consequence. Under such conditions, doing
becomes a trying, an experiment with the world to
find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes
instructions – discovery of the connections of
things.
John Dewey^27At whatever level you choose to look, producing effective text
is a very iterative experience. Once you formulate an overall
architecture for the thesis, it is important to keep it updated as
your planned research activities work out in practice. At the
micro-level you need to consider alternative ways of structuring
or sequencing materials, comparing your status quo arrange-
ment with a viable and well-specified alternative. At the detailed
sentence level, you need space and distance in order to be able
to spot what can be improved in your writing. Running through
all these aspects is the common thread of considering how your
text will be read. How will it be deconstructed? What intended
or inadvertent messages will you communicate? In its current
form does this sentence/this paragraph/this chapter positively
build the thesis? It can help your confidence to keep in mind
that producing an integrated professional text is a multi-stage
process, and that a lot will change as you progress raw text
towards an effective finished form. And remember too that com-
pleting the thesis as a whole is a further key stage for making
improvements in your final text, a phase which I discuss in
detail in Chapter 8. Before then, however, I focus in the next
chapter on some important non-text elements of many theses –
charts, tables and diagrams.
156 ◆AUTHORING A PHD