Authoring a PhD

Implementing effective chapter structures is closely bound up with writing and producing text more generally. But to have a clear idea of what you are doing and some rules of thumb of the kind set out here is a great advantage when starting out on the writing process. It should generate more initial ideas for you to tryout. In the next chapter I carry the discussion down to an even more detailed level of writing, looking at two issues which often prove troublesome for doctoral students – writing in a good style, and including simple and efficient scholarly references 0 AUTHORING AP H D
Chapter 2
Section Section Section 2.3
Conclusions
Figure 4.1
The tree structure of a chapter

Writing Clearly Style and
Referencing Issues
Poorer writers have fewer readers.
Robert J. Sternberg
1
A
n author with a well-organized piece of text must still pass two further hurdles before gaining credibility or approval in academic professional circles. The first is a test of style. Does the author communicate fluently, convincingly and appealingly in the professional manner appropriate for her discipline?
Quite where successor failure should be determined here is difficult to specify in any general way. Evaluations of good or bad writing style are notoriously subjective. Much ink has been spilt on good style for novelists and creative writers (see Further
Reading on p. 287 for some style manuals. But this literature offers little help to authors of doctoral theses or other large professional bits of text, like academic books. However, it is still possible to pull together some generally useful advice about conflicting style pressures, and some sensible ways of proceeding at a paragraph-by-paragraph, or sentence-by-sentence level,
as I try to do in the first part of this chapter.
The second hurdle is a test of scholarship, more important perhaps in a PhD thesis than in any other piece of academic writing. Does the author acknowledge sources for her arguments or evidence Does she chart her intellectual influences comprehensively and in an appropriate format Obtrusive referencing is often one of the most obvious hallmarks of academic text, something that sets it apart from everything else. As a result PhD students often overdo referencing, and 5

they can get trapped into embracing overelaborate systems or mystifying the issues involved. But in stark contrast to stylistic issues, good referencing practice can be clearly and objectively defined in terms of key principles. In the second part of the chapter I show how two simple core referencing systems meet these needs.
The elements of good research style
Below the zoom level of the chapter and the section, we enter the realm of new and smaller organizing entities, the paragraph and the sentence. Good style consists of stringing these tiny elements together in connected chains that strike the maximum number of other people, your achieved readers, as logical,
meaningful, accessible and plausible. But it is wise to acknowledge from the outset that there is no single route to good style.
Such judgements are particular, varying with the nature of the materials, the readership and the author’s purposes. It would be easy to say also that good style is a subjective issue, and to adopt a philosophy of each to their own taste. But underneath this appearance of irreconcilable diversity I actually think there lie some more fundamental authoring dilemmas in professional writing. I begin by exploring these divergent style pressures in doctoral work. I move onto some checklists of style issues particularly relevant for writing dissertations, at the level of paragraphs, then sentences, and last vocabulary.
Conflicting style pressures
Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on … Writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
Alain de Botton
2
1 0 AUTHORING AP H D

An approximate but still useful view of the basic tension in professional and academic writing is shown in Figure Accessibility considerations (graphed on the horizontal axis)
tend to make your writing clearer and easier to follow. Here they are shown pulling at right angles to ‘value-added’ considerations
(shown on the vertical axis, which normally tend to make your text more packed with content. (This aspect of the diagram is a graphical oversimplification. Accessibility and value-added considerations certainly pull indifferent directions, but whether they pull in such sharply contrasted directions is a moot point.)
Writing which is neither accessible nor contentful is simply ineffective, and this is often where doctoral students start off. Few
PhD students move rightwards along the horizontal axis following the dotted arrow towards popular writing (highly accessible but low content. However, every year there area certain number of fluent and competent writers who find themselves undershooting the doctoral standard for the content needed.
Instead most thesis authors follow the dashed arrows in
Figure 5.1, increasing the content of their work as their research progresses, but often producing very complex, dense, and underorganized text by the time they reach the middle of their studies. Once they have coped with the value-added problem,
they can then painfully achieve progress on making their text more accessible, and try to move closer to good professional text during their final draft stage. But this indirect progress is apt to be long-winded and fraught with difficulties. The advice
W RI TING CLEARLY 5
Accessibility
High
Low
Low
Value-added
High
Popular writing
Sound professional text
Dense writing
Ineffective writing

Download 2.39 Mb.

Share with your friends: