beginning to appreciate your research contribution. Your core
stuff thus comes across much earlier, leaving more space at
the end of the thesis for you to do a couple of chapters or one
decent, long chapter of analysis. The first part of these con-
cluding materials might focus on bringing together and inte-
grating the conclusions from your core chapters, each of which
should cover a different component of your research. The sec-
ond part of these concluding materials can then do a more
limited opening out from the results of your analysis back into
the wider literature. By saving much of the theory discussion
and literature discussion to handle at the end of the argument,
you should be able to form a strong theoretical or broad-view
chapter. This way you can conclude your thesis on an upbeat,
confident and professionally salient note.
Four patterns of explanation
I have yet to see any problem, however
complicated, which when you looked at it the
right way did not become still more complicated.
Poul Anderson^7When you try to communicate a set of connected information
to someone else there are only a limited number of ways that
you can do it. If your chosen way cuts across the other person’s
expectations then crossed wires may occur in the communica-
tion. This problem is made worse when your audience does not
listen intently to every twist and turn of your account. For
instance, people of different genders famously tend to choose
incompatible modes of communication. Most women like to
give and receive process-organized explanations, often running
through the history of an event or an interaction from begin-
ning to end in narrative succession. But most men prefer to
receive ‘bottom-line’ information first. They want to know at
the start what the key point of a story is, and only then will
they be ready to listen much more selectively to the detail of
how the story’s outcome ended up as it did. Hence men easily
get annoyed by what they code as women ‘rabbiting on’.
Equally, women often get turned off by men’s overly terse and
62 ◆AUTHORING A PHD