not include many people who know a great deal about your
topic. The point of these exercises is for you to think through
how your text can be presented and explained to people knowl-
edgeable in your discipline but not in your specific topic.
The changes that you make in order to mount an effective pres-
entation and the comments that you get back can often be
very helpful foretastes of how people in your discipline gener-
ally will view your work. Some PhD students resent being asked
by their departments to do regular presentations once or twice
a year to such groups, feeling that so inexpert an audience has
little to say to them about their own specialist research. But at
the end of the PhD other ‘generalist’ audiences in your disci-
pline will make crucial decisions about your future as an aca-
demic, such as deciding whether or not to appoint you to a
university job or to allocate you a post-doctoral grant. It is far
better to have to appreciate early on how the profession as a
whole may see your work – so that you can make adjustments
in the orientation or presentation of your text in time to
improve these later perceptions.
Talking is a basic human art. By it each
communicates to others what he [or she] knows
and, at the same time, provokes the contradictions
which direct his attention to what he has
overlooked.
Bernard Lonergan^8
Conference makes a ready man [or woman].
Francis Bacon^9After your supervisors or advisers have commented on your
draft, and perhaps you have also accumulated some ‘outside’
commentary, then you should quickly make any changes that
seem necessary, while these criticisms and reactions are still
fresh in your mind. This second round of revisions is the final
element in producing a settled first draft of the chapter. Your
first draft will normally be a long way from your original
raw text. It is a version of the chapter that you can safely bank,
leaving it as it is, not to be reassessed until you have written a
complete draft of the whole thesis and are moving to a final
DEVELOPING YOUR TEXT◆ 141