Religious Studies News

There are some challenges to overcome, however. About fifteen students began as workshop participants in early fall; by early spring only five remained. Some dropped out because of outside work or family commitments, others because they felt they needed to use the time to work on their own theses rather than read others’ work. Another possible reason is related to an issue brought up by a student who did participate the entire year; she found the wide variety of thesis topics problematic: "If a topic was too outside of my area of interest I found it difficult to offer insights because of my lack of knowledge." Notably, by the spring semester the five students who remained in the workshop were all writing on topics in North American religion, and discussions were better focused and intellectually more fully developed and thus more constructive. That these were the five remaining students is perhaps not surprising, since they represent the majority of our students; most write theses on religion in America.

The student who felt she could offer little insight on topics outside her field highlights a critical challenge to the workshop’s effectiveness: the difficulty of incorporating students from the four diverse fields within the department. One solution to this might be for faculty members from each of the department’s four areas to facilitate separate writing workshops for students in their fields, as in many doctoral programs. However, this is not a practical or viable alternative for our program (or likely for other stand-alone MA programs), since some fields have very few, perhaps only one or two, students writing theses. For the workshop to be successful for all students, we must develop ways to communicate across the various fields represented by participants. 

One way to do this would be to focus workshop discussions less on a chapter’s or prospectus’s topical content and more on how it is structured and the writing process itself. Some of the most valuable feedback students offered and received concerned advice about writing itself, such as transitions within chapters or from chapter to chapter. In preparation for workshop discussions, participants might approach each chapter or prospectus with a basic set of questions in mind, such as:

• What is the thesis of the piece and how might it be reformulated for more clarity and accuracy?
• Are the arguments well constructed?
• What evidence do they marshal?
• Do they track a logical development?
• How might they be more persuasively presented?
• What are the author’s conclusions?
• Do they follow from the arguments and evidence presented?
• How might they be more thoroughly and clearly articulated?

One advantage to including participants from different fields is that students can receive feedback about the accessibility of their writing. Rather than assuming that readers have a background in the author’s topic and will understand specialized terminology and theoretical models and their application, for example, authors learn which areas of the thesis are not easily grasped by nonspecialists and receive guidance on how to make them more accessible. Thinking about these issues ahead of time and then dealing with them in the group would focus attention on elements of structure and process that participants can apply to their own research and writing.

In conclusion, as all who advise Master’s theses know, doing it well demands a great deal of time and energy of us, as well as of our students. Finding creative ways to reconfigure the process, making it more efficient practically and less stressful psychologically, is a current goal of my department. Each year, the university selects one thesis from among its forty-five Master’s programs to receive the University Distinguished Thesis Award; in the past eight years, three religious studies theses have won the award. Hopefully, the strategies we have introduced, including establishing the writing workshop, will contribute to the increased success of our students completing their theses within two or at most three years — theses that will continue to be among the best produced at Missouri State University.