Authoring a PhD

Conclusions
Like the rest of authoring, publishing takes a lot of time and
dedicated effort. It is never easy to do. It always requires per-
sistence and resilience in the face of rejection, criticisms or
demands for further changes to text that has already taken so
long to produce. You also need to look ahead, and try not to
publish material that within a few years you will not particu-
larly want to acknowledge. But publishing is the only way in
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A U T H O R I N G A P H D

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which you can disseminate the messages from your doctoral
research to a wider audience. It is the principal mechanism by
which your ideas can shape and become part of the traditions
in your discipline (the other way being teaching). The goal of
all publishing is in part an acknowledgement of your creative
contribution, your value-added, to the discipline’s mission. To
then be cited by others, to shape their further work (whether
positively or in opposition to your own propositions) is to
acquire a kind of ‘immortality’. Milan Kundera’s novel of this
title makes a powerful case to have us recognize this motive as
a basic human drive.
10
Perhaps, though, reflecting on such
goals and motives is too heady stuff, best tempered by a degree
of cynicism. A famous cartoon of Garfield the cat starts with 
his owner, John, confessing in a moment of introspection:
‘Garfield, I’m depressed. When I’m gone, no one will care that
I ever existed.’
11
The normally unsupportive Garfield seems for
a moment to be acting out of character: ‘Cheer up John’, the cat
thinks in the middle frame. ‘They don’t care now’, it concludes.
P U B L I S H I N G Y O U R R E S E A R C H
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Afterword
‘I
f a thing is worth doing’, said G. K. Chesterton, ‘it’s worth
doing badly.’
1
His brilliant reversal of common sense cap-
tures an important truth. Something intrinsically worthwhile
for us to accomplish remains worthwhile, however imperfectly
we carry it through. This thought has sustained me in writing
these pages, which in the end have done so much less than I ini-
tially hoped they might. In closing I want to stress again the mes-
sage of the Preface that none of the advice given here should
necessarily be applied, still less adopted, in a mechanical or
‘handbook’ way. This book offers only suggestions, to be consid-
ered, evaluated, perhaps tried out, amended or discarded, as
seems useful for your own situation and purposes. As Nietzche
recognized: ‘Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books
included, more than he [or she] already knows. What one has no
access to through experience one has no ear for.’
2
There is a final danger, a risk of misconstruction that I want
to underscore. This book tries to partially condense a set of
practices which to a large extent must still be lived to be fully
appreciated. It is, in short, a ‘crib’ book, of which Michael
Oakeshott once remarked: ‘Now the character of a crib is that
its author must have an educated man’s [or woman’s] knowl-
edge of the language, that he must prostitute his genius (if he
has any) as a translator, and that it is powerless to save the igno-
rant reader from all possibility of mistake.’
3
Most of us will
know the sinking feeling of making a transition from the appar-
ent simplicities of a phrase book to an actual conversation in a
foreign language. So let me stress that moving between these
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pages and your own doctoral work will entail a similar amount
of heroic commitment on your part, a wholesale and necessary
reconstruction. You must not, ever, construe a gap between the
apparent straightforwardness of this text and the messiness or
difficulty of your own authoring experience as reflecting
adversely upon your authorial competences. Reading so far has
been the easy bit. Doing authoring remains, for all of us, every
time, a considerable trial.
In case this seems too sickeningly modest a view on which 
to end, let me mention that the object of Oakeshott’s conde-
scension about crib books was actually Niccolò Machiavelli’s
The Prince
, a book so original, widely read and influential that
it gave English (and many another language) a new complex
word (‘machiavellian’). In my own view a new ‘crib’ book is as
valid as any other book, helping us to consolidate an estab-
lished body of knowledge, to systematize it and then immedi-
ately to begin to change and reimprove it. How else, in our
text-based civilization, can we make progress? The really impor-
tant thing for any book is how readers approach it and what
they seek to do in using it. As A. D. Sertillanges once wrote: 
‘A book is a signal, a stimulant, a helper, an initiator – it is not
a substitute and it is not a chain.’
4
A F T E R W O R D
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Glossary of Maxims, Terms 
and Phrases
All good maxims are in the world. We only need to
apply them.
Blaise Pascal
1
The maxims included here are general suggestions for effective author-
ing, referred to at several points in the book. They are shown in grey-
shaded boxes below. The terms or phrases included here are those
which are not part of common parlance but are used widely in the
book. The glossary does not include some specialist terms that are
defined and used only at a single point in the main text. Words high-
lighted in 
italics
denote other entries in the glossary below. Numbers
in square brackets show page numbers for relevant sections in the
main text.
ABD
– an acronym for ‘all but dissertationed’, denoting a student in
the
taught PhD model
who has passed her general examination but is
still working on completing her dissertation.