Authoring a PhD

Friedrich Nietzsche
17
How many writing sessions do you need to accomplish the
physical task of banging out 80,000 words in a coherent whole?
Different perspectives suggest very diverse answers. An encour-
aging way of looking at things sees a thesis as ‘a mountain with
steps’, capable of being surmounted a bit at a time. Zerubavel
points out that if you can write even 500 words in each writing
session, you will need only 160 sessions to complete 80,000
words.
18
Even if every word has to be redrafted twice from
scratch, you will still only require 320 sessions. Seen in this
salami-slicing light the wonder is that it commonly takes three
or four years of full-time work to find the space for these few
hundred necessary writing sessions, when there are 200 work-
ing days per year. If you can manage 1000 words per day, which
is perfectly feasible for all but the most painstaking or complex
D E V E L O P I N G Y O U R T E X T
◆
1 5 1

---

bits of text, then writing the whole thesis twice over should
only take 160 days. And at 2000 words a day the time involved
shrinks to just 80 days.
But look at how much time you have in a day and the 
perspective is not so benign. Allow 7.5 hours for sleep every
night, the current average for people in the USA, about an hour
short of what is medically best for us. That leaves a total of 1440
waking minutes per day, according to James Gleick.
19
Say we
take as a rule of thumb the idea that even the simplest of daily
tasks takes somewhat under five minutes (having a shower,
brushing your teeth, making a cup of coffee). Then in a normal
day we can each of us only do 300 things, across every life activ-
ity we have. In a four-hour writing session you can do maybe 
50 things – like switching on your PC and waiting for it to lum-
ber into life, checking a reference, writing a couple of sentences,
editing a paragraph, making a note or two (that is 10 per cent
of your time gone already). Yet it is by combining a myriad such
protean activities that an integrated professional text has to be
constructed.
How much you manage to do in any writing session will be
shaped by many different influences. The traditional mind/body
way of looking at scholarly pursuits pictures a struggle between
your intellectual push to complete authoring tasks and the phys-
ical artificiality of spending long hours in front of a PC or sitting
writing at a desk (see the quote from Aquinas below). There is
something in this perspective, since writing on your own is nor-
mally a more sedentary activity than (say) working in an office,
especially if family distractions pen you up in your study in
order to get any writing done at all. You can counteract these
tendencies, however, by ensuring that even on heavy writing
days you insert time outside your writing sessions for walks,
fresh air, getting out and about, going to the gym or the swim-
ming pool, or whatever works best in helping you focus. It is
important to remember that authoring is not a leisure activity,
but work. You need to be fit and well to do authoring properly,
just as much as for more physically demanding jobs.
The soul has an urge to know, and the body an
inclination to shirk the effort involved.
St Thomas Aquinas
20
1 5 2
◆
A U T H O R I N G A P H D

---

The whole calamity of man comes from one 
single thing, that he [or she] cannot keep quiet 
in a room.
Blaise Pascal
21
Our thinking subject is not corporeal.
Immanuel Kant
22
The mind/body way of picturing difficulties in writing is far
too crude, though. Normally problems in concentrating and
focusing, getting up steam and then keeping going, are the
results not of physical resistances to being chained to the key-
board or the desk but of mental cross-pressures. Your progress
will depend most upon your intellectual morale (itself closely
reflecting how the work is going) and the level to which other
worries and business impede upon you. These are the influ-
ences which tend to generate displacement behaviour instead of
writing (such as overperfecting earlier bits of text, refiling your
notes and papers, or breaking off for a cup of coffee and some
light-relief daytime TV). Making an effort to persist with writing
for your full session length is usually a worthwhile response to
such pressures. Taking some small steps can also strengthen your
morale by giving you more perceptible indicators of progress
and better incentives to continue. For instance, find the start-
ing number of words in your chapter (using the ‘Tools/Word
Count’ buttons in Word or the ‘document information’ button
in Wordperfect), and then type it into the beginning or end of
your document file. Then update the word count at the end of
each session, and perhaps keep a record of the words racked up.
Comparing these figures with your target level also guards
against overwriting, otherwise an important source of potential
extra delay for hard-working people.
Keeping up your intellectual morale can be very difficult
while working up a chapter on your own. Planning the struc-
ture of a new piece of text tends to be an optimistic stage,
because you are still shielded from difficulties of implementa-
tion. But writing up raw text for the first time tends to be inher-
ently dispiriting, especially if you subscribe to the ‘writing
equals one-off creation’ myth and hence do not take account of
the multi-stage nature of the authoring process. In looking at
D E V E L O P I N G Y O U R T E X T
◆
1 5 3

---

last session’s raw text try to bear in mind the extent to which
you will normally be able to edit, revise, upgrade and remodel
your work. You can always make big changes by taking out 
infelicities, adding in strengthening evidence, developing and
extending arguments, formalizing or systematizing frameworks
for analysis, uncovering new relationships in your data, boost-
ing scholarly referencing, and so on.
Work makes the companion.
Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe
23
In order that people may be happy in their work,
these three things are needed:
they must be fit for it;
they must not do too much of it; and
they must have a sense of success in it
– not a doubtful sense, such as needs some 
testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure
sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has
been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the
world may say or think about it.
W. H. Auden
24
As you are writing up new text you are likely to be strongly
influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by ideas about how
your readership or audience might respond to what you are 
saying. Normally these are constructive influences, for instance,
if you think seriously about how to represent ideas to readers,
or use the ‘need to know’ criterion to set an appropriate level of
detail for your argument. Anticipating how professional readers
will interpret your text is also a vital element in composing raw
prose and then editing it into a more acceptable form. But it is
also possible for this thinking ahead to become overdone and
disabling, creating a ‘writer’s block’ syndrome where authors
are so constrained by their readership’s anticipated reactions
that they have difficulty getting any text up on screen at all, or
showing what text they have got to other people. The good
news is that this problem is strongly linked to previous success
or anxiety about your reputation. So perhaps it more com-
monly afflicts established authors in middle age trying to repeat
earlier successes than it does young people just starting out. 
1 5 4
◆
A U T H O R I N G A P H D

---

But the off-putting and obsessional character of the doctorate in
general, especially when a ‘big book’ thesis is involved, probably
more than makes up for this age-protection effect.
Trouble has no necessary connection with 
discouragement – discouragement has a germ of its
own, as different from trouble as arthritis is from a
stiff joint.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
25
Some people misinterpret what writer’s block is.
They assume you can’t think of a single thing. Not
true. You can think of hundreds of things. You just
don’t like any of them.
Neil Simon
26