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

(Brent) #1

Writing Clearly: Style and


Referencing Issues


Poorer writers have fewer readers.
Robert J. Sternberg^1

A


n author with a well-organized piece of text must still pass
two further hurdles before gaining credibility or approval
in academic professional circles. The first is a test of style. Does
the author communicate fluently, convincingly and appeal-
ingly in the professional manner appropriate for her discipline?
Quite where success or failure should be determined here is
difficult to specify in any general way. Evaluations of good or
bad writing style are notoriously subjective. Much ink has been
spilt on good style for novelists and creative writers (see Further
Readingon p. 287 for some style manuals). But this literature
offers little help to authors of doctoral theses or other large pro-
fessional bits of text, like academic books. However, it is still
possible to pull together some generally useful advice about
conflicting style pressures, and some sensible ways of proceed-
ing at a paragraph-by-paragraph, or sentence-by-sentence level,
as I try to do in the first part of this chapter.
The second hurdle is a test of scholarship, more important
perhaps in a PhD thesis than in any other piece of academic
writing. Does the author acknowledge sources for her argu-
ments or evidence? Does she chart her intellectual influences
comprehensively and in an appropriate format? Obtrusive
referencing is often one of the most obvious hallmarks of
academic text, something that sets it apart from everything
else. As a result PhD students often overdo referencing, and

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