Authoring a PhD

particularly relevant for writing dissertations, at the level of
paragraphs, then sentences, and last vocabulary.
Conflicting style pressures
Every difficult work presents us with a choice of
whether to judge the author inept for not being
clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is
going on … Writing with simplicity requires
courage, for there is a danger that one will be 
overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those
with a tenacious belief that impassable prose 
is a hallmark of intelligence.
Alain de Botton
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A U T H O R I N G A P H D

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An approximate but still useful view of the basic tension in
professional and academic writing is shown in Figure 5.1.
Accessibility considerations (graphed on the horizontal axis)
tend to make your writing clearer and easier to follow. Here they
are shown pulling at right angles to ‘value-added’ considerations
(shown on the vertical axis), which normally tend to make your
text more packed with content. (This aspect of the diagram is a
graphical oversimplification. Accessibility and value-added con-
siderations certainly pull in different directions, but whether
they pull in such sharply contrasted directions is a moot point.)
Writing which is neither accessible nor contentful is simply inef-
fective, and this is often where doctoral students start off. Few
PhD students move rightwards along the horizontal axis follow-
ing the dotted arrow towards popular writing (highly accessible
but low content). However, every year there are a certain num-
ber of fluent and competent writers who find themselves under-
shooting the doctoral standard for the content needed.
Instead most thesis authors follow the dashed arrows in
Figure 5.1, increasing the content of their work as their research
progresses, but often producing very complex, dense, and
underorganized text by the time they reach the middle of their
studies. Once they have coped with the value-added problem,
they can then painfully achieve progress on making their text
more accessible, and try to move closer to good professional
text during their final draft stage. But this indirect progress is
apt to be long-winded and fraught with difficulties. The advice
W R I T I N G C L E A R LY
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Accessibility
High
Low
Low
Value-added
High
Popular
writing
Sound
professional
text
Dense
writing
Ineffective
writing