Figure 3.5Three ways of viewing my home study

Bad points
(e.g. eclectic furniture,
clutter overload)
Services (e.g. light,
windows, electricals)
Hard furnishings
(e.g. shelves, filing cabinets)
Filing cabinets
PC
Desk
Chair
Box files
Printer
More books
Notebook PC
Window

become very long-winded and hard to organize mentally. These problems may perhaps lead you to think that I am setting up a straw person to knockdown here, and that in practice in advanced humanities and social science research it would be very hard to find people utilizing this kind of pattern of explanation.
Think again. Most theses in these disciplines still follow a descriptive approach, in the sense defined above, in that their fundamental organization is set externally to the author, by the way things are arranged in the real world. Key forms of a descriptive approach are:
◆
Narrative theses, which follow the pattern of a storyline set by an external work or by another author – for example, a critical exposition discussing Act 1 of a play, followed by Act 2, then Act 3, etc. This pattern is popular in literature studies.
◆
Chronological theses, which essentially let a historical sequence dictate their structure, beginning at the beginning and going on until they come to the end. This pattern is prevalent in historical studies and related fields.
◆
Institutional theses or those with a guidebook structure which replicate the pattern of an organization chart, or the relationships among different institutions, or the structure of apiece of legislation or a set of regulations, in order to trace out its working in loving detail. This pattern is popular in law, public administration, social policy, and so on.
Other descriptive patterns can be envisaged, for instance spatially organized work in geographical studies. Less commonly found at whole-thesis level is the most popular descriptive pattern in masters level or undergraduate essays, the random sequence of authors. Here the order in which sources are discussed, and their relative weighting in the essay, are both determined by which sources students were able to access in the library that week in the time available to do the essay. So a lot is written about sources which were accessed first rather less about sources which the student only had a short time to absorb and least of all is said about sources which the student is only pretending to have read. But even the random sequence of authors pattern often recurs over sections of a thesis AUTHORING AP H D

In lower level university studies with exams as a key assessment method, and even for taught courses at PhD level, adopting a descriptive approach to organizing your ideas and sequencing your work is a popular but very damaging habit. It is prevalent because it seems a lazy way. You just pickup an already given or perhaps obvious structure existing out there, and organize your workaround it. It is damaging because a descriptive approach demands a very high load of facts or other materials to make it work well, and yet it often becomes hard for authors to control and hence ends up looking very disorganized. Just as the things which sit next to each other in my study form an eclectic list,
hard for readers to follow or understand, so things which sit next to each other in historical time or institutional space maybe all jumbled up thematically or analytically.
But in big book theses these difficulties are greatly ameliorated. The space and time constraints of lower level university studies are not so pressing at PhD level – indeed they may not seem to be present at all to beginning students. At doctoral level descriptive explanations can work better, because you can assemble the mass of facts and evidence needed to make the approach look comprehensive and non-naïve. In addition, some kinds of descriptive (externally structured) explanation are clearly popular with and accessible to a wide range of readers, especially historical and narrative writing. The most chronological of all A to Z
storylines are biographies, which sell very widely.
Yet to make a descriptive structure work inmost of the humanities and soft social sciences in fact demands very high level authoring skills. In very subtle ways you need to first articulate and then weave into your meta-level descriptive account either analytic concepts or argumentative themes. This thematization of what seem to be just narrative, chronologies or ‘guidebook’
texts is an art that is harder than it looks. If you have not reached this high level of attainment then you should always examine carefully the three alternative approaches below before concluding that you can successfully make a descriptive structure work in your thesis. The danger is that your thesis argument flounders in a disorganized fashion, presenting a jumble of complexities in which a single not very important feature (like temporal proximity in historical accounts or institutional connected- ness in guidebook arguments) is prioritized over everything else.
P LAN NI N GA NI NT E GRATED THESIS 7

Such theses can often seem to be structured by no clear internal or intellectual pattern of organization.

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