42 4 Making a Strong Start
In my experience, a strong obstacle for some students at this stage is a fear of
making a false start and thus of wasting time. However, almost any concrete work
early in your PhD is time well spent: it helps you come to grips with the literature,
gain experience with tools, and learn to write as a researcher. Moreover, it can be
difficult to establish a clear line of research without writing about it—for example,
it may well be that the exercise of creating an initial thesis is how you learn that the
topic needs to be changed.
A student of mine, Jacob, drafted his thesis structure with chapters, sections, and
subsections. He used this structure wisely: whenever something occurred to him,
he would add a new section and a few lines of text to describe what he thought
he should say. As a result, he had a substantial thesis structure, with ten or twenty
thousand words written, a year before submission. But during the final write-up
of his thesis the sections got out of control. The structure got too deep—in some
places, his subsections had sub-subsections and the subsubsections had titled para-
graphs with numbered subparagraphs. He struggled to find headings for many of
the elements and had sequences such as ‘First Stage ... Second Stage ... Third
Stage ... Thoughts’ or ‘Brundt’s Work ... Kavli’s Work ... Refinements ... Other
Work’, each describing just a paragraph or two; he sometimes had a separate head-
ing, completely unnecessarily, for every reference he discussed. Some sections had
become irrelevant as the work developed, but he was reluctant to delete them, and
so would write a brief, content-free paragraph to justify their existence. In one part
of his thesis, he had planned to write a historical survey. During his candidature an
excellent review paper was published, saving him a great deal of work, and he could
restrict himself to a two-page summary noting key developments. However, he still
kept his original headings, despite the fact that each now had just a single sentence
underneath. Jacob had failed to realize that the headings that had so successfully
provided a guide to his thinking were often unhelpful in the final thesis.
Initial Efforts
Once you have a structure, your next task is to decide which chapter or section you
could tackle first, and start writing. Many students find it easiest to start with a fac-
tual or concrete chapter, rather than attempt to write material that requires careful
argument or complex interpretations or judgments. In a technical area, for example,
this chapter might be a description of an experimental design, or a presentation of
a series of initial results.
It is not a good idea to start with a ‘critical review’ of existing theory, as used
to be fashionable, indeed compulsory. How one could be ‘critical’ in these circum-
stances is quite beyond me—insightful critical analysis requires expertise, and thus
such a review is probably the hardest chapter for an inexperienced student to write.
Likewise, while you might sketch a background chapter and even write some parts