version of the entire text (see Chapter 8). It is important for
your later morale that before you ‘bank’ the chapter you make
some effective modifications to meet suggestions or comments
from your advisers and criticisms in seminars.
This does not mean scrapping and starting again. Nor does it
mean throwing up your hands and filing your existing version
of the chapter with a lot of disabling commentaries attached,
your own and other people’s. Instead keep faith with your
chapter, and with the work that it embodies, but try to find a
way of adjusting what you say and how you say it that meets or
skates around the points made against your argument. It may
not be a good idea to painstakingly try to remodel the chapter
into a completely different form now, because later changes
when you move from first draft to a final text could supersede
any major restructuring which you do now. But when you
‘bank’ your chapter in first draft and move on to the next, it is
important that it is in a reasonable working format, one that
counters criticisms and incorporates important suggestions. In
that way you will think of the banked chapter as viable, up to
date, genuinely a first draft – rather than seeing it as imperfect,
conditional or in need of a major overhaul before reaching
proper first-draft status.
Phase 4 of developing text is a desirable but more optional
one, of going public in wider professional settings by giving
seminars at other universities and papers at conferences. Do not
attempt this stage until your chapter or paper is well worked-
up, so that you are reasonably confident about taking outside
criticism of your ideas. If you meet this test then presenting to
an outside seminar at another university can be a very useful
first step. Alternatively there may be small-scale specialist group
meetings which occur regularly within academic professional
associations. These occasions can offer more focused criticisms
and evaluations from people working in exactly your field. Any
outside audience (especially at conferences) will tend to be
more heterogeneous, less committed to the theoretical ideas or
methods of research that hold sway in your home department
or university. They will be franker about possible problems and
more radical in challenging your ideas with alternative
approaches. Going beyond this level involves presenting
a paper to a larger professional conference, at national level.
142 ◆AUTHORING A PHD