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

concept on it, before embarking on the long job of chiselling out a finished piece. Doing original work All good things which ex ...

topic is whether their work will fit the normal ‘original work’ requirement. All good universities in either the classical or th ...

people cannot be clones of their supervisors, nor even just walk in their footsteps. Often this realization dawns on students qu ...

question. And it can accentuate an inability to cut down or personalize your thesis topic. Perverse effects here are often serio ...

limited time frame. A speedy but comprehensive review of pre- vious work on your topic is especially easy now that Web sys- tems ...

To have learned anything from the dead’. That statement – subject to appeal – Means: ‘I’m a self-made imbecile’. Johanne Wolfgan ...

The nature of academic debates is such that complete closure of many controversies is unlikely. More than four centuries ago Bla ...

learning in the library, and by so many other people seemingly adept at the task, not all the influences to which you are expose ...

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. George Bernard Shaw^21 I’m not afraid of fai ...

marginalize jottings or possibilities on the ideas sheet which are not really relevant, or which will not work as you wish. (But ...

and recycling. Jotting things down as notes in a regularly maintained or filed notebook, or in a well-saved and cumula- tive fil ...

looking for it. This pattern may reflect your subconscious helping out by processing difficult issues in the background over lon ...

the thesis question in close sync with your research answers and appropriately managing readers’ expectations. Your theoretical ...

associated with different elements of their work. Perhaps they also compress the time-scales involved. Creativity always comes a ...

PhD by making all students do only ‘manageable’ topics within very tight time limits. Experience takes more away than it adds: y ...

My strength lies solely in my tenacity. Louis Pasteur^38 Creativity takes time. T. Z. Tardif and Robert Sternberg^39 It may help ...

connected more strongly? Are they consistent, or conflicting, or simply at a tangent from each other? If they seem inconsistent, ...

3 Planning an Integrated Thesis: the Macro-Structure The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. Vladimir Nabokov^1 A ny large ...

when chapters 1 to 4 are already pretty well defined. Generally speaking, writing chapter 5 when all you have to look at are dis ...

material to write and just ponder for a bit how much, what kind, in what order. A ‘big book’ thesis is a particularly fraught co ...