A note from Jo: I saw a great Twitter thread by Allison Van Deventer that is related to a book she and Katelyn Knox have coming out in November: The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook.

She agreed to write a blog post (with her co-author Katelyn E. Knox) based on that Twitter thread for November.

Recently we were chatting with a humanities scholar in her first year on the tenure track…

“I know my dissertation needs rethinking,” she said. “It probably needs to be restructured. I’m up to my ears in teaching responsibilities until April. I’d like to do a little bit of work on it every week, just to keep it at the forefront of my mind. But without huge blocks of time, what can I do?”

If you’re in a similar spot—eager to do big-picture thinking about a draft manuscript, but unsure how to do it while pressed for time—then you’re facing a common challenge.

Whether you’re working on a book manuscript or a journal article, you likely know you should do more than just tinker with the first sentence and move on to the next.

In this post, we’re going to offer you a different place to start: with what we call your organizing principle. We will talk about book manuscripts for now, but we’ll come back to journal articles at the end of the post.

Why is it important to name and review your organizing principle?

As we like to say, a book’s structure is part of its argument. The way your book is organized makes certain questions—and consequently certain claims—more salient than others. Although you may never have thought about your book in this way, it’s worth defining and probing your organizing principle to assess whether the structure you’ve chosen is well-suited to the argument you want to make.

In what follows, we’ll explain what to do. We walk you through the exercises in much more detail in our new book, The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Managing Your Book Manuscript (UChicago Press, 2023).

What is the Organizing Principle… and some examples

In writing a book, the organizing principle describes what changes from chapter to chapter. You can identify it by completing the sentence:

Each chapter discusses a different ________.

EXAMPLE: In Lucy Swanson’s book The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023), for instance, each chapter discusses a different zombie avatar: the zombie slave, the zombie as a figure of mental illness, the zombie horde, the popular zombie. In other books, each chapter discusses a different work (novel, film, etc.), a different person or group, a different historical period, or a different geographical location. Or maybe the organizing principle is “type of ____.”

EXAMPLE: Maybe you’re writing a book about a concept in Latin American cinema that you call “slant”. In this case,  each chapter might be about a different type of slant: temporal slant, aesthetic slant, feminist slant, etc. If your book is arguing that local political activism is a form of care work, each chapter might consider a different aspect of care work, showing how local political activism operates in that way.

With these examples in mind, we recommend that you take a work session or two to pinpoint your book’s organizing principle. More examples and some pre-formatted tables can be found in a free download of Chapter 2 of The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook, which walks you through this process in much more detail.

Struggling to find your organizing principle?

As you find your organizing principle, you’ll likely have questions. Here are two of the most common.

1. Is it bad to have a simple organizing principle like ‘author’, ‘work’, or ‘site’? It’s fine to have a simple organizing principle! Many books build compelling arguments via chapters whose organizing principle is very straightforward.
2. Is it OK to have two organizing principles? For instance, in my book, each chapter explores a different mode of ecocriticism and also a different region. Yes! It’s common for books to have multiple organizing principles. The key is to decide which is the *primary* organizing principle, the one that’s most likely to show up in your chapter titles.If you think your book has secondary organizing principles, take note of them for later.

How does your organizing principle work for your book?

EXAMPLE: Consider the book Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford UP, 2022) by Aynne Kokas, about how data is moved across borders for commercial and political gain. Kokas could have structured this book in any number of ways, and each structure would naturally foreground a different type of argument.

She could have focused each chapter on a different company, which would support an argument about how commercial entities are involved in or affected by data trafficking. Or she could have highlighted a different country or region in each chapter, which would allow her to show how data trafficking plays out differently in different geopolitical contexts. Instead, she wanted to emphasize the claim that data trafficking is a significant threat.

Accordingly, after two chapters that lay out the concept and mechanism of data trafficking, she discusses a different domain of society in each chapter, explaining how data trafficking poses a different threat in each one. Together, the chapters paint a thorough and convincing picture of the threat posed by data trafficking.

Take your time to reflect.

Take one or more work sessions to reflect on your own organizing principle.

If your current primary organizing principle is chronological—that is, each chapter discusses a different historical period—are you planning to make an argument about change over time? If not, is there a different organizing principle that points to the argument you want to make?

Jot notes to yourself about what effect different organizing principles would have on your reader’s experience of the book.

Consider, too, how much time you have to complete the book. Sometimes adopting a new organizing principle is just a matter of changing the way you title and frame your chapters, but sometimes it means redistributing your evidence and analysis across a new set of chapters. If you need a book for tenure, be realistic about what you can accomplish.

After you reflect on your current organizing principle, brainstorm other possible organizing principles, and settle on a provisional primary organizing principle, you’ll be ready to make another key move: uncovering the question your organizing principle implies.

Think back to Lucy Swanson’s book about zombie fiction. Her organizing principle is “zombie avatars,” and it suggests the following question: “Through which avatars is the zombie represented in contemporary French Caribbean fiction?”

Or consider the data trafficking book. Its organizing principle is “domains of society” (social media, gaming, health, etc.), and its associated question could be: “How does data trafficking pose a threat in various domains of society?”

Turning your organizing principle into a question

Set aside another work session to turn your own organizing principle into a question.

Choose your question word carefully: which? what? how? why? In our experience, most of these questions begin with “which” or “how.” If you can, write down several questions and consider which one best describes what you want your book to do. It won’t describe everything your book is doing, but it should get at a core piece.

There are more examples of the relationship between your book’s question and its organizing principle in the free, downloadable copy of Chapter 2 of The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook!

To test whether the question works for your book, you can think about whether and how each of your chapters answers it. Ask yourself: Do the chapter answers capture something essential about your book?

• How does Chapter 1 answer the question?
• How does Chapter 2 answer it?
• Chapter 3?

For this exercise, you can leave out the introduction, the conclusion, and any background or conceptual chapters.

If you’re wavering between two organizing principles, this question-and-answer exercise can be revealing. Try it with each organizing principle and reflect on which set of answers you’re best equipped to support with evidence.

Which question/answer set does the best job of setting up the main intervention you want to make in your field?

Organizing beyond books

As a concept, the organizing principle has value for projects at scales other than books. If you’re writing a journal article, for instance, you can ask yourself what organizing principle underlies your sections. Not all articles have a clear organizing principle, and not every article needs one.

But if you’re wrestling with a draft, articulating an underlying logic can help you achieve a sense of progression in the argument, inspire stronger transitions, and expose tangents.

The same is true if you’re writing a book chapter. At times this approach might even help you impose order on paragraphs within a section.

The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Managing Your Book Manuscript (UChicago Press, 2023) goes into much more detail about the question/answer exercise, which is a powerful tool for pinpointing your argument and tracking its development across the chapters.

Despite the title, the workbook is suitable for anyone who’s writing a scholarly book in the humanities or qualitative social sciences, even if the book isn’t based on a dissertation. In the workbook, you’ll find manageable exercises designed to fit into a busy life—paced so that it’s realistic for most people to go through one chapter per week. If you’ve done the work we’ve described here, then you have a head start: you’ve already completed the core parts of Chapters 2 and 3!

And if you want to find more resources or get in touch, you can always find us at: https://go.dissertationtobook.com.

Related Posts & Links:

The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Managing Your Book Manuscript (UChicago Press, 2023) by Allison Van Deventer and Katelyn E. Knox

Chapter 2 sample of The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook by Allison Van Deventer and Katelyn E. Knox

The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) by Lucy Swanson

Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford UP, 2022) by Aynne Kokas

Why are you writing this book? by Jo Van Every

What to do about a stalled book project by Jo Van Every

You don’t have to find a “gap” in the literature by Jo Van Every

This post was originally sent to the newsletter on November 17. Lightly edited for republishing here.