Styles of Working 53
And don’t forget that reading is an ongoing commitment; you should be looking
for literature throughout your study. Some of this will be deep reading of critical
papers; some will be light reading across an area to get a sense of the current think-
ing. Some will be a return to search tools to see what new work is being published.
Commit to a program of reading, and stick to it.
Having found papers, you need to analyze them, an issue that is examined in
Chap. 6.
Styles of Working
Production of a finished thesis involves not just writing in a certain way, creating
the right structures, and so on, but also that you work effectively. Very broadly,
completing a thesis presents two main challenges. The first is the structure of a
research program: several months or years of continuous work on a single project,
with only minimal deadlines along the way. In contrast to an undergraduate degree,
where each step is tightly specified and completion of a unit means that another
fraction of your degree has been achieved, with a thesis you have an ‘all or nothing’
result based on a single written document. You need to learn to work towards this
result from the start.
A key consequence of this line of thinking is to observe that, in the end, only the
writing matters. What draws many students into research is excitement about the
possibility of making discoveries and creating new knowledge, and in many disci-
plines this involves undertaking experiments and studies in a lab, or making site vis-
its, or searching for primary sources; the task of writing seems remote. Yet from the
point of view of undertaking the work to produce a thesis it is the writing that should
be paramount; experiments (and so on) should only be undertaken as required for
the thesis. The reality of lab or field work is not like this of course—experiments are
used to guide the student’s learning, to help form the hypotheses of the thesis, and
so on—but it is undoubtedly true that many, many students let experimental work
dominate their time and put off the thesis writing for much too long. The fact that
writing is a lot less fun than lab work is a large part of this.
The other main challenge is that thesis writing can be a painful grind. Let me
rephrase that. Thesis writing is a painful grind. Creating a complete first draft of
a PhD involves writing up to a thousand words a day of reasonably polished text,
every day, for months. Underlying this writing are repetitive tasks of reading pa-
pers, maintaining bibliographies, generating graphs, and so on. The text then has to
be read, and re-read, and re-read again. It is hardly surprising that many students
struggle to stick to a writing routine.
This is one area where every student really is different. Some people write best at
night; one of my students habitually wrote from about 10 pm to 3 am. I did much of
my thesis writing from 5 am to midday, with a long break for breakfast from say 8
am to 9 am. Some people say they write well in cycles of little bursts, of say 20 min,
followed by a half hour of distractions; others find that it takes them an hour or two