This absolutely worked for me with mine, to get the initial movement going. I think my paper, as a written document, was nearly incomprehensible. The publication I turned it into was even more so, but I got a peer reviewed pub out of it.

My master’s defense was 2.5 hours long. When I walked out, my brain was mush after essentially spending an hour doing some kind of verbal judo sidestepping questions i didn’t know the answer to by making them into questions i could answer.

It wasn’t until they all conferred without me and then came out to tell me I passed, my research was interesting, and i was entertaining that i realized the process is just often pointlessly demoralizing and the format is basically there to see if you can do research and generate the two most common outputs (a scientific paper + a talk with discussion) on a topic of your choosing with limited guidance for an audience of pedants. i.e. can you be a self-starting communicator in a profession full of petty snobs and jackals?