Later on in your doctorate, when you have a developed version
of a chapter in a tightly written and short conference paper for-
mat, then you may also find it valuable to apply for interna-
tional conferences. As you go up this ladder of increasing scale
the potential audience for your paper widens. But the time you
get to present it falls, from 30 to 40 minutes in a university
seminar, to maybe only 15 or 20 minutes at large conferences.
Remodelling text
One changes one’s ideas the way an animal sheds
its coat, in patches: it’s never a wholesale change
from one day to the next.
Umberto Eco^10All of the advice above assumes that your text already works tol-
erably well, sufficient for you to be able to absorb comments and
to upgrade it incrementally. But sometimes, perhaps rather fre-
quently in the early stages of developing your thesis or with
more argumentative or theoretical chapters, you may find
that the overall feel of a chapter is not right. Here more
fundamental changes may be needed. Text remodelling is a
particularly powerful technique for this kind of situation. It is
psychologically difficult to use, because none of us likes to admit
to ourselves that some writing we have produced really does
not work. The idea of starting over can seem very threatening
and non-constructive if you have no clear alternative idea of
how to proceed.
Remodelling is designed to cope with the fact that at the
normal full-chapter length of 30 to 40 pages any piece of text
becomes very difficult for us to hold in our heads as a whole. We
tend to cope by selectively forgetting parts of the text as we move
through it. Authors use many different linking words, phrases and
sentences to convince readers that one paragraph leads on seam-
lessly to the next. These devices can all effectively disguise the
structure of a chapter from the author as well. Even if you have
gone over a finished chapter several times making incremental
changes and revisions, the chances are still very high that you
will not fundamentally understand what you have done.
DEVELOPING YOUR TEXT◆ 143