Authoring a PhD

Figure 5.1
How PhD students’ writing can develop

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here aims to help you follow instead the solid diagonal arrow
in Figure 5.1, moving more directly both to meet the content
standards of the PhD and to produce text which is accessible for
readers.
The message in Figure 5.1 can be made a bit more subtle by
noting that PhD authors (like academics in general) are profes-
sional communicators operating in a specialized environment.
There is no clear consensus on what constitutes good style, nor
is it feasible to envisage one in the future, because there are 
multiple
conflicting style pressures operating upon doctoral 
students. The exact mix of these influences varies a good deal
from one discipline to another, sometimes from one time
period to another, and from one university location to the next.
But there is never any single resolution possible, no point
where everyone will agree. There is no ‘one best way’ out there
waiting to be discovered, only a balancing act to be achieved
with one piece of text, then struck afresh with the next.
Four main pressures will unambiguously influence you
towards producing text that can be easily appreciated; these are
shown in the left-hand column of Table 5.1: the more they are
emphasized the more accessible your text becomes:
◆
Structural considerations
, such as those discussed in 
Chapters 3 and 4, push you towards producing writing 
with sufficient organizers, operating within a well-developed
overall framework, for your own sake as an author as well as
for readers.
◆
Logical and developmental pressures
operate in a large number
of other ways, pushing you to chain your text together in a
closely connected fashion which readers can follow as they
move through it. Paragraphs articulate the argument as a
sequence of ‘unit of thought’ components (see the checklists
below for more on this issue). And there must be clear links
from one paragraph or one sentence to the next, so that the
argument builds up in a coherent fashion.
◆
Readability
pressures are for a straightforwardly written text
using understandable language and simple grammatical
forms, again discussed below.
◆
Managing readers’ expectations
is a consideration which
encourages you to ask the ‘need to know’ question (‘What
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do readers really need to know at this point?’) all the way
through your text; and then to deliver that, no more and no
less. All these pressures make your style more accessible.
However, there are also three general pressures in academic
work which will always push you towards reducing the accessi-
bility of your text. As the right-hand column in Table 5.1
shows, the more these factors are emphasized the more difficult
and the less accessible your text will seem:
◆
Professional authenticity
is often seen (especially by younger
scholars) in terms of mastering a specialized argot, learning
and using an ‘alchemical’ terminology confined to insiders
and hence incomprehensible to outsiders. Like all
specialized vocabularies there is often a case for using
professional jargon where it is more precise, fine-tuned, and
helps avoid the multiple meanings and normative or value
connotations often inherent in equivalent ordinary
language terms. But students often lose sight of this
rationale behind a prolific use of complex vocabularies and
grammatical constructions, designed only to demonstrate
the writer’s qualifications as a member of the ‘initiated’.
◆
Reproducing the feel of an original text
[or a case study or a
field experience or a data set] has a somewhat similar effect.
Here an analyst’s style of writing is pulled towards the
subject she is covering. For example, an expositor of 
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◆
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