertations are characterised by the large amount of quite complex reading that has to be understood and included. In academic work, the successful student is an ‘active’ reader. This means not sitting back and waiting for knowledge or understanding to jump from the page, but to dive into the page and ask key questions that need to be answered.

6. Improving reading technique: Use these questions as you go through articles/book chapters Question What?What is meant by the key words/ideas/concepts ? Make sure you have clear definitions and have compared and contrasted different authors suggestions on meanings. Why?Why is this important in this context/to service users/nurses? How?How does this intervention or idea work?/ How is it carried out?/How does it improve practice? Problems (or advantages)? What are the major problems and their consequences? (Or what are the major advantages argued here?) Solutions (or disadvantages)? What are the key solutions suggested here and their implications (Or what are the major disadvantages argued here? Implications for Aim/Practice? Use your imagination, experience, professional opinion, to consider what are the implications of the ideas contained in the reading source?

7. Engaging with authors Your dissertation is not your summary of the literature or other writers words and ideas; it is the result of you engaging with a range of writers to produce your own understanding and ideas. The questions in the last table will help you engage with writers so you can record: ‘what did they say?’ as well as ‘what do I think about what they said?’

8. Critical analysis This means giving considered thought to what you read and think, in terms of strengths and limitations backed up by some kind of argument and objective supporting evidence. From the previous slides we are already developing this need for your own ‘point of view’ based on ‘analysis’ not pre-existing prejudices that may have weaknesses.

9. Critical analysis It is important you do not translate ‘critical analysis’ as ‘criticising’. It is taking a balanced point of view of both sides of the argument and looking for existing objective evidence or a consensus of opinion. The critical analysis in your dissertation will be built up by comparing and contrasting different authors and synthesising (putting together, rather than discussing one by one) this in the light of your growing understanding and evidence.

10. Writing skills The marker only has your written word to go on when evaluating your work. This means it is your writing skills that count most in getting you the marks. Naturally, what you write has to be grammatical, correctly spelt and accurately punctuated and referenced, but it is its clarity that really counts. This provides a warning in trying to be too complicated in the way you write; use simple words and simple ways of saying what you mean.

11. Writing skills The trick to being a good writer is to write from a reader’s point of view. Do you give them the information they need, in the form that makes sense to them even before they realise they need it? In other words, you have to anticipate what you need to tell the reader, in what sequence, in a simple but engaging way. Look at the writing of those you like for clues on how you can achieve this.

12. Writing skills To help the reader read through your dissertation understanding how it all fits together, you need a clear structure. Make good use of chapter headings and subheadings as the ‘scaffolding’ that holds the ideas together. The reader needs to hear ‘your voice’ talking them through the issues and the detail of all the things that need to be considered. Again, consult some favourite writing to identify this in practice.

13. Finally Study skills help you develop the ‘art’ of producing a dissertation that could not have been written by anyone else but you; no one else’s dissertation could have your voice and stamp on it. Although these points require a great deal of self-awareness and an ability to see the bigger picture, study skills techniques, such as ‘mind- maps’, all contribute to producing a winning dissertation. Consider what you need to do now by reading chapter 11.