with a 100,000 limit. The formal limit is inclusive of everything
except the bibliography, so your notes, appendices, preface,
acknowledgements and so on must all be able to fit within the
remaining fifth of the word limit. It is very common for people
who thought that they were comfortably inside the word limit to
find out that they have run over not just the four-fifths rule, but
even the formal thesis limit by 10 to 20 per cent. Often the prob-
lem occurs because they are repeating similar material at different
places in different chapters, or they are overdoing the level of
detail that readers need to know. When you are pressing to reach
closure on the thesis this can be a depressing realization to make,
since it may mean that you must spend extra weeks or even
months just cutting away text which took you so long to write in
the first place. But bear in mind Robert Browning’s famous dic-
tum: ‘Less is more’.^4 Any text can be fairly painlessly cut by
around 10 per cent, and this operation almost always improves
its overall look and feel, sometimes out of all recognition.
Considered as a single problem of cutting, say, 12,000 words from
the entire thesis, this order of cuts will always seem daunting. But
try thinking about it instead as cutting 30 out of 330 words on
each page of your A4 typescript, which may be easier to do. If you
have greatly overwritten, by more than 10 per cent, then you will
almost certainly have to find a bulk cut by losing one of the chap-
ters, appendices or other sections. If you can, try to make more
cuts in the lead-in chapters and to safeguard the thesis core. If you
are over your limit, bear in mind that you can now very easily put
data and other bulky materials on a CD bound in to the covers of
your thesis, instead of having to get them printed up as text. Most
university regulations about length still assume paper-only theses,
and so as yet say nothing about CDs.
Normally the closing months and weeks of writing up make a
surprising amount of difference to PhD theses. You may find
yourself moving materials that have been stuck in a given
sequence for two or three years into radically different configu-
rations. You may drop concepts that have long been important
in your research in favour of new themes, of which you were
only dimly aware before you could look at your first draft as a
whole. This burst of rethinking and remodelling is quite usual
and predictable. It does not show (as many students worry) that
208 ◆AUTHORING A PHD