than half of your text should be original-ish stuff, reporting
primary research that you have undertaken, or making new and
distinctive arguments that you can plausibly claim to have orig-
inated or developed. This is a very demanding standard, but a
therapeutic one. It throws into sharp focus the need to concen-
trate on your thesis’s value-added elements. If you are doing a
papers model dissertation then although your overall word
length will be less, the ratio of core materials will be a good deal
higher. Each of the four or five ‘papers’ chapters you need to
write will have to be around 75 per cent original material to
count as publishable, an even more demanding standard.
Do not end-load a ‘big book’ thesis, leaving all the good bits
squeezed into the last third or quarter of the text, as many peo-
ple do. A recurring problem in most humanities and social sci-
ences disciplines is that students spend so much time and effort
on writing lead-in materials that they create a long, dull, low-
value sequence of chapters before readers come across anything
original. To check your own plan, count the number of chap-
ters and the number of pages that readers must scan through
before they come to the core. Overextending the lead-in stuff
will also squeeze out the time needed to do your core research
and write it up properly. Long ‘legacy’ chapters (often literature
reviews or methods descriptions inherited from your first one
or two years of study) also restrict the text space you have avail-
able to set out the core properly.
Avoiding an end-loaded thesis is more difficult than it looks.
When beginning students are doing text planning they often
multiply introductory literature reviews, or insert unneeded
theoretical or ground-clearing or methodological chapters. It is
easy to become convinced that you must somehow discuss and
explain everything about your project before actually doing it.
To curb this tendency, try setting a maximum size limit for lead-
in materials of two chapters. Obviously every ‘big book’ thesis
needs at least one lead-in and one lead-out chapter, usually
the first and last respectively. With only eight chapters overall,
and a minimum size for the core of five chapters, that leaves
you only one spare chapter that can hold additional lead-in
materials – such as descriptive set-up materials or an account of
your methods. Less commonly the ‘spare’ chapter might pro-
vide a second lead-out chapter, for instance where your research
PLANNING AN INTEGRATED THESIS◆ 51