material to write and just ponder for a bit how much, what
kind, in what order. A ‘big book’ thesis is a particularly fraught
context in which to set out to write what is good or true before
putting some numbers in the frame. In the first place universi-
ties now impose some important legal restrictions on what your
doctoral dissertation can look like. In the past many people
overwrote big book theses, greatly prolonging the time spent
on them and creating long tomes that were excessively onerous
to get examined. Nowadays any responsible university will
limit the maximum time that you can spend on a PhD –
usually allowing from five to eight years of full-time study, but
more pro rata for part-time students. If the thought of (say) a
six-year-long project makes you shudder, as it should, do not be
fooled into thinking that this limit is purely notional. Every
year there will be people who come up to the limit and some
who overrun it.
Just as no one should go on and on as a permanent student,
so doctoral theses are now normally limited to a maximum
length, which may vary a little from one university or disci-
pline to another. In Europe and Britain where the ‘big book’
thesis remains predominant in ‘soft’ disciplines, the upper limit
can be safely thought of as 100,000 words – which is about 330
pages of A4 paper typed double-spaced. One A4 page is about
330 words, so that 1000 (or 1K) words cover three pages.
(Obviously you should check the specific regulations applying
to your discipline at your university and adjust my advice here
to fit well inside your formal limit if it is less than 100K words.)
You must take this constraint seriously from the start and make
sure that you do not overwrite it. If you work away on your
chapters in isolation, one at a time, it is very easy for hard-
working people to write 125,000 or 150,000 (even 200,000)
words of text without appreciating how the numbers are stack-
ing up. At a late stage in your research to realize that you have
25 per cent or 50 per cent more text than you need or can
submit is a very great shock. It can take weeks or months of
painstaking work to make cuts of this magnitude in a complex
text. And cutting out whole chapters at a late stage can be
almost equally disruptive.
In fact the danger of overwriting is so acute that you need to
make sure you come in well withinthe formal limit. A useful
PLANNING AN INTEGRATED THESIS◆ 45