My newsletter for October 10 will be on "Six Steps to an Original Contribution." Of course, the way to be original is to think creatively. In Barbara Lovitts' new book Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation , she clarifies what the 270 faculty members who took part in her focus groups indicated went into an original contribution. So what is an original contribution? The description starts out: "Something that has not been done, found, known, proved, said, or seen before that results from:" I won't write out the rest of her description -- the book is worth reading in its entirety, plus I don't have permission! But I want to note the actions that cause the "something new" to be created: Asking or identifying Applying Developing Inventing Creating Finding Coming up with Producing Combining Synthesizing Clearly these are all actions that demand creativity. Let's assume that you are trying to
Academiblog... Write your dissertation, get a job, get tenure.