Afterword264Glossary of maxims, terms and phrases

List of Figures and Tables
Figures
3.1
Interrelating the whole and the core The focus down model The opening out model The compromise model Three ways of viewing my home study Examples of a matrix structure The tree structure of a chapter How PhD students writing can develop Eight main types of chart (and when to use them How health boards compare How Scotland’s health boards compared in treating cataracts, 1998–9 financial year An example of a box-and-whisker chart comparing across variables An example of median-smoothing
191 Integrating themes An example of a journal article evaluation form
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Tables
5.1
How different pressures on authors improve or worsen the accessibility of their text How health boards compare How Scotland’s health boards compared in treating cataracts, 1998–9 financial year
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IX

Preface
T
he conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott once argued that:
A university is an association of persons, locally situated, engaged in caring for and attending to the whole intellectual capital which composes a civilization. It is concerned not merely to keep an intellectual inheritance intact, but to be continuously recovering what has been lost, restoring what has been neglected, collecting together what has been dissipated, repairing what has been corrupted, reconsidering, reshaping, reorganizing, making more intelligible, reissuing and reinvesting.
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Even if we leave aside Oakeshott’s evident antiquarian bias against any genuine or substantive innovation here, this mission statement is extensive enough. Indeed it is far too large to be credible in the era of a knowledge society, when so many other people (working in professions, companies, cultural and media organizations, governments, civil society groups or as independent writers and researchers) also attend to the intellectual capital of a civilization’.
This book is written in the hope of somewhat assisting any of these people who produce longer creative nonfiction texts.
It is especially directed to research students and their advisers or supervisors in universities. In undertaking or fostering the
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doctorate they still pursue the most demanding ideal of original research. Nothing was ever yet done that someone was not the first to do said John Stuart Mill, and that is what the doctoral ideal always has celebrated and always should.
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Each doctoral dissertation or thesis is to a large extent sui generis. But this book reflects a conviction that in the humanities, arts and social sciences research students also need to acquire a core of generic authoring skills that are substantially similar across diverse disciplines and topics. While research skills training has been formalized a great deal in the last two decades, these craft skills of authoring have been relatively neglected and left unsystematized.
For Oakeshott and other traditionalists my enterprise here will seem no more than another brick in the wall, a further step towards the bureaucratization of modern society foreseen by
Max Weber.
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But I believe that learning the craft of how to plan,
draft, write, develop, revise and rethink a thesis, and to finish it on time and to the standard required, is too important and too often mishandled a set of tasks to be left to the somewhat erratic and tangential models of induction and training that have prevailed in the past. There is along and honourable tradition now of scholarship reflecting upon itself. It stretches back through
Friedrich Schelling’s idealist vision in On University Studies, to
Francis Bacon’s musings in The Advancement of Learning, and before him to some significant reflective writings of the medieval thinkers and the ancient Greek philosophers.
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Now, as in those earlier times, scholars and students are not (cannot be)
immune to external influences and rationalization processes. In modern conditions universities can privilege their existing modes of generating and transmitting knowledge only so long as they are demonstrably the best of available alternatives.
Of course, completing a doctoral dissertation is also too personal and too subtle a process, too dependent upon students and supervisors or advisers, too variable across thesis topics, disciplines and university contexts, for any generic advice to encompass more than a tiny proportion of what a given doctoral student needs to help her develop as an author. But covering this fraction in a systematic way can still be very valuable,
time-saving and perhaps inspiring. PhD students know their own situation better than anyone else in the world. They can
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build on a small amount of ‘ready-made knowledge (as
Schelling termed it),
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picking and choosing those elements of this text that are relevant for their problems. I hope that this book may also help thesis advisers (with knowledge of a range of doctoral projects in their own discipline) to extend and systematize their thinking and guidance to students about authoring issues. So this book is written as a foil for students and their supervisors, as a grid or a framework which they can set against their own situations and experiences.
I have written up this advice in a modest but not a tentative way, because I know no other style that will seem honest or convincing. For some readers there is a risk that my suggestions may come across as overly slick or didactic, as if I am seeking to dictate what squads of PhD students should do. But I am acutely aware that readers always will and always should construct their own personalized versions of this text, adapting and domesticating what works for them, and setting to one side what does not fit. I have written like someone devising a menu fora restaurant, wanting to offer a treatment that is challenging and convincing, and an experience which is consistent and as complete as possible. But I am conscious that no one (in their right frame of mind) will pickup and consume more than a fraction of this menu at a time.
Lastly let me stress that this book is to a large extent a conduit for the ideas of many student and staff colleagues, whose wisdom and suggestions I have jotted down, adopted, tried out and probably shamelessly purloined over the years. I owe my heaviest debt to some 30 people who have worked with me on their own doctorates across two and a bit decades. They have taught me so much as they developed their ideas, not just about their thesis topics but also about our joint profession.
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In different ways, each of them will know the frailties and limitations of supervisors all too well, and I can only ask their tolerance of any gloss on their experience which this volume inadvertently gives. My next biggest debt is to colleagues at the London School of Economics and Political Science who have co-supervised
PhDs with me or co-taught the School-wide seminar on PhD
writing.
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From their very different styles of teaching and encouraging, I have learned much. I am grateful also to a wide range of other colleagues, who may recognize their own ideas and inputs
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