How to Prepare for PhD Literature Programs

It takes a lot of hard work, courage, commitment and devotion to earn a PhD degree in Literature. You have to work on your research (thesis or dissertation) for around three to five years after completing your graduate degree. Furthermore, you will have to orally defend your work in front of a panel to get your PhD degree. In order to remain focussed for your PhD programme, you have to follow few things which have been discussed here.

Instructions

  • 1

    You have to maintain a very good academic record. First, earn good grades in your high school. Even though, you can study any subjects during your high school, however, it is highly recommended for you to study English and history.

  • 2

    After completing your high school, you must enrol yourself in a good college or university for undergraduate degree. You will have to take SAT in order to get admission in a university. Therefore, you must score well in SAT to be able to make your way into a good university to complete your bachelor’s degree. SAT is one of the toughest standardised tests which measures an individual’s reasoning, verbal and quantitative abilities. Therefore, you should prepare well for the test to get competitive score in it.

  • 3

    You should study English, communications, journalism or any other interdisciplinary courses during your undergraduate programme. Furthermore, you can improve your writing abilities by taking technical writing courses which can help you a lot in making your position stronger for PhD programme.

  • 4

    After completing your bachelor’s degree, you will have to take GRE (Graduate Record Exam) to be eligible for admission in a university for PhD Literature programme. GRE Literature will test your abilities in literature history, grammar and literary theory. You will have to improve your grammar first which you can do by revising your concepts from books. You have to be able to identify grammatical errors in a sentence efficiently. If you don’t want to study from a book, you can simply take lessons online as there are many websites which can assist you in improving your grammar.

  • 5

    It is really important for you to learn literary terms which will help you in identifying the errors quickly. You can use "A Glossary of Literary Terms" by M.H. Abrams to discover and learn literary terms.

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