here aims to help you follow instead the solid diagonal arrow in Figure 5.1, moving more directly both to meet the content standards of the PhD and to produce text which is accessible for readers.
The message in Figure 5.1 can be made a bit more subtle by noting that PhD authors (like academics in general) are professional communicators operating in a specialized environment.
There is no clear consensus on what constitutes good style, nor is it feasible to envisage one in the future, because there are
multiple conflicting style pressures operating upon doctoral students. The exact mix of these influences varies a good deal
from one discipline to another, sometimes from onetime period to another, and from one university location to the next.
But there is never any single resolution possible, no point where everyone will agree. There is no one best way out
there waiting to be discovered, only a balancing act to be achieved with one piece of text, then struck afresh with the next.
Four main pressures will unambiguously influence you towards producing text that can be easily appreciated these are shown in the left-hand column of Table 5.1: the more they are emphasized the more accessible your text becomes:
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Structural considerations, such as those discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, push you towards producing writing
with sufficient organizers, operating within a well-developed overall framework, for your own sake as an author as well as for readers.
◆
Logical and developmental pressures operate in
a large number of other ways, pushing you to chain your text together in a closely connected fashion which readers can follow as they move through it. Paragraphs articulate the argument as a sequence of unit of thought components (seethe checklists below for more on this issue. And there must be clear links from one paragraph or one sentence to the next, so that the argument builds up in a coherent fashion.
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Readability pressures are fora straightforwardly written text using understandable language and simple grammatical forms, again discussed below.
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Managing readers expectations is a consideration which encourages you to ask the need to know question (What 0 AUTHORING AP H D
do readers really need to know at this point) all the way through your text and then to deliver that, no more and no less. All these pressures make your style more accessible.
However, there are also three general pressures in academic work which will always push you towards reducing the accessibility of your text. As the right-hand
column in Table shows, the more these factors are emphasized the more difficult and the less accessible your text will seem:
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Professional authenticity is often seen (especially by younger scholars) in terms of mastering a specialized argot, learning and using an ‘alchemical’ terminology confined to insiders and hence incomprehensible to outsiders. Like all specialized vocabularies there is often a case for using professional jargon
where it is more precise, fine-tuned, and helps avoid the multiple meanings and normative or value connotations often inherent in equivalent ordinary language terms. But students often lose sight of this rationale behind a prolific use of complex vocabularies and grammatical constructions, designed only to demonstrate the writer’s qualifications as a member of the ‘initiated’.
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Reproducing the feel of an original text [or a case study or afield experience or a data set has a somewhat similar effect.
Here an analyst’s style of writing is pulled towards the subject she is covering. For example, an expositor of WRITING CLEARLY 7
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