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

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And if you wheel an elaborate theoretical apparatus onstage at
great length, or delineate a typology, or introduce your own
neologisms – then readers will expect that these elements will
justify themselves, will do useful work or create new insights or
predictions that could not have materialized without them. How
your text uses terminology, the concepts and vocabulary it
deploys, and the style cues that you signal as author – all these will
be used by readers to try and classify you and your text, to under-
stand where you are coming from, where your scholarly tribal
affiliations really lie. If these cues do not fit with your self-classifi-
cation in the professional scene, or what you later say and do,
then readers will receive incompatible messages – and code them
as confused authorial purposes. Diagrams, charts and tables are
also key attention points. Along with headings these are the items
that readers will most quickly identify on a first scan through a
piece of text. And like headings these attention points should ide-
ally be independently understandable, because readers will com-
monly try to make sense of what they say on a first scan, without
ploughing into accompanying text in detail (see Chapter 7 below).
It is unrealistic for authors to respond to these points by
deploring the laziness or the lack of application or disorderli-
ness of readers, their inability to unwrap your text in the same
sequence that you have written it. And it would be naïve to
imagine that examiners, however conscientious, will behave in
a radically different manner. None of us read academic work
like a good novel, ploughing through in one straight line from
A to Z. Educated, professional audiences do not suspend disbe-
lief. From the word go, from the first encounter with your argu-
ments, academic readers will get on with criticizing and
categorizing your text, trying to place you as an author, trying
to find short-cuts to unravel your intent, determined to econo-
mize on the time they spend grappling with your thought. And
they are right to do so, for this is a rational approach to allo-
cating scarce resources of time and attention.
The most crucial parts of a chapter for generating readers’
expectations, for setting up mental frameworks, for getting read-
ers off on the right foot or the wrong foot, are the beginnings and
ends of chapters and of sections. And, of course, these are also
usually the most difficult passages to write. So here you can ease
your difficulties a good deal by having a well-defined checklist or
repertoire of things to include and strategies to try. I review: key


90 ◆AUTHORING A PHD

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