Authoring a PhD

Writing sentences
Words differently arranged have a different 
meaning, and meanings differently arranged 
have different effects.
Blaise Pascal
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In English sentences the inner core is a subject linked to a verb
linked to an object: Subject–Verb–Object. Different languages
have different conventions. But if you want to write straight-
forward and accessible English sentences, these three compo-
nents should be closely bonded together. This means that a real
subject, main verb, and real object should always be clearly
identifiable. There must be no equivocation about who or what
is the subject of the sentence. Fake or implicit subjects can arise
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in several ways. Some thesis authors pick up the passive verb
forms and anonymized subjects favoured by government
bureaucracies or lawyers: ‘It was felt that …’, ‘It was decided
that …’. Others create implied subjects by verbal means, such
as using ‘this’ without an accompanying noun as the subject:
‘This entailed …’. All such usages need to be carefully excised.
There must be no ambiguity either about which is the main
verb. It should be highlighted in the sentence structure, and it
should be clearly superior in importance to any other second-
ary verb forms included in the sentence. Not all sentences have
objects, but most do and it is worth following through the same
discipline for them also. Do not interpose any other element
between subject, verb and object. Nothing should impair their
double-bonding or break up the sentence core. This rule means
that qualifying or subordinate clauses are always best placed at
the beginning or ends of sentences, never in the middle, which
should be reserved for the core. And other terms or phrases 
in sentences, such as adjectives and qualifier or descriptor words,
should generally be placed before or after the subject/verb/
object also.
In order to keep the subject/verb/object core clearly visible,
sentences should not get too long and they should have the
simplest feasible grammatical construction. Many PhD students
seem to feel that writing professional-looking text requires
them to construct great, rambling sentences. The tone of their
writing differs markedly from their conversational approach. 
It becomes replete with subordinate or qualifying clauses, so
that their sentences require complex grammatical construc-
tions to hold them together. All the main word-processing
packages have facilities which will identify for you the average
number of words per sentence in any piece of text, and usually
the maximum sentence length also. (Look under ‘Tools’ for the
‘Word Count’ facility in Microsoft’s Word, and under
‘Document Information’ in Wordperfect.) My suggested rule of
thumb here is that you should never write a sentence longer
than 40 words, and that you should aim for an ideal sentence
length of around 20 words. Wherever a sentence is more than
40 words long, you should always chunk it up into two or three
sentences. Where it is between 20 and 40 words, you should
assess if it would be better split into two. Problems with long
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sentences usually reflect either the author writing inauthenti-
cally in a pompous style, or trying to do too many things
within a single sentence, typically by loading in qualifying
clauses beginning with ‘although’, ‘however’ and so on. A 
sentence should express a single thought or proposition, not
multiple ones.
Each sentence is also important as a fundamental building
block of your thesis as a whole. You should routinely run a
checklist over new sentences in turn to ensure that you main-
tain quality control. The basic ethos here is that sentences can
only do one of three things for you – build, blur or corrode.
They can build the thesis, forming part of the coral-reef accre-
tions of your core argument. Or they can blur the thesis, 
creating patches of text (like repetitions) which perhaps are not
actively damaging but which fail to advance the argument. 
Or they can corrode your argument, mis-stating propositions
and actively weakening your chances of getting a doctorate.
Unless a sentence builds your thesis, you are best cutting it out.
You must ruthlessly eliminate all corrosive sentences, which are
liabilities if left alone. You may need to retain a few blurring
sentences with little new content, to help give continuity or to
make rhetorical linkages at certain points.
Every author has a meaning in which all the 
contradictory passages agree, or he [or she] has no
meaning at all.