Identify your topic and research questions. Your topic can come from a variety of sources: your own interests, your adviser's suggestion or a gap in previous research. Develop your research questions that are answerable in the time frame you intend to devote to writing your dissertation. For example, if you want to finish your dissertation in a year, do not choose a question or questions that will take considerably longer than that to answer.
Read the literature that exists on your topic. You must locate and read the prior research that has already been conducted on your subject. Sort them into piles: "good," "bad" and "other." Use the ones primarily from your good pile: those that are methodologically sound and rigorously executed.
Write an outline of your proposal. Draft a skeleton, indicating what you will cover and when. For instance, who is your audience? Will you start your proposal with an anecdote or a statistical fact? What will your sub-topics be, based on your literature review? Your outline will provide a rough sketch to answer these kinds of questions
Write the first chapter, your introduction. Introduce your topic to your audience. Make the first sentence and paragraph attention-grabbing. Set up your readers to take a trip through your dissertation, and clearly describe where you are taking them. Thoroughly explore your subject, how you arrived at it, why it is important and its limitations.
Write the second chapter, your literature review. Here, you will write about what you discovered during the reading phase in Step 2. Your review should be critical -- do not merely report what others have already said. Rather, write a "conversation," inserting your own voice where appropriate. What did you think about what Researcher A said about your topic. Was it sound? Based on what evidence?
Write your third chapter, the methodology. This is perhaps the most important part of your proposal. It is here where you describe how you intend to conduct your research, analyze the resulting data and write up your findings. Include a thorough description of the kind of research you will undertake (qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods) and its many components, including participant selection criteria, a description of the observation setting, sample size, data collection methods, data analysis methods and a conceptual framework. Be very clear. If you cannot articulate what you will be attempting to do, you will not make it past this stage in the dissertation process.
Meet frequently with your dissertation chair, or submit your work to him for feedback. After you've written a draft of each chapter, send it to your chair for review. Hopefully, he will read it and give you substantive, constructive criticism on your content, identifying areas that need expansion, deletion or clarification.
Make the revisions you chair suggests. Make any and all changes your chair gives you an opinion on, even if it comes across as only a suggestion. When you've made those revisions, send the manuscript back to your chair. Continue this process until there is no additional feedback from him.