Authoring a PhD

‘professional’ doctorate
, that
has previously been rare but which may develop further in
future. It basically extends the two or three years of coursework
in the taught PhD model into a full four or five years. At a limit
this approach may dispense with a final PhD dissertation alto-
gether in favour of more assessment and the production of a
number of smaller papers or the completion of a project or
other non-written piece of practice. In other cases a very
stripped-down dissertation is retained, perhaps 30,000 words
long, without the clear originality or publishability require-
ments of the models above. Given the demanding amounts of
years of extra coursework that students face in this approach,
completing even a short dissertation at the right level may not
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be straightforward. Instead you may find yourself under
considerable pressure from other project and course work on
tight deadlines, which eats into your time for authoring and
developing research. At the same time the very short theses or
long essays completed under this model (and possibly some of
the assessed papers also) will still have to operate at more
advanced levels than those which are produced by masters (MA
or MSc) students. Again students doing a professional doctorate
might skip Chapter 2. But they should find that the rest of the
book is highly relevant to their situation, especially for pro-
ducing advanced text at a good scholarly level but written
under acute time and workload constraints.
Managing readers’ expectations
The book speaks only to those who know already
the kind of thing to expect from it and 
consequently how to interpret it.
Michael Oakeshott, about cookery books
3
A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness
varying with readers.
Ernest Dimnet
4
Producing a PhD is normally a longer piece of writing than any-
thing you have ever done before. If you have to tackle a ‘big
book’ thesis then it may easily be the longest text you ever com-
plete, even assuming you enter an academic career and keep
writing for another several decades. As a university teacher you
will rarely get three or four years again to work full time on a
single research project. Perhaps you will publish books, but most
academic books have to stay between 60,000 and 80,000 words
long, while ‘big book’ theses can be up to 100,000 words –
with students typically taking it to the limit. Even where your
doctorate has a papers model dissertation, this will normally be
because your discipline’s dominant type of academic publica-
tion is journal articles. And so your dissertation will still be four,
five or even six times more text than a full paper. It may be
equivalent in length to four years’ academic research output in
your later career, but all wrapped up together in a single pair of
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covers. So the simplest reason why it is important to think 
systematically about how to author a doctorate is that produc-
ing this much joined-up text for the first time is unavoidably
difficult. The longer the text the more taxing it becomes for you
as an author to understand your own arguments and to keep
them marshalled effectively.
It is also harder for your readers to follow your thoughts
as the text grows in size. Readers’ difficulties will increase the 
more unfamiliar is the material they are asked to grapple with –
a substantial problem for thesis authors who are supposed to be
undertaking original research. Almost by definition, much of a
new thesis may be unfamiliar even to experienced professional
readers. The epigraph from Oakeshott, above, stresses that even
the apparently simplest text (like a cookery book) rests on a
shared set of conventions between an author and her readers
about how that kind of book should be written. Knowing your
discipline’s conventions inside out will help you do authoring
more reliably. Yet as the Dimnet epigraph also points out, dif-
ferent readers may still code the same text in different ways.
Trying to think consistently about how readers will understand
your text, writing with readers in mind, is a fundamental aspect
of becoming a good author. It is not something that is external
to the process of producing and understanding your arguments,
but rather an integral stage in helping you be most effective in
organizing and expressing your thought.
In one way or another all authoring involves you in con-
stantly managing readers’ expectations and recognizing that
different people in the readership will have different perspec-
tives on your text. Writing your thesis to be accessible to the
widest feasible readership can help you in becoming a better
author, by developing your own ideas and improving the clar-
ity and direction of your research design and finished thought.
Most doctoral dissertations may never get published, but many
others do see the light of day, as complete books in some cases
but more generally in the form of one or several journal articles
(see Chapter 9). Writing with readers in mind will hugely help
the quality of your text, and maximize your chance to be one
of the published group, and hence to feed into the develop-
ment of scholarly thought. The alternative outcome is to pro-
duce only a ‘shelf-bending’ thesis, one which after submission
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goes into a library and over the next two decades slowly bends
a shelf. A thesis that is never published in whole or in part may
be read at most by one or two later scholars in your own insti-
tution. Or perhaps some very diligent researchers elsewhere
may be sufficiently interested in exactly your topic to find and
borrow your work. But, equally likely, it could remain unread
by anyone else beyond your supervisors and examiners, like
Thomas Gray’s roses ‘born to blush unseen’.
5
Seeing things from a reader’s perspective is not an easy
task. Academic authors typically spend so long in developing
their research, clarifying their theories, and expressing their
arguments in a close-joined way, that they can find it very
hard to see how their text will be received and interpreted.
For PhD students this problem is especially acute because the
thesis is their first extended piece of writing, and usually has
a limited audience whose reactions are difficult to ascertain
in advance. In addition (as I discuss in Chapter 2), PhD
projects usually become closely bound up with people’s
identities as a beginning scholar and apprentice researcher,
making it hard for students to be self-aware or critical about
their work.
All these features mean that some students can write obses-
sively with only two or three readers in mind, namely their
supervisors or advisers, and perhaps the examiners. Since advis-
ers, supervisors and examiners all get paid for their roles, stu-
dents often picture them as incapable of being bored. They are
assumed to be so committed to absorbing the text that they are
unconcerned about how (un)interesting it is. And since exam-
iners are senior figures at the height of their profession, they 
are also often pictured as completely unconcerned about the
readability or accessibility of the thesis. They are presumed
capable of mastering any level of difficulty. Sometimes they are
also seen as pedantically obsessed about the details of research
methods and about scholarly referencing for every proposition.
Adopting anything like this kind of orientation can have a very
poor effect on the quality of the text that you produce. In pub-
lishing circles PhD theses are often a byword for unreadable
arguments, pompous and excessively complex expression of
ideas, and an overkill in referencing, literature reviews, and
theoretical and methodological detailing.
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Like other forms of mild paranoia, research students’ defen-
sive mind-set bears little relation to the facts. Rational PhD
supervisors, advisers and examiners do not carry out their role
for the money, still less for the dubious academic kudos
involved. Instead most professors and other senior figures
undertake supervision and examining for three reasons: they
hope to encounter or foster fresh and original work; they want
to induct promising young scholars into the disciplines to
which they have devoted their lives; and they see it as a duty 
to colleagues in their department and in the wider profession.
So providing them with a clear and accessible text is only the
most basic politeness which they can expect. Writing to be
understood by the widest possible audience of informed, pro-
fessional readers will help ensure that your advisers and exam-
iners form the best impression of your work and can carry out
their tricky task in the speediest and easiest way. By contrast, a
complex or obscure text, written in a crabbed and inaccessible
way, makes working with you more off-putting. In the end-
game of finishing and submitting the dissertation it may even
raise fundamental doubts in advisers’ or examiners’ minds
about your ability to carry on professional activities essential
for a later academic career, such as effectively teaching students
or publishing regularly in journals (see Chapters 8 and 9).
There are many different ways in which your writing will
generate readers’ expectations. Any accessible piece of text
longer than a few pages must include ‘orientating devices’,
ways of giving advance notice of what is to come (discussed in
detail in Chapters 3 and 4). In addition academic dissertations
usually require a very developed apparatus for situating the