In lower level university studies with exams as a key assessment
method, and even for taught courses at PhD level, adopting a
descriptive approach to organizing your ideas and sequencing
your work is a popular but very damaging habit. It is prevalent
because it seems a lazy way. You just pick up an already ‘given’ or
perhaps ‘obvious’ structure existing ‘out there’, and organize your
work around it. It is damaging because a descriptive approach
demands a very high load of facts or other materials to make it
work well, and yet it often becomes hard for authors to control
and hence ends up looking very disorganized. Just as the things
which sit next to each other in my study form an eclectic list,
hard for readers to follow or understand, so things which sit next
to each other in historical time or institutional space may be all
jumbled up thematically or analytically.
But in ‘big book’ theses these difficulties are greatly amelio-
rated. The space and time constraints of lower level university
studies are not so pressing at PhD level – indeed they may not
seem to be present at all to beginning students. At doctoral level
descriptive explanations can work better, because you can assem-
ble the mass of facts and evidence needed to make the approach
look comprehensive and non-naïve. In addition, some kinds of
descriptive (externally structured) explanation are clearly popular
with and accessible to a wide range of readers, especially histori-
cal and narrative writing. The most chronological of all A to Z
storylines are biographies, which sell very widely.
Yet to make a descriptive structure work in most of the human-
ities and ‘soft’ social sciences in fact demands very high level
authoring skills. In very subtle ways you need to first articulate
and then weave into your meta-level descriptive account either
analytic concepts or argumentative themes. This thematization
of what seem to be just narrative, chronologies or ‘guidebook’
texts is an art that is harder than it looks. If you have not reached
this high level of attainment then you should always examine
carefully the three alternative approaches below before conclud-
ing that you can successfully make a descriptive structure work in
your thesis. The danger is that your thesis argument flounders
in a disorganized fashion, presenting a jumble of complexities
in which a single not very important feature (like temporal
proximity in historical accounts or institutional connected-
ness in guidebook arguments) is prioritized over everything else.
PLANNING AN INTEGRATED THESIS◆ 67