Authoring a PhD

country and west-
ern singer
’ then this four-word label sums up a lot of different
features – dressing up in fake cowboy clothes with fringes on
them, singing in a yodelling fashion with a slide guitar accom-
paniment, and favouring songs about rural backwoods themes,
the trials of married love and American patriotism. If I have to
spell out these features every time it will take a lot longer than
three words to explain. Similarly, academic jargon is an essential
element of maintaining a professional conversation (in person
and in print) where meanings are precise and specialist topics
can be handled flexibly and economically. If your PhD thesis is
to be interesting at all then it is inevitable that it will focus to a
great extent on some kind of controversy in your discipline,
some nexus of debate between different theories, or thematic
interpretations, or methodological positions, or empirical stand-
points. You will thus have to discuss positions, register criti-
cisms, affirm some loyalties – in short take sides. Beginning
students often underestimate the importance and pervasiveness
of the side-taking cues which their text conveys. They pick up
and use ‘loaded’ terminology or concepts without appreciating
how some readers will decode its presence. So to manage read-
ers’ expectations effectively requires that you carefully judge all
elements of your presentation, the explicit promises and the
implicit signals which you give to readers about the intentions
of your work and its relationship to the discipline.
Conclusions
Starting work on a PhD dissertation inaugurates an apprentice-
ship not just in your chosen academic discipline and its
research skills, but also in authoring. This aspect of your
new role can easily attract too little attention, both from your
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supervisors or advisers and in terms of your own priorities. But
the craft skills of authoring are an important aspect of your
role, critical for your success in progressing and finishing the
thesis. It is an area where you can make solid and cumulative
progress that will stand you in good stead throughout a profes-
sional career. The most fundamental aspect of authoring is to
manage readers’ expectations successfully, ensuring that they
see the text as coherent, well paced and organized, and deliver-
ing upon your promises in a credible way. And for new PhD 
students, a critical step in beginning to manage readers’ expec-
tations is to define clearly the intended overall thrust of their
thesis – its central research question.
B E C O M I N G A N A U T H O R
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Envisioning the Thesis as 
a Whole
In dreams begin responsibility.
W. B. Yeats
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hat is your dissertation about? And what contribution do
you aim to achieve? What will be new or different about
your work? How would you justify the time and resources that
you will devote to it? These fundamental questions will seem
very pressing in the beginning stages of your research, as Yeats’
intangible process of locking you into a long-run project begins.
But they do not go away later on. You can often push such issues
into the background in the central stages of the thesis, during
field visits, case studies or the hard slog of library or archive work
or data collection and analysis. But they tend to return during
the ‘mid-term slump’ in morale that often afflicts dissertation
authors. And they invariably crop up again when you have a first
draft of your complete thesis, and have to fashion it into a 
polished and defensible final version. This chapter is about the
importance of thinking through some reasonable answers before
you invest too heavily in a particular research topic and approach.
I consider first how to define one or several questions that will
inform your project as a whole. The second section looks at the
demands of doing ‘original’ and interesting research.
Defining the central research questions
Certain books seem to have been written, not in
order to afford us any instruction, but merely for
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the purpose of letting us know that their authors
knew something.