Authoring a PhD

Blaise Pascal
8
Three other questions are helpful to bear in mind when checking:
◆
Is the sentence 
correct
? Is it argumentatively substantive and
logically put? Is it factually right? Do all parts of the
sentence work together to meet these tests?
◆
Is it 
appropriate
for PhD level work? Some propositions may
be factually true or argumentatively sound, but just not
what we would expect to see people saying or discussing at
the doctoral level. For instance, we would not expect a car
engine designer to tell us that: ‘Internal combustion engines
go brmm, brmm you know’ – even though that is
completely correct.
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Does the sentence 
say exactly what you want
? Read it aloud.
If anything niggles at the back of your mind, if you have
some undefined uncertainty about the sentence, always
rewrite it.
Choosing vocabulary
We only think through the medium of words.
Abbé Etienne de Condillac
9
How you pick words makes a difference to how sentences work.
Doctoral authors are renowned for overusing jargon and 
producing pompous prose, perhaps wrongly but certainly not
without some cause. In the humanities and social sciences
many people routinely substitute longer noun forms of words
where they could use short verb forms, saying ‘configuration’
instead of ‘configuring’ just to get an extra syllable. Or they
choose complex forms of words which sound more abstruse, 
for very little reason. For instance, ‘methodology’ means the
science or study of methods, but many social scientists use it
just to replace ‘method’ itself, because it seems to give a more
‘professional’ feel to do so.
You cannot avoid necessary jargon in your discipline, nor
should you try to do so. Academic jargon often does specialist
things, has more precise meanings and allows expositions or
conversations to quickly reach targetted subjects which would
be hard to reach or cumbersome to define in other ways. But
you should maintain a constant check that you fully appreciate
the meanings of words you use. Do not pointlessly substitute
portentous vocabulary for ordinary language words where 
there is no extra value in doing so. In general, try to write as
you would speak if you were sitting across the table from some-
one in your discipline and giving a carefully grammatical oral
explanation of your work. Trying for a professional ‘voice’ more
strained or more pompous than you would use in such a 
considered conversation will not make your work seem more
doctoral. It will make it seem inauthentic, and perhaps
ungrounded, since you will be more likely to make mistakes in
meaning.
W R I T I N G C L E A R LY
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No wise man [or woman] will wish to bring more
long words into the world.
G. K. Chesterton
10
Managing verb forms and tenses well can have important
consequences for your text. Using active verb forms with real
subjects will make your text much more lively, and fits closely
with the subject/verb/object focus above. You should strictly
avoid passive verb forms because they tend to create avoidable
ambiguities. If you are using Microsoft Word the spellchecker
facility will automatically highlight all the passive sentences in
your text, and offer a more active way of saying the same thing:
make sure that you do not just click ‘Ignore’ at these points. If
your doctorate is in history or any of the social sciences, you can
save yourself a lot of time by writing chiefly in the past tense. If
you write any passages in the present tense about real-world
events or situations, then developments after you write are likely
to render what you say anachronistic or inaccurate within the
span of your research period. During the time that your thesis
sits on library shelves in unpublished or published forms this
danger obviously grows. If you write: ‘In autumn 2001 American
public opinion supported military intervention in Afghanistan’,
your proposition will not go out of date. Whereas if you write:
‘The British public supports limited military intervention in
Iraq’ (which was true in early 2002), the statement is falsified
when a majority of people no longer endorse this strategy. Never
use the pluperfect tense, and avoid the future conditional form
beloved of biographers: ‘In a small cottage a new baby cried,
who would in less than two decades become a force in world 
history.’ In other humanities disciplines, such as literature or
cultural studies, these rules may not apply universally. But it
may still pay to be cautious about writing in the present tense.
Intellectuals are prone to some particular style lapses, which
can sometimes spill over into quite serious flaws in reasoning.
People who use greater than normal levels of theorization and
abstraction can sometimes commit two classic errors. ‘Reification’
means that you convert an abstraction into a ‘thing’, to which
you then ascribe agency, the power to act, as in: ‘Society can 
exact a price for non-conformity.’ It is a short step from there to
‘anthropomorphism’, where you ascribe human capacities or
attributes to non-human entities, as in: ‘A learning organization
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always wants to look after itself.’ Combining the two, you can
first convert an abstraction into a thing, and then endow this
artificial agent with humanlike qualities, as in: ‘The hurt done
to society causes it to seek retribution.’ Each of these conceptual
slips creates a broad pathway to writing absurd propositions.
A closely related problem concerns the handling of 
collectivities. Academics should know better than to use general-
izing stereotypes. But in fact when discussing the behaviour of
groups of people they often write in a style using the ‘archetypal
singular’. Here a statement is made about the behaviour of a
mythical archetype who somehow stands for all the people 
occupying a certain role or having certain characteristics. For
instance: ‘The bureaucrat is interested primarily in achieving a
quiet life and a comfortable sinecure, whereas the politician seeks
only to be re-elected.’ Or: ‘The writer’s lot is not a happy one.’
The problem here is that any statement using an archetypal sin-
gular is only true if