Authoring a PhD

Patrick Dunleavy
January 2003
London School of Economics and Political Science
London
[e-mail]
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Becoming an Author
In writing a problem down or airing it in
conversation we let its essential aspects emerge.
And by knowing its character, we remove, if not
the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating
characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise.
Alain de Botton
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T
he authoring process involves all the component parts of
producing a finished piece of text, that is: envisaging what
to write, planning it in outline, drafting passages, writing the
whole thing, revising and rewriting it, and finishing it in an
appropriate form, together with publishing all or parts of your
text. At every stage a complex mix of intellectual and logistical
issues can crop up. As de Botton suggests of problems in gen-
eral, often there are genuine (permanent) dilemmas surrounded
by more resolvable delaying or distracting factors. Neither the
fundamental problems nor their penumbra of aggravations
may be straightforward to resolve, but we can often make
progress on the latter by making the issues involved more
explicit. My aim here is to shed light on common authoring
problems and to point out solutions which others have found
helpful and that may also work for you.
I begin by discussing the importance of authoring as a generic
set of skills at the doctoral level. A thesis or a long dissertation 
(I use these words interchangeably from here on) forms a criti-
cal element in all the main models of PhD education. Some key
authoring principles have important application across many
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humanities and social science disciplines. The second section
considers the varying authoring tasks involved in the ‘classical’
model of PhD and newer ‘taught PhD’ models. The third 
section looks at a foundation skill for becoming a good author,
which is to actively manage your readers’ expectations.
Authoring is more than just writing
To write is to raise a claim to be read, but by
whom?
C. Wright Mills
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To do authoring at doctoral level is to become a qualified (and
hopefully published) academic writer. It involves acquiring 
a complete set of ‘craft’ skills, a body of practical knowledge that
has traditionally been passed on by personal contacts within
university departments from supervisors to students. A basic
theme of this book is that authoring skills are a crucial element
to completing a successful doctorate. They are fundamental 
in achieving a coherent, joined-up argument for your thesis.
Proficiency in authoring can also help you meet the require-
ments of ‘originality’ and making a substantive contribution to
the development of a discipline, which are still key criteria
for awarding a doctorate in good universities. And acquiring
authoring capabilities is very important in finishing a doctorate
on time and avoiding the long delays for which PhD students
were once notorious.
Yet PhD students are only rarely taught authoring skills in an
explicit way in universities. The knowledge involved has not
often been codified or written down. Great effort is normally put
into communicating to students the substantive knowledge of
each discipline, with an intense socialization and training in its
research methods. By comparison the teaching or training of stu-
dents in authoring has been given little attention. Partly this
reflects a widespread conviction amongst academic staff that at
the PhD level becoming an effective writer is completely bound
up with becoming a good researcher, and with mastering the sub-
ject matter of one individual academic discipline. Authoring a
doctorate has often been seen as too diffuse an activity to be
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legitimately or usefully studied in universities. Many, perhaps
most, working academics might doubt that much useful can be
said about the generic skills involved in authoring – outside the
context of each particular discipline. Hence in offering advice
about authoring to their students most university teachers and
supervisors have had few credible resources to hand. Many
advisers must draw largely on their own experience, of super-
vising earlier students, or perhaps of being a PhD student them-
selves up to three decades ago. This neglect of authoring skills
is not universal. The editors of academic journals and most
publishers of university-level books can and do draw a distinc-
tion between people’s prowess in a discipline and their profi-
ciency as writers. They recognize that good researchers can be
bad writers, and that uninspiring researchers can still be good
writers, interpreters and communicators. But the thrust of
much doctoral education none the less remains that if you get
the research right then the writing aspect will somehow just fall
naturally into place.
This conventional approach assumes that beginning PhD stu-
dents will be sustained by discipline-specific study skills incul-
cated in their earlier education, at first degree or masters level. As
their research goes on they will presumably learn how to produce
good (or at least acceptable) writing in the style of their discipline
via a process of trial and error, ‘learning by doing’ over successive
drafts – first of papers, then of chapters, and ultimately of a com-
plete thesis. Doctoral students are mentored intensively and
hence should get detailed criticisms and individual advice from
their supervisors and perhaps other colleagues. This advice is
always text-specific and discipline-specific, focusing on this or
that substantive argument or piece of research, on whether a par-
ticular point has been proved sufficiently, or whether a given 
way of expressing an argument is legitimate or appropriate in its
context, and so on. From many repeated instances of these com-
ments and interactions the hope is that students will progres-
sively build up their own sense of what can and cannot be said,
how it may be said, and how other professionals in their subject
will interpret and react to their text.
In undertaking research and in developing disciplinary
knowledge the craft approach to PhD education still works well,
even though it has been extensively supplemented in modern
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times by much more formalized, extensive and lengthier
processes of advanced instruction. And on authoring issues,
many students will perhaps be lucky and have sympathetic staff
as their supervisors, people who are themselves skilled and
experienced authors and who are also prepared to devote a lot
of time and effort to inculcating similar authoring skills via
individual working with students. In these circumstances the
by-product approach can still deliver outstanding results.
But normally the by-product model of how students learn
and develop is far more problematic in relation to authoring
skills. In modern universities the pressures of teaching, research,
publishing and administration on qualified staff frequently
cause this model to break down in one or several respects.
Doctoral instruction via individual supervision is costly and
time-consuming. One of the reasons for a more formal and col-
lective trend in doctoral education has been to reduce the
amount of individual teaching needed, with peer group semi-
nars used more to help students to develop their ideas and com-
munication skills. Even in the most traditional view of PhD
education, which still stresses one-to-one induction of each stu-
dent by a single supervisor, the transmission of authoring skills
is vulnerable. Some supervisors may be indifferent writers, or
not very interested in or proficient in developing other people’s
authoring capabilities. Their students can find themselves with-
out any fall-back source of guidance. Above all, the by-product
way of doing things can be very time-consuming and erratic,
hence worrying and psychologically taxing for students.
Informal or ‘trial and error’ methods may unnecessarily stretch
out the period people take to complete a doctorate. And it may
make the process of becoming a competent and talented author
in your own right more problematic than it need be.
Here is where this book aims to be useful, in helping PhD stu-
dents and their advisers to think more systematically about
authoring skills. On the basis of supervising my own students
over the years, and of teaching a large and intensive course on
PhD drafting and writing at my university for more than a
decade, I take what might be labelled an ‘extreme’ view by
more conventional colleagues. I believe that in most of the
social sciences and all of the humanities disciplines, a set of
general authoring skills determine around 40 to 50 per cent of
anyone’s success in completing a doctorate. Of course, your
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ability to complete doctoral-level work will be primarily condi-
tioned by your own research ideas and ‘native’ originality, and
your hard work, application and skill in acquiring specific
knowledge of your discipline and competence in its methods.
But unless you simultaneously grow and enhance your author-
ing abilities, there are strong risks that your ideas may not
develop sufficiently far or fast enough to sustain you through
to finishing your thesis at the right level and in a reasonable
time. Doing good research and becoming an effective author
are not separate processes, but closely related aspects of intel-
lectual development that need to work in parallel. I also believe
that authoring skills are relatively generic ones, applicable in a
broadly similar way across a range of disciplines at doctoral
level. Hence this book draws on a wide range of previous writ-
ings and insights by earlier generations of university scholars.
Different models of PhD and the tasks 
of authoring
In contemporary universities there are a number of different
models of what a doctorate consists of. The way in which you
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