background doubts they may have had about granting you the
doctorate easily drop away over the course of this specialized
conversation. The examiners recognize that you are an inde-
pendent professional in your own right, fully capable of stand-
ing on your own in academic argument and debate, and not
someone who lives just in your supervisor’s shadow. Even
where they may disagree with you, they appreciate that you are
not a student making errors, but a fellow professional with well-
grounded reasons for the choices you have made and the con-
clusions you have drawn. They also see that you are someone
with a good overall grip on your discipline and a commitment
to its academic and moral values. If you go out into the wider
academic environment with the title of ‘Dr’ no one is going to
hold that judgement against them as examiners, or see it as in
any way insecurely based. These reasons are why many research
students are surprised to find that much of their oral exams or
vivas turn out to be pretty general conversations, only loosely
tethered to professional topics grouped around your text, rather
than working through most of it in great detail.
Of course, at some stage every oral exam will come to
specifics, to points which make one or more of the examiners
doubtful or anxious, or where you (and your supervisors) may
have made a mistake. This intensification of the discussion
usually indicates that the examiners will insist on you making
revisions, which are of two kinds: minor (which are no prob-
lem) or major (which are fairly fatal). Normally university reg-
ulations allow for ‘minor revisions’ to be made within a brief
period (around six weeks to three months): these changes are
completely consistent with the thesis passing first time. With
the advent of word processors the barrier for ‘minor’ revisions
has effectively been lowered, so that examiners now commonly
demand fairly extensive alterations as a matter of course. They
may often smuggle in a requirement for quite substantial
changes to the thesis argument or coverage under this heading.
But at least the examiners congratulate you at the end of the
oral exam that you have gained the doctorate, subject to mak-
ing their revisions, which the regulations mean that you must
do right away. In British-style systems around four in every five
PhDs now will be accepted with minor revisions. Very few the-
ses make it through without any changes at all. (In Europe or
220 ◆AUTHORING A PHD