Authoring a PhD

than half of your text should be original-ish stuff, reporting primary research that you have undertaken, or making new and distinctive arguments that you can plausibly claim to have originated or developed. This is a very demanding standard, but a therapeutic one. It throws into sharp focus the need to concentrate on your thesis’s value-added elements. If you are doing a papers model dissertation then although your overall word length will be less, the ratio of core materials will be a good deal higher. Each of the four or five papers chapters you need to write will have to be around 75 percent original material to count as publishable, an even more demanding standard.
Do not end-load a big book thesis, leaving all the good bits squeezed into the last third or quarter of the text, as many people do. A recurring problem inmost humanities and social sciences disciplines is that students spend so much time and effort on writing lead-in materials that they create along, dull, low- value sequence of chapters before readers come across anything original. To check your own plan, count the number of chapters and the number of pages that readers must scan through before they come to the core. Overextending the lead-in stuff will also squeeze out the time needed to do your core research and write it up properly. Long legacy chapters (often literature reviews or methods descriptions inherited from your first one or two years of study) also restrict the text space you have available to set out the core properly.
Avoiding an end-loaded thesis is more difficult than it looks.
When beginning students are doing text planning they often multiply introductory literature reviews, or insert unneeded theoretical or ground-clearing or methodological chapters. It is easy to become convinced that you must somehow discuss and explain everything about your project before actually doing it.
To curb this tendency, try setting a maximum size limit for lead- in materials of two chapters. Obviously every big book thesis needs at least one lead-in and one lead-out chapter, usually the first and last respectively. With only eight chapters overall,
and a minimum size for the core of five chapters, that leaves you only one spare chapter that can hold additional lead-in materials – such as descriptive setup materials or an account of your methods. Less commonly the spare chapter might provide a second lead-out chapter, for instance where your research
P LAN NI N GA NI NT E GRATED THESIS 1

findings are very rich and require a lot of after-analysis. Note that if you schedule three chapters of lead-in material then you must either erode your core to half or less of your thesis (which is dangerous in meeting the doctoral level or leave yourself no space fora proper lead-out chapter or begin inflating the number of your chapters beyond what is ideal. Bear in mind the adverse impacts on professional readers of having to page through three whole chapters of secondary guff before they reach any worthwhile value-added elements. If you find that your initial thesis plan has four or more chapters of lead-in material, my advice would be scrap this schema at once and to rethink your approach from scratch.
Clearly identifying what is core in your thesis and what is not can be a psychologically taxing decision. You may tend to disguise from yourself that some chapters are not actually part of the core. Or you may enlarge your core inauthentically so as to include low value-added materials and get yourself up to having four or five apparently qualifying chapters. You need to guard against these tendencies, because being honest with yourself can be crucial for your research planning. For instance,
what happens if you can only identify three chapters out of eight in your thesis plan that genuinely seem to be value-added material You need to go back to the fundamental design of your project here, and see how you can produce one or two more core chapters. For instance, if you previously planned to undertake two case study or detailed analysis chapters, can you instead aim to undertake three or four case studies Or if you previously were using just one method for generating results,
should you think about employing another confirmatory method as well?
Being honest about your core is also vital to organizing your thesis effectively. Once you have the core firmly in focus you need to cue it and brand it heavily for readers. Your thesis title,
your abstract, your chapter headings and the contents page, your preface and the introductory chapter – all these key organizers need to be mobilized so as to highlight, setup and frame the core materials in your thesis. The need to know criterion should apply strongly here too. Ask of your lead-in chapters What do readers need to know in order to appreciate the value-added elements to come in the core chapters At the start of your PhD AUTHORING AP H D

studies cueing and branding the core is difficult, for you still will not have begun the key stages of your research. But these considerations need to come into even your early planning.
A key orientating device here is a rolling thesis synopsis of three or four pages. This document is for your own use and for your supervisors only. It greatly expands on your chapter plan or contents page by giving a paragraph of writing about what each chapter will say. The synopsis also expresses the main
‘storyline’ of your thesis. You should write your first synopsis as early as possible in your first year. Thereafter it is vital to keep revising it, so that it is permanently up to date and always captures your latest thinking. The whole point of a rolling synopsis is that you should never be writing or working into a vacuum. As you work on one chapter you always need to have a paragraph or so about what later unwritten chapters will cover, and an accessible summary also of the key points made in chapters already written. The rolling synopsis should always concentrate on summarizing your substantive arguments and conclusions – what you have claimed, what you have found out, and what you hope to discover.
Focusing down or opening out
Thinking is a struggle for order and at the same time for comprehensiveness.

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