Conclusions
These three cuts on the macro-structure of your thesis each
matter a great deal. Putting them together often entails making
quite complex judgements, which can be hard to resolve. There
is never just ‘one best way’ of organizing a long text. One
consideration may pull
you in a particular direction, and
another in a divergent fashion. When you do settle on a pattern
for your work, there will
always
be at least one other viable alter-
native
structure that you could use, and some debate in your
own mind about whether to switch over. Welcome then to the
world of permanent authoring dilemmas, of which this is only
the first. Some of the same issues
recur at the micro-level
of organizing individual chapters or papers, albeit in a more
manageable way.
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
◆
7 5
76
Organizing a Chapter or Paper:
the Micro-Structure
George said: ‘You know we are on the wrong track
altogether. We must
not think of the things we
could do with, but only of the things that we can’t
do without.’
A character in Jerome K. Jerome’s
Three Men in a
Boat
1
T
he building blocks of a completed thesis are chapters. Yet if
these blocks are to hold together they must themselves be
effectively structured internally,
so that they can bear a load
rather than crumbling away under pressure. A first step then is
to divide the chapter into parts. In addition, two elements
of designing internal structure are commonly mishandled:
devising headings and subheadings to highlight your organizing
pattern; and writing the starts and
ends of the chapter and its
main sections. I discuss these three issues in turn.
Dividing a chapter into sections
The human mind is only capable of absorbing a
few things at a time.
Stanislaw Lem
2
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into
small parts.
Henry Ford
3
4
A chapter of 10,000 words is impossible for you to hold in your
head as an author unless it can be split into shorter component
Dostları ilə paylaş: 
