Authoring a PhD

Glossary of maxims, terms and phrases
266
Notes
277
Further reading
287
Index
291
V I I I
◆
C O N T E N T S

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List of Figures and Tables
Figures
3.1
Interrelating the whole and the core
50
3.2
The focus down model
55
3.3
The opening out model
59
3.4
The compromise model
61
3.5
Three ways of viewing my home study
64
3.6
Examples of a matrix structure
74
4.1
The tree structure of a chapter
102
5.1
How PhD students’ writing can develop
105
7.1
Eight main types of chart (and when to use them)
173
7.2
How health boards compare
182
7.3
How Scotland’s health boards compared in treating
cataracts, 1998–9 financial year
183
7.4
An example of a box-and-whisker chart comparing
across variables
189
7.5
An example of median-smoothing
191
8.1
Integrating themes
200
9.1
An example of a journal article evaluation form
236
Tables
5.1
How different pressures on authors improve
or worsen the accessibility of their text
107
7.1
How health boards compare
166
7.2
How Scotland’s health boards compared in
treating cataracts, 1998–9 financial year
167
IX

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Preface
T
he conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott
once argued that:
A university is an association of persons, locally 
situated, engaged in caring for and attending to 
the whole intellectual capital which composes a 
civilization. It is concerned not merely to keep 
an intellectual inheritance intact, but to be 
continuously recovering what has been lost, 
restoring what has been neglected, collecting
together what has been dissipated, repairing what
has been corrupted, reconsidering, reshaping, 
reorganizing, making more intelligible, reissuing
and reinvesting.
1
Even if we leave aside Oakeshott’s evident antiquarian bias
against any genuine or substantive innovation here, this ‘mis-
sion statement’ is extensive enough. Indeed it is far too large to
be credible in the era of a ‘knowledge society’, when so many
other people (working in professions, companies, cultural and
media organizations, governments, civil society groups or as
independent writers and researchers) also attend to ‘the intel-
lectual capital [of] a civilization’.
This book is written in the hope of somewhat assisting any
of these people who produce longer creative non-fiction texts.
It is especially directed to research students and their advisers 
or supervisors in universities. In undertaking or fostering the
X

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doctorate they still pursue the most demanding ideal of original
research. ‘Nothing was ever yet done that someone was not the
first to do,’ said John Stuart Mill, and that is what the doctoral
ideal always has celebrated and always should.
2
Each doctoral
dissertation or thesis is to a large extent 
sui generis
. But this book
reflects a conviction that in the humanities, arts and social 
sciences research students also need to acquire a core of generic
authoring skills that are substantially similar across diverse 
disciplines and topics. While research skills training has been
formalized a great deal in the last two decades, these ‘craft’ 
skills of authoring have been relatively neglected and left
unsystematized.
For Oakeshott and other traditionalists my enterprise here
will seem no more than another brick in the wall, a further step
towards the bureaucratization of modern society foreseen by
Max Weber.
3
But I believe that learning the craft of how to plan,
draft, write, develop, revise and rethink a thesis, and to finish it
on time and to the standard required, is too important and too
often mishandled a set of tasks to be left to the somewhat erratic
and tangential models of induction and training that have pre-
vailed in the past. There is a long and honourable tradition now
of scholarship reflecting upon itself. It stretches back through
Friedrich Schelling’s idealist vision in