Authoring a PhD

say it once and say it right
’ approach urges you not to
blur the argumentative impact of a single connected set of
points about X by dissipating them in dribs and drabs, a
little bit here and then again there and somewhere else a
third time. Instead you should pull together all the related
little ‘x’s into one, big bloc X argument. In weakly organized
text this idea can again be a great force for good. Nothing is
so corrosive of readers’ confidence in an author than the
feeling that they are simply re-encountering material already
described in a disorganized text, or are revisiting in only a
marginally varied form points made already, perhaps for the
third, fourth or fifth time. But some degree of linkaging
back and forth across a text is inevitable and necessary. For
instance, cross-referencing and short ‘reminder’ passages can
often be justified on the ‘need to know’ criterion. Radically
overdoing a ‘say it once and say it right’ logic may
sometimes push an already well-structured text into
inaccessibility, denying readers the ‘warm-up’ links that they
need to grasp a wider pattern of argument.
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A concern to maximize the originality
of your text is a positive
impulse so long as it is well-grounded and your efforts focus
on clarifying and framing the value-added elements of your
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work. Making these components more apparent and
ensuring that their significance is recognized by you as
author and then communicated to readers will improve
accessibility. You can start to overdo this concern, however,
if your originality ceases to be well grounded in your
research, and instead you try to inject value-added
‘artificially’, as it were. It is not being genuinely original to
coin new concepts or terminology that are not really needed
or do little effective work, or to write overly dense or
elliptical text that is difficult even for other professional
readers to follow. Sometimes in the social sciences people
can overdo things in an analogous way, by adopting a very
formalized or algebraic way of expressing arguments where
this is not strictly necessary or insightful. Stating things in
equations rather than words will always cut your readership
numbers – perhaps dramatically if you give no alternative,
informal account of your argument. So take the step to
formalization only when it shows clear intellectual or
analytic dividends. And even then try to provide in parallel
the best possible intuitive explanation of the operations
carried out in the formal analysis, and what they show.
Recognizing that there are multiple pressures acting on your
style, and that they pull in different directions, may help you
to appreciate how much any piece of professional writing
entails striking a balance. All of the ten influences reviewed
above are perfectly valid and legitimate ones to take into
account in fixing on an appropriate writing style. None of them
can simply be ignored. All of them will need to be pursued in a
constrained way, going as far as you can in one dimension
without damaging how your text appears in another dimen-
sion. And if your text reads wrong in some way, the solution
you need will almost always entail tweaking your writing a bit
to re-emphasize a consideration that has become neglected. It
will not usually entail scrapping completely the way that you
do writing, or trying to start all over again in some completely
inauthentic voice. ‘If your face is not clean, wash it,’ said
George Bernard Shaw, ‘don’t cut your head off.’
4
Solutions for
style problems are usually about rebalancing more than revolu-
tionizing your writing.
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