become very long-winded and hard to organize mentally. These
problems may perhaps lead you to think that I am setting up
a straw person to knock down here, and that in practice
in advanced humanities and social science research it would
be very hard to find people utilizing this kind of pattern of
explanation.
Think again. Most theses in these disciplines still follow a
descriptive approach, in the sense defined above, in that their
fundamental organization is set externally to the author, by the
way things are arranged in the ‘real world’. Key forms of a
descriptive approach are:
◆Narrative theses, which follow the pattern of a storyline set
by an external work or by another author – for example, a
critical exposition discussing Act 1 of a play, followed by
Act 2, then Act 3, etc. This pattern is popular in literature
studies.
◆Chronological theses, which essentially let a historical
sequence dictate their structure, beginning at the beginning
and going on until they come to the end. This pattern is
prevalent in historical studies and related fields.
◆Institutional theses or those with a ‘guidebook’ structure –
which replicate the pattern of an organization chart, or the
relationships among different institutions, or the structure
of a piece of legislation or a set of regulations, in order to
trace out its working in loving detail. This pattern is popular
in law, public administration, social policy, and so on.
Other descriptive patterns can be envisaged, for instance spa-
tially organized work in geographical studies. Less commonly
found at whole-thesis level is the most popular descriptive pat-
tern in masters level or undergraduate essays, the ‘random
sequence of authors’. Here the order in which sources are dis-
cussed, and their relative weighting in the essay, are both deter-
mined by which sources students were able to access in the
library that week in the time available to do the essay. So a lot
is written about sources which were accessed first; rather less
about sources which the student only had a short time to
absorb; and least of all is said about sources which the student
is only pretending to have read. But even the ‘random sequence
of authors’ pattern often recurs over sections of a thesis.
66 ◆AUTHORING A PHD