Writing Style 25
with), they weren’t necessarily as up to date as ‘results-valsNotChecked’. He
soon lost track of what was where.- Make sure you have a single location, maybe that USB drive, where you keep the
master version. Always make sure you are editing the most recent version.
Whenever you prepare a document for your supervisor, such as a review on a topic
or a draft chapter, label it in the header or the footer with the following: page num-
ber; the name of the document (and give it a name that clearly identifies it, so
that your supervisor doesn’t get a document labelled ‘Draft Chap. 3’ and not know
whose Draft Chap. 3 it is); and the date, so that you and your supervisor don’t get
tangled up as to which version of Chap. 3 is which. If your supervisor agrees, put
a due date on it—the proposed day on which your supervisor will return it to you.
Writing Style
Most books on writing theses deal with the art of writing and presentation. They
usually deal also with the conventions that support good expression, namely gram-
mar and punctuation. This is not a book about writing style, but rather about struc-
ture and coherence, and for advice on good grammar and so on you should look
elsewhere. Likewise, I cannot deal here with all the errors that I have come across
in my reading of draft theses. I recommend that you buy at least two writing books:
a style manual and a guide to good writing. Read them thoroughly, and keep them
on your desktop. Such books will tell you all you need to know; more than you can
take in at first.
We develop a writing style long before we start to write a thesis. Some people
can effortlessly write beautiful, clear, direct English that aids communication. Oth-
ers have writing styles that hinder the reader: verbose, ungrammatical, turgid, la-
boured. The strange thing, I’ve noted, is that some of the worst writers seem to be
unaware of their faults, and have no desire to improve. It would take another whole
book to deal with this. I suggest that you ask two or three people you respect to do
you the favour of telling you what they think of your style—indeed, your supervisor
may annoy you by doing this without being asked. When people criticize your writ-
ing, don’t be defensive. Instead, thank them, and set about to improve your work.
Not only do some students not see their own faults, but they don’t see faults as a
problem, that is, they do not appreciate the importance of acquiring a style and writ-
ing to a good standard. One of my students, Liz, wrote so sloppily that it undermined
the value of the work, with sentences that didn’t parse, inconsistent notation and no-
menclature, and even basic faults such as many misspelt words. There was a strong
mismatch of expectations between Liz and me—she saw no benefit in writing well.
She sometimes invested more energy in disagreeing, or in deflecting the argument
by pointing at ways in which her work was strong (and it was strong), than it would
have taken to correct the writing. Of course it is possible for a supervisor’s expec-
tations to be unreasonable, but in this case the problems were significant, and her
reluctance to acknowledge faults meant that she could not develop as a researcher.