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

here aims to help you follow instead the solid diagonal arrow in Figure 5.1, moving more directly both to meet the content stand ...

do readers really need to know at this point?’) all the way through your text; and then to deliver that, no more and no less. Al ...

a philosopher may end up imitating the sage’s portentous style. Or a commentator on a literary text may come to mimic its manner ...

But with an already pared down and well-organized text the same stance can have different effects. Cut out all unnecessary words ...

work. Making these components more apparent and ensuring that their significance is recognized by you as author and then communi ...

Constructing paragraphs The paragraph is a great art form. I’m very inter- ested in paragraphs and I write paragraphs very, very ...

Read any book-form reprint of a journalist’s collected writings and you will notice that these short paragraph lengths do not wo ...

Some PhD students bridle at this advice, arguing that it would be wrong for them to adjust their writing pattern to accommodate ...

(accurately) into an appropriate school of thought. The paragraph can then set out what that school of thought or intellectual p ...

in several ways. Some thesis authors pick up the passive verb forms and anonymized subjects favoured by government bureaucracies ...

sentences usually reflect either the author writing inauthenti- cally in a pompous style, or trying to do too many things within ...

◆ Does the sentence say exactly what you want? Read it aloud. If anything niggles at the back of your mind, if you have some und ...

No wise man [or woman] will wish to bring more long words into the world. G. K. Chesterton^10 Managing verb forms and tenses wel ...

always wants to look after itself.’ Combining the two, you can first convert an abstraction into a thing, and then endow this ar ...

creative fiction writers with that for non-fiction authors. The sources I recommend are worth consulting, but do also bear in mi ...

amount of time and attention amongst PhD students, especially in the humanities and social sciences. There is no reason that it ...

For instance, it is still very common to find books where an author uses footnotes or endnotes in the main text, but when you tu ...

Choosing a referencing system You will not get to choose a referencing system if the PhD regulations in your university specify ...

in Europe volume alone is usually given. Again the only safe rule is to collect the fullest possible details from the outset. Ma ...

less commonplace word processors (such as Linux or Apple ones). But the integration difficulties have now been solved for the ma ...