a fully integrated thesis, unified by a clear intellectual direction
and looking like an ‘industrial standard’ product, with all the
necessary bits present and working. The second aspect is less
visible but still important, and involves formally submitting the
thesis for examination. The final challenge is for you to be pre-
pared in most cases for a ‘viva’ or oral examination.
From a first full draft to your final text
The last thing one settles in writing a book is what
to put in first.
Blaise Pascal^3The process of producing and banking chapter drafts is always
a slightly inconclusive one, because what you put in a subse-
quently written chapter may always have implications for
already settled text. Later text may not live up to promises
made early on, requiring an important change of tone. Or it
may cut across the themes and structure of what has already
been written so as to create the need for revisions and realloca-
tion of materials between chapters. In the worst cases later text
may contradict earlier chapters, showing no relationship where
you expected to see one, or suggesting a quite different story-
line or interpretation. Just as current developments often pro-
duce a change in how we see established historical events, you
can never be sure that a chapter banked early on will not need
radical alterations at a later stage.
So it is a magic moment when you can for the first time
spread out all your chapters on the floor and physically hold
and review all the elements of the thesis as a whole. From here
on your task should be consolidation, rather than producing
new elements to add into the picture. Only in very unlucky cir-
cumstances will reviewing the chapter first drafts as a whole
lead you to conclude that the thesis is not in fact complete and
you must go back to primary research to fill a major hole in the
analysis. This problem is most likely to occur if your chapter
drafts taken together greatly under-shoot the thesis word norm
(80,000 words for a ‘big book’ thesis, and perhaps 60,000 for a
papers model dissertation). Otherwise a genuinely complete
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