try and mask an otherwise obvious gap or unsuccessful patch in
your research effort.
Of course, theses vary a great deal in how far they can be
structured into similarly sized chunks. So these targets and lim-
its are only indicative. There will be many occasions where you
have to interpret them a bit flexibly. Yet it is a good idea to be
very sceptical about writing chapters that are much longer or
much shorter than 10,000 words. This central target length can
be pushed up or down by 2000 words either way without doing
any great harm. But chapter lengths should not go lower than
about 8000 words or higher than about 12,000 words, except
for the most pressing and exceptional reasons. Of course, it is
often hard to predict at the planning stage how long chapters
will turn out in the writing. If you end up with a substantially
oversized chapter, say one that is 17,000 words long, the best
strategy is to split it into two new, evenly sized chapters of
around 8500 words each. Do not try to struggle along trying to
organize so much text as a single unit. And do not ask your
readers to cope with following an argument at the original
monster length.
An overall text of around 80,000 words, evenly divided into
chunks averaging 10,000 (or 10K) words each, implies that your
thesis will need around eight chapters. The 810K format is
a very potent one. It can usefully serve as a strong benchmark
against which you should measure any different chapter struc-
ture. With eight chapters your contents page will easily meet
the ‘seven is a magic number’ criterion (see p. 35 above). Your
readers can hold the whole sequence in the forefront of their
attention, and so can you. But if your structure has more than
10 or 11 chapters you will be unable to pay attention to it or
envision it as a whole, and you may react by randomly ‘forget-
ting’ chapters or losing track of the sequence. Again what is true
for you as author here will also be true for readers. Give them
14 chapters to keep in mind and you can be almost certain that
the overall pattern of your argument will become less visible
and harder to follow.
People often feel that the 810K norm is too restrictive and
that they can handle many more chapters in their thesis by
dividing it into parts, where each part is a set of connected
chapters. For instance, a 15-chapter thesis may be too complex
48 ◆AUTHORING A PHD