Authoring a PhD

Michelangelo Buonarroti
6
A central task for any author is to manage readers’ expectations.
But authors are often not fully aware of the number of different
ways in which they create expectations. Once you have produced
a piece of text, and you are familiar with its every nuance and
wrinkle, you may assume that readers will be equally detailed in
their approach. It is all too easy to picture readers as scanning
your text carefully in the exact sequence that you wrote it, judi-
ciously assigning weight to this factor or that argument, and
carefully creating a balanced picture of what is said. But ‘real life’
readers, those who are not the fictional products of our authorial
imaginations, do not operate like that. Instead they treat the text
harshly, garnering first impressions quickly from obvious signs
and stigmata, and then often coding up what they later read in
detail to fit in with that initial frame of reference.
Although readers are famously diverse in their reactions, it is
not hard to explain how their first impressions are mostly
sourced, or to identify which elements of the text are most pro-
ductive of expectations. Headings, subheadings and the sec-
tioning of the text are very important, as the two previous
sections make clear. Well-organized authors also signal to read-
ers what a chapter or a section will do. They make promises: ‘I
will show that …’, ‘The analysis demonstrates that …’. These
explicit hostages to fortune clearly need careful phrasing. But in
addition you will often generate expectations more implicitly.
Suppose you assign two-thirds of one chapter’s text to aspect P,
a fifth to aspect Q, and an eighth to aspect R. Readers will
inevitably conclude that in your view P is more important or
more interesting than Q, which in turn is more important 
or interesting than R. And if your literature review waxes lyrical
on the defects of previous work, then readers expect that your
analysis will do better, will transcend these earlier limitations.
O R G A N I Z I N G A C H A P T E R O R PA P E R
◆
8 9

---

And if you wheel an elaborate theoretical apparatus onstage at
great length, or delineate a typology, or introduce your own 
neologisms – then readers will expect that these elements will 
justify themselves, will do useful work or create new insights or
predictions that could not have materialized without them. How
your text uses terminology, the concepts and vocabulary it
deploys, and the style cues that you signal as author – all these will
be used by readers to try and classify you and your text, to under-
stand where you are coming from, where your scholarly tribal
affiliations really lie. If these cues do not fit with your self-classifi-
cation in the professional scene, or what you later say and do,
then readers will receive incompatible messages – and code them
as confused authorial purposes. Diagrams, charts and tables are
also key attention points. Along with headings these are the items
that readers will most quickly identify on a first scan through a
piece of text. And like headings these attention points should ide-
ally be independently understandable, because readers will com-
monly try to make sense of what they say on a first scan, without
ploughing into accompanying text in detail (see Chapter 7 below).
It is unrealistic for authors to respond to these points by
deploring the laziness or the lack of application or disorderli-
ness of readers, their inability to unwrap your text in the same
sequence that you have written it. And it would be naïve to
imagine that examiners, however conscientious, will behave in
a radically different manner. None of us read academic work
like a good novel, ploughing through in one straight line from
A to Z. Educated, professional audiences do not suspend disbe-
lief. From the word go, from the first encounter with your argu-
ments, academic readers will get on with criticizing and
categorizing your text, trying to place you as an author, trying
to find short-cuts to unravel your intent, determined to econo-
mize on the time they spend grappling with your thought. And
they are right to do so, for this is a rational approach to allo-
cating scarce resources of time and attention.
The most crucial parts of a chapter for generating readers’
expectations, for setting up mental frameworks, for getting read-
ers off on the right foot or the wrong foot, are the beginnings and
ends of chapters and of sections. And, of course, these are also
usually the most difficult passages to write. So here you can ease
your difficulties a good deal by having a well-defined checklist or
repertoire of things to include and strategies to try. I review: key
9 0
◆
A U T H O R I N G A P H D

---

elements for setting out on a chapter; beginning and finishing 
a section; and concluding the chapter as a whole.
Starting a chapter
Writing down the first few pages of a chapter can take far more
time than completing much longer sections of the main body
of the text. Partly this is the normal intimidating effect of a
blank page or a blank screen, a problem built into the writing
process at all times (see Chapter 6). But the problem gains extra
intensity here because all authors know implicitly that begin-
nings are important in conditioning how readers view their
work, as well as influencing how their writing will progress and
the detailed directions it will take once they are launched into
text production. Getting a satisfactory start to a chapter will
often be a two-stage process. At the very beginning you need to
write quickly a ‘working’ start, just a piece of lead-in text that
gets you going, that helps you start the writing out of your ideas
for the chapter. Later, when you have all or much of the text in
being, you will probably need to go back and carefully reshape
your start to frame what you have actually done.
At either of these stages, however, you must always include
four elements in the following sequence:
◆
a chapter title;
◆
some form of ‘high impact’ start element, designed to