lead-in sections or chapters always require careful
management. None the less they often loom much larger to
students in terms of their length, and their writing and
rewriting time, than their eventual role in the final thesis
would justify. Readers often page through lead-in materials
quite quickly, looking mainly for ‘the beef’ to be found later
in the core sections.
◆Lead-out materials do the ‘book-closing’ role for large theses,
providing an integrating summation or restatement of what
has been found, and setting it in a wider context.
When thinking about how to organize these three types of
materials (lead-in, core and lead-out), it is vital that so far as pos-
sible they should form distinct blocks in this sequence, shown
in Figure 3.1. They should not be split up and scattered around
the thesis in little chunks. Readers must be able to clearly iden-
tify the core as a set of discrete, high value-added chapters. They
should never have to search for smaller nuggets of originality
dispersed in mixed chapters that also contain other kinds of
material. The point of the lead-in materials is simply to frame,
highlight and lead up to the core. In particular, they should
ensure that readers can appreciate the originality and the use-
fulness of what you have done in your central research activities.
To get a doctorate (and to do a good thesis more broadly) the
size of the core matters a great deal. You must make sure that
there are enough core chapters, and that they are big enough
in terms of the total wordage of your thesis, to colour the whole
thing as an original piece of work. My suggested rule of thumb
for ‘big book’ theses is that 50,000 out of the 80,000 words of
main text must be core materials. That is, appreciably more
50 ◆AUTHORING A PHD
Lead-in materials
(2 chapters at most)Lead-out materials
(1 or 2 chapters)Core
(5/8ths of words,
and 5 chapters)Figure 3.1 Interrelating the whole and the core