Dr CHANG Wei-ling, Department of Chinese Culture

Experiences of Writing Dissertation and Book Publication. Experiences of Writing Dissertation and Book Publication (學位論文寫作與出版經驗分享). History Department, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, 4 August 2022.

Abstract
I was invited to attend this Symposium to share my experiences of how to revise my dissertation and then publish it as a monograph. In my remarks, I pointed out that the assumed readers of a dissertation and a monograph are different. While the readers of a dissertation are scholars in our fields, the readers of a monograph should be more general, including undergraduate students who are interested in the topics but with little related knowledge. Therefore, when composing a monograph, we should assume that we are experts who are happy to guild our readers to acquire new knowledge. To achieve this purpose, we develop very different strategies between writing dissertations and monographs. For example, dissertations can include a detailed discussion about established studies, but a monograph only includes scholarship with which the author wishes to engage. Second, the title and the chapter titles of a dissertation can be professional, but the titles of monographs should be more understandable and attractive. Through this experience sharing, my audience can understand that writing a dissertation and writing a monograph are two different stages, and each stage trains us to become more mature scholars.