Authoring a PhD

need to know
in order to appreciate the value-added ele-
ments to come in the core chapters?’ At the start of your PhD
5 2
◆
A U T H O R I N G A P H D

---

studies cueing and branding the core is difficult, for you still 
will not have begun the key stages of your research. But these
considerations need to come into even your early planning.
A key orientating device here is a rolling thesis synopsis of
three or four pages. This document is for your own use and for
your supervisors only. It greatly expands on your chapter plan
or contents page by giving a paragraph of writing about what
each chapter will say. The synopsis also expresses the main
‘storyline’ of your thesis. You should write your first synopsis as
early as possible in your first year. Thereafter it is vital to keep
revising it, so that it is permanently up to date and always cap-
tures your latest thinking. The whole point of a rolling synop-
sis is that you should never be writing or working into a
vacuum. As you work on one chapter you always need to have
a paragraph or so about what later unwritten chapters will
cover, and an accessible summary also of the key points made
in chapters already written. The rolling synopsis should always
concentrate on summarizing your substantive arguments and
conclusions – what you have claimed, what you have found
out, and what you hope to discover.
Focusing down or opening out
Thinking is a struggle for order and at the same
time for comprehensiveness.
C. Wright Mills
4
Thinking is a conversation with imaginary
audiences.
Randall Collins
5
There are three basic sequences of chapters for a doctorate,
which can be labelled the ‘focus down’ model, the ‘opening
out’ model, and the ‘compromise’ model.
The focus down model
The most common, and most awful, sequence records four 
or five years’ work, more or less in the order that it happened.
P L A N N I N G A N I N T E G R A T E D T H E S I S
◆
5 3

---

The contents page typically shows two, three or even four lit-
erature review chapters (sometimes even more); followed by a
pretty boring or predictable methods chapter; then only three
to four chapters of detailed substantive, applied or empirical
work; and last a very brief concluding chapter. A rather cruel
précis of the ‘subtext’ message this pattern conveys to readers
would go like this:
Hi – this is the story of what I did during my doctorate.
When I began I was a bit confused about what topic to pick.
So I undertook a really big, broad literature review in order
to bring myself and my supervisor up to speed on a field of
possible topics. I wrote this up as a long chapter to get me
through assessment by my department at the end of the
first year. After that I narrowed the topic down a lot more
and did an exhaustive literature review on a bit of the field
where I thought I could do better than previous authors.
Next I worked a great deal on my research methodology [or
whatever ‘techy’ bits the research involved – for instance, 
I did a lot of searching for and accessing archives / I col-
lected a lot of numbers / I translated a big text / I devised 
a framework for doing a content analysis / etc.].
At last, mid-way through my second or in my third year
I went out into the field and got my hands dirty doing
empirical research [or it may be, I went and sat in foreign
libraries or an archive for a year / I analysed my numerical
data over and over / I interviewed a lot of people / I did
experiments in the labs]. At this point I discovered that
things in the outside world [or, the archive documents /
the library materials / the interview tapes / the computer
databases / the test tubes] are pretty confusing and hard to
make sense of. The results I got did not really support what
I had expected to find, [or sometimes, did not seem to have
any recognizable pattern at all]. Because I was puzzled, and
a bit at a loss, I wrote several long chapters setting out in
raw detail much of what I’d actually discovered, and trying
to make preliminary sense of these findings.
By now I’d almost used up my word limit, my PhD
finances were running low, and I was becoming jumpy that
I’d never make it into the academic job market. So I pushed
5 4
◆
A U T H O R I N G A P H D

---

ahead to get things finished up somehow. My last chapter
contains the little bit of 
post hoc
rationalization of my
results [or rethinking of my opening perspective] that 
I managed to scrape together during a very rushed final
drafting stage.
There are multiple reasons why this kind of disappointingly
familiar storyline recurs so frequently and predictably with doc-
torates. One of the most important of these influences is that
many people in the humanities and social sciences regard the
‘focus down’ model of how a doctorate should be structured as
either a natural or desirable or inevitable way to do things.
Figure 3.2 shows the kind of sequence adopted by nine out of
ten research students doing ‘big book’ theses in Europe in these
disciplines, and often demanded by their supervisors. The order
of material is shown along the horizontal axis from left to right,
and the horizontal width of each block shows the weight of
words assigned to that chunk of the thesis. The vertical size for
each block shows the scope of the material or topics (the
breadth of coverage) being considered at that stage.
The focus down model starts with a very broad literature
review that progressively gets winnowed down as it goes on. 
A set of related big themes are raised initially, discussed super-
ficially but then often set to the side one by one, or discarded
P L A N N I N G A N I N T E G R A T E D T H E S I S
◆
5 5
More review,
methods and
set-up
materials
Analysis
Large
literature
review