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How to Write a Great Dissertation Title
What’s in a name? When it’s the title of your dissertation, everything. Your dissertation title will be a permanent fixture on your CV throughout your career, so it’s a good idea to invest time and thought into it. There are many considerations when it comes to crafting a dissertation title, as well as missteps you’ll want to avoid. A solid dissertation title is a testament to your vision (and, likely, revision), and every scholar wants to get it right.
Before deciding on a dissertation title, you’ll want to consult your dissertation advisor –and possibly members of your dissertation committee –to make sure your proposed title meets the conventions and word limitations of your department and academic discipline. It wouldn’t hurt to look at the titles of dissertations written by recent graduates of your program for some successful examples.
These are some commonly asked questions about dissertation titles:
- How do I title my dissertation?
- Why does the title of my dissertation matter?
- What should I keep in mind when titling my dissertation?
- What should I avoid when titling my dissertation?
How Do I Title My Dissertation?
When it comes to dissertation titles, clarity is the name of the game. The title of your dissertation should assert both the topic and the purpose of your research study as clearly and succinctly as possible. At a glance, any reader who sees the title of your dissertation should be able to discern the content within.
Dissertation titles are not designed to appeal to a broad audience, but rather scholars with related expertise. Whether your dissertation focuses on a particular enzyme or an obscure law or a trading route in a country that no longer exists, make the purpose of your research apparent in your dissertation title. Test drive a few different titles until you write one that feels like a good fit.
Why Does My Dissertation Title Matter?
While the title of your dissertation stays with you for your entire career, it’s of particular importance in the first few years after you earn your degree. For many scholars, their first post-graduate publications are either directly related to their dissertation or stem from research conducted as part of the dissertation project.
Though the research, writing, and defense of your dissertation project may be over, you’ll likely keep talking about this research long after your degree is conferred. Your dissertation is basically the first book in the canon of scholarship you’ll complete over the course of your career. Having a good dissertation title and a succinct overview of your early research will be essential tools moving forward.
Titling Your Dissertation
There are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind when crafting your dissertation title:
- Keep it simple. Yes, your dissertation is a long, complex document filled with nuance and complicated ideas. Though it’s difficult, choose a title that reflects these concepts with clarity and simplicity.
- Say it out loud. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this. Once your dissertation is completed, you’ll have to be prepared to talk about it on conference panels, in job interviews, and to colleagues in the field. Your future self will thank you for avoiding tongue twisters. Craft a dissertation title that’s easy to pronounce and won’t trip you up.
- Do your homework. It never hurts to do a little market research when searching for your dissertation title. Be on the lookout for titles that are similar to the ones you’re workshopping. When you’re trying to stand out in your field, it helps to have a dissertation title that is as unique and original as possible.
Dissertation Titles to Avoid
These are some suggestions for landmines you’ll want to avoid when titling your dissertation:
- Is my dissertation title mysterious?
- Is my dissertation title complicated?
- Is my dissertation title clever?
Mysterious dissertation titles serve no purpose
Occasionally, I’ll be working with a graduate student struggling to craft a dissertation title because they’re afraid of “giving away” the key to their dissertation. I get it. We live in an age of spoiler alerts, and a dissertation title like “Poor Attendance Impedes Academic Success” doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination about the content within.
Keep in mind that, as a genre, dissertation titles privilege function over style. Like a newspaper headline, a dissertation title is designed to convey necessary information with brevity and clarity. If it helps, envision your dissertation title above the fold of your favorite newspaper and deliver “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Complicated dissertation titles are trouble
This is something of a paradox, because, generally speaking, there is nothing academia appreciates more than a long and winding title. A quick glance at any conference program will reveal miles of titles punctuated with quotations, colons, semi-colons, and even emojis. A dissertation title, however, adheres to a rather more staid academic tradition.
As a graduate student, I remember this being a particularly bitter pill to swallow. I love a good conference paper title, and I think our instinct as academics is to be as thorough as possible when representing our work. Though these convoluted darlings are beloved, unfortunately they are too distracting for the serious business of a dissertation title.
Clever dissertation titles are no good, either
If a long paper title is an academic’s first love, then a witty paper title is nothing short of their soulmate. Scholars everywhere use conference paper titles and academic journal articles as open-mic venues for wry observations and witty rejoinders in a tradition that dates back centuries. There is a lot of love in academia for funny, interesting, and scandalous titles–just not in your dissertation.
The good news is, you can save your brilliant title for a future presentation or publication. My dissertation title, “Literary Tourism in the South,” was clear, reasonable, and stone cold sober. My first peer-reviewed article, however, came from an excited, newly-minted Ph.D. and it was ready to party: “Tourist Trap: Re-Branding History and the Commodification of the South in Literary Tourism in Mississippi.” The moral of the story: keep your fun titles in your back pocket; you’ll get to use them soon enough.
Your title must be in alignment with the rest of your paper
A final point to keep in mind is that your dissertation title should be “in alignment” with your problem statement, purpose statement , and research questions. This means that all of those sentences are saying essentially the same thing–oftentimes with variations on the same wording.
For example, if your Problem Statement is “The specific problem is that the effect of poor school attendance on academic success is unknown,” and your Purpose Statement is, “The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between attendance and academic success in a public school in rural Montana,” your title could be something like, “Poor Attendance Impedes Academic Success” (assuming that’s what your research indicates).
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Courtney Watson, Ph.D.
Courtney Watson, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English at Radford University Carilion, in Roanoke, Virginia. Her areas of expertise include undergraduate and graduate curriculum development for writing courses in the health sciences and American literature with a focus on literary travel, tourism, and heritage economies. Her writing and academic scholarship has been widely published in places that include Studies in American Culture , Dialogue , and The Virginia Quarterly Review . Her research on the integration of humanities into STEM education will be published by Routledge in an upcoming collection. Dr. Watson has also been nominated by the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Rising Star Award, and she is a past winner of the National Society of Arts & Letters Regional Short Story Prize, as well as institutional awards for scholarly research and excellence in teaching. Throughout her career in higher education, Dr. Watson has served in faculty governance and administration as a frequent committee chair and program chair. As a higher education consultant, she has served as a subject matter expert, an evaluator, and a contributor to white papers exploring program development, enrollment research, and educational mergers and acquisitions.
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