go forward a certain distance on your own, after which you
need to get some radically different views of what you are say-
ing in order to make progress. Your supervisors or advisers are
the first port of call. One of their primary roles is to look at and
comment on your formal written text. You need to make sure
that they give you effective feedback on your work. Normally
advisers are reassured and even grateful when they get chapters
to look at. It is not easy for them to operate solely at an oral level
in someone else’s research topic. They need your help in the
form of a regular sequence of chapters in order to offer useful
advice and commentary. But supervisors are also very variable
in what they say, for various reasons. Some are famously diffi-
dent or difficult people, like the Oxford philosopher whose
three-word written comment on a student’s painfully produced
12,000-word chapter was: ‘I suppose so’. Different supervisors
also follow different strategies. Some will comment in vigorous
detail on early drafts, where others deliberately stand back for
fear of being too critical of your nascent ideas. Some very well
organized supervisors put their effort in very early on in your
text production process, demanding that you get a near-perfect
chapter draft to stockpile before you can move on to another
chapter. In this perspective, once you have reached the right
‘doctoral’ level in one chapter, it will become easier for you to
deliver subsequent chapters to the same standard. Other advis-
ers (like me) feel that it is only important for you to get a
broadly acceptable chapter draft before moving on, lest you
drag out early writing with perfectionist anxieties and erode
your later research and authoring time. In this perspective,
going from a first full draft of the thesis to a final version of the
text will normally produce so many changes that overwriting
early chapters, before the neighbouring chapters are written,
will too frequently be wasted or redundant effort. The detailed
stylistic and argumentative choices you make in your first two
years’ work are likely to be extensively overturned by more
mature insights and by the alterations inherent in crafting the
thesis into an integrated whole.
Beginning to go public should take other forms than just
showing material to your supervisor, however. Presenting a
chapter in a ‘friendly’ public forum such as a departmental
graduate seminar can be very helpful, even if the audience does
140 ◆AUTHORING A PHD