218 ◆AUTHORING A PHD
members of the department, although there will always be at
least one external examiner whom the student may not know.
But most of the public audience at these occasions is actually
made up of the student’s friends and proud relations. They can
safely attend because the whole examining committee again
normally reaches agreement in private that the doctorate is
acceptable before the public defence is organized.
So it is perhaps in British- and Commonwealth-influenced
university systems that the oral exam or viva normally plays
the most significant part in determining whether or not some-
one gains a doctorate. Most of the lessons appropriate for this
tough oral exam system, with two or three independent exam-
iners, also apply in scaled-down forms to other public defence
systems. The famous Monty Pythonsketch has it that: ‘Nobody
expects the Spanish Inquisition.’^6 Yet this is what PhD students
almost universally expect in their oral exam. They foresee a
very text-focused session, with detailed questioning about the
minutiae of what they have said. In fact under normal circum-
stances a viva is mostly a rather high-level but also quite gen-
eral conversation amongst three, four or more people in a
discipline. If things have gone well with your thesis there may
not be much close ‘examination’ of it. The examiners will be
diligent readers, and often come armed with long lists of ‘liter-
als’ – spelling mistakes, grammatical infelicities, glitches in sta-
tistics or charts, or sentences that might profitably be rewritten.
You will want to keep their list as short as possible, and it is cer-
tainly prudent to avoid annoying them by leaving evidence of
carelessness. But unless you are very slipshod, or have made a
mistake in your choices of examiners and ended up with a neu-
rotic after all, the examiners will rarely want to nag on about
these things, still less take time discussing them. They will sim-
ply pass over their list and expect to see the corrections imple-
mented as a matter of course in minor revisions.
Normally examiners come to the oral exam with much more
fundamental doubts and anxieties that they want to assuage.
Your work will be unfamiliar to them in some aspects, and
hence difficult for them to grasp or assess at least in part. They
will worry about whether it is innovative in a worthwhile way
or simply a misguided dead-end. Having lived with your