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

general rule is to produce a main text that is no more than four-fifths of the permitted length. A formal words target includes ...

which has a lower maximum word limit. In the UK, for instance, this non-doctoral research degree is called an M.Phil. (Master of ...

try and mask an otherwise obvious gap or unsuccessful patch in your research effort. Of course, theses vary a great deal in how ...

to envision clearly, but the idea is that it could be more man- ageable if divided into three parts of five chapters each. This ...

lead-in sections or chapters always require careful management. None the less they often loom much larger to students in terms o ...

than half of your text should be original-ish stuff, reporting primary research that you have undertaken, or making new and dist ...

findings are very rich and require a lot of after-analysis. Note that if you schedule three chapters of lead-in material then yo ...

studies cueing and branding the core is difficult, for you still will not have begun the key stages of your research. But these ...

The contents page typically shows two, three or even four lit- erature review chapters (sometimes even more); followed by a pret ...

ahead to get things finished up somehow. My last chapter contains the little bit of post hocrationalization of my results [or re ...

as unmanageable. Gradually a focus on something resembling the much narrower final topic is reached. At this point there is ofte ...

‘safety first’ appeal for bureaucratic reasons. Students who are made to do a big literature review in their first year almost a ...

creates misleading expectations amongst readers, or imperils the intellectual coherence of their doctorate. Long early sec- tion ...

the thesis as a whole. The whole effect may be that the thesis ends ‘not with a bang, but a whimper’.^6 The opening out model Th ...

There are many advantages in the opening out model. Readers come into contact with your original work much sooner than in the fo ...

you should keep your original literature review down to just a single chapter, ideally one that is framed quite closely around y ...

beginning to appreciate your research contribution. Your core stuff thus comes across much earlier, leaving more space at the en ...

inaccessible explanations of complex phenomena. A variant of this particular contrast in modes of communication (serialistic rat ...

(b)Analytic approach (c)Argumentative approach (a)Descriptive approach (for example,start from door and go clockwise) Good point ...

Bad points (e.g. eclectic furniture, clutter overload) Services (e.g. light, windows, electricals) Hard furnishings (e.g. shelve ...