Authoring a PhD Thesis How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Dissertation by Patrick Dunleavy

need to develop authoring skills will vary somewhat across each of these models, as well as across different humanities and soci ...

how to become a professional author is somewhat more a matter of sitting in repeated research seminars, interacting with lots of ...

reliance on their most sympathetic supervisor. Students are also usually better covered for absences by one of their supervisors ...

complete, and they conduct the ‘dissertation defence’, or final oral examination (see Chapter 8). Normally a dissertation can- n ...

For students doing a papers model dissertation or thesis, Chapter 2 here (about the macro-structure of a thesis as a whole) is n ...

be straightforward. Instead you may find yourself under considerable pressure from other project and course work on tight deadli ...

covers. So the simplest reason why it is important to think systematically about how to author a doctorate is that produc- ing t ...

goes into a library and over the next two decades slowly bends a shelf. A thesis that is never published in whole or in part may ...

Like other forms of mild paranoia, research students’ defen- sive mind-set bears little relation to the facts. Rational PhD supe ...

thought. Each of these outcomes makes readers worry: perhaps the author does not know what she thinks, does not under- stand the ...

positions. Charles Caleb Colton observed wryly: ‘Professors in every branch of knowledge prefer their own theories to the truth; ...

supervisors or advisers and in terms of your own priorities. But the craft skills of authoring are an important aspect of your r ...

Envisioning the Thesis as a Whole In dreams begin responsibility. W. B. Yeats^1 W hat is your dissertation about? And what contr ...

the purpose of letting us know that their authors knew something. Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe^2 At the most fundamental level an ...

show that the question is a serious one and a legitimate focus for academic enquiry, which is to say that it must relate to the ...

A closely related syndrome is the gap-filling thesis, designed solely to cover an uninhabited niche in the literature rather tha ...

reasons. Most doctoral students experience some form of mid- term slump in their morale, one or more periods when they lose conf ...

hope to achieve, the chances are very high that in a very fun- damental way you do not yet understand your thesis topic. You def ...

Father Brown laid down his cigar and said carefully, ‘It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the p ...

In a sense this exercise is like turning to the answer pages at the back of a maths textbook before you work out how to derive t ...