They often seem restrictive for new authors who are convinced
of the uniqueness of their individual approach. But it is per-
fectly feasible to impress clear views on your chapter plan with-
out lurching off into idiosyncrasy or impenetrable distinctions.
Once you have an analytic structure of chapters it is also
importantnotto follow through unquestioningly with a further
analytic way of carving up material inside each chapter. Do not
overdo the analysis. At its limit an ultra-analytic thesis can
resemble a fairly unique (and awful) item of British cuisine, the
canned ‘fruit cocktail’. This dish consists of different kinds of
tinned fruit (like peach, apricot, pear, apple, grapes, cherries
and so on), all cut up into small cubes and mixed together, and
then completely covered in a sugary syrup. When you eat a
mouthful of canned fruit cocktail you may know intellectually
that you are consuming different types of fruit, but the tastes
are so effectively homogenized that you will have difficulty
identifying what any given cube consists of. The analogous
danger in academic life is that you wrench apart connected
phenomena to such a detailed extent that your readers lose any
grip on how the parts connect as a whole. For instance, if you
analyse a chronological process into separate analytic compo-
nents, and then analyse each of these in turn into subcompo-
nents, readers may lose any working sense of how the processes
being described operated over time, and hence find no clear
narrative storyline at all. Overextended analytic arguments can
also produce very formalistic patterns of organizing material,
with multi-layered typologies or sets of categories being
expounded which are very remote from ‘ordinary knowledge’
ways of looking at problems. In some technical or highly theo-
retical areas very formalized treatments may be acceptable,
even expected, especially in the parts of social sciences and
philosophy. But outside these areas, they can easily look
off-putting or impenetrable, especially where an author uses
unfamiliar organizing concepts.
Argumentative explanations
Organizing your account argumentatively is again easy to do.
First you gather together all the points which might be made
70 ◆AUTHORING A PHD