always wants to look after itself.’ Combining the two, you can
first convert an abstraction into a thing, and then endow this
artificial agent with humanlike qualities, as in: ‘The hurt done
to society causes it to seek retribution.’ Each of these conceptual
slips creates a broad pathway to writing absurd propositions.
A closely related problem concerns the handling of
collectivities. Academics should know better than to use general-
izing stereotypes. But in fact when discussing the behaviour of
groups of people they often write in a style using the ‘archetypal
singular’. Here a statement is made about the behaviour of a
mythical archetype who somehow stands for all the people
occupying a certain role or having certain characteristics. For
instance: ‘The bureaucrat is interested primarily in achieving a
quiet life and a comfortable sinecure, whereas the politician seeks
only to be re-elected.’ Or: ‘The writer’s lot is not a happy one.’
The problem here is that any statement using an archetypal sin-
gular is only true if everyonein that role or with that characteris-
tic behaves in the way cited, a claim that is almost always bound
to be wrong and is additionally never provable. Some bureaucrats
are no doubt interested in slacking, but we could never establish
thatallare, just as some writers will be happy and others miser-
able. Any author who uses the archetypal singular, in virtually
any context, will immediately degrade her intellectual grip on
whatever she is discussing, debasing her reasoning to a sub-
professional level and affecting adversely the accuracy of her text.
When discussing collective entities use plural forms of phrasing,
such as: ‘Politicians are interested only in re-election.’ The great
virtue of the plural form is that as soon as you read this sentence,
a question will occur to you: Do I mean allpoliticians,most
politicians,somepoliticians, or normalpoliticians? And then you
might further ask: What evidence or other argumentative token
can I offer to corroborate my claim? In this way you might end
up with worthwhile empirical propositions that positively build
your doctorate – whereas any sentence including an archetypal
singular can only be a corrosive liability.
A miscellany of other minor but common errors in theses are
discussed in the style guide books listed in Further Reading
on p. 289. Be careful in using other well-known style guides
that are now quite old: they tend to be more tolerant of com-
plex grammatical forms and overlong sentences than current
professional standards. And they often mix up advice for
WRITING CLEARLY◆ 119