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

become very long-winded and hard to organize mentally. These problems may perhaps lead you to think that I am setting up a straw ...

In lower level university studies with exams as a key assessment method, and even for taught courses at PhD level, adopting a de ...

Such theses can often seem to be structured by no clear internal or intellectual pattern of organization. Analytic explanations ...

storyline into a number of clear periods. The characteristics of each period can then be treated more synoptically. The crucial ...

They often seem restrictive for new authors who are convinced of the uniqueness of their individual approach. But it is per- fec ...

in one interpretation or intellectual position and express them coherently. Next you assemble an alternative or opposed inter- p ...

especially those who have carried out overextended literature searches, somehow lapse into thinking that at doctoral level they ...

three approaches above. There are four pairs of possible combinations: ◆analytic plus argumentative ◆argumentative plus analytic ...

primary dimension is the analytic one, and the argumenta- tive dimension is secondary. Exploiting the two-dimensional space of a ...

Conclusions These three cuts on the macro-structure of your thesis each matter a great deal. Putting them together often entails ...

76 Organizing a Chapter or Paper: the Micro-Structure George said: ‘You know we are on the wrong track altogether. We must not t ...

A chapter of 10,000 words is impossible for you to hold in your head as an author unless it can be split into shorter component ...

size and format that makes them stand out clearly from the sur- rounding text; and by locating them prominently, for instance on ...

than 30 words. Run on smaller quotations in the text within single quotation marks, ‘like this’.) In addition to its component m ...

(i) The simplest way of disorganizing a chapter is to under- organizeit, perhaps including headings but only fake ones that do n ...

12 sections, and have three or four second-order subheadings in each section, plus a scattering of third-order subheads as well, ...

In both these examples the number sequence is overdone and looks ugly and hard to follow. Extending it to fourth-order subheadin ...

(like 3.1.2.3 or 3.2.3.2.3) for smaller subsections, which will tend to encourage you to use overfragmented modes of exposi- tio ...

you. Instead its role is to help your planning and your orien- tation thinking by displaying a synoptic view of how your thesis ...

readers is mainly preoccupied with soap opera stars, footballers and the nude pin-up girls on page 3 of the paper. None the less ...