Authoring a PhD

work. Making these components more apparent and ensuring that their significance is recognized by you as author and then communicated to readers will improve accessibility. You can start to overdo this concern, however,
if your originality ceases to be well grounded in your research, and instead you try to inject value-added
‘artificially’, as it were. It is not being genuinely original to coin new concepts or terminology that are not really needed or do little effective work, or to write overly dense or elliptical text that is difficult even for other professional readers to follow. Sometimes in the social sciences people can overdo things in an analogous way, by adopting a very formalized or algebraic way of expressing arguments where this is not strictly necessary or insightful. Stating things in equations rather than words will always cut your readership numbers – perhaps dramatically if you give no alternative,
informal account of your argument. So take the step to formalization only when it shows clear intellectual or analytic dividends. And even then try to provide in parallel the best possible intuitive explanation of the operations carried out in the formal analysis, and what they show.
Recognizing that there are multiple pressures acting on your style, and that they pull indifferent directions, may help you to appreciate how much any piece of professional writing entails striking a balance. All of the ten influences reviewed above are perfectly valid and legitimate ones to take into account in fixing on an appropriate writing style. None of them can simply be ignored. All of them will need to be pursued in a constrained way, going as far as you can in one dimension without damaging how your text appears in another dimension. And if your text reads wrong in someway, the solution you need will almost always entail tweaking your writing a bit to reemphasize a consideration that has become neglected. It will not usually entail scrapping completely the way that you do writing, or trying to start allover again in some completely inauthentic voice. If your face is not clean, wash it said
George Bernard Shaw, ‘don’t cut your head off.’
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Solutions for style problems are usually about rebalancing more than revolutionizing your writing 1 AUTHORING AP H D

Constructing paragraphs
The paragraph is a great art form. I’m very interested in paragraphs and I write paragraphs very,
very carefully.
Iris Murdoch
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One thought alone occupies us we cannot think of two things at the same time.
Blaise Pascal
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A paragraph is a unit of thought. In English writing, much more than in many other languages, the pattern of paragraphs is a very critical element in making an argument look coherent and well organized. In general a paragraph should make one point, or one component part of a single broader point. Where a paragraph handles instead miscellaneous unconnected points, as is sometimes necessary to round out an argument,
this role should be explicitly signalled to readers – because they will not expect it. Normally readers will expect a paragraph to have a single focus and one role. Overlong paragraphs, with too many sentences in them, have numerous drawbacks. Your text becomes underorganized and difficult to follow. And the internal focus of the paragraph becomes blurred, with too many different elements stuffed into a single bulging bag.
But paragraphs must not become too short either. A paragraph is not a sentence. It is a grouping of sentences, away of carving them up into connected sets so as to reduce the diversity of your thought to manageable proportions. If paragraphs reduce to just one or two sentences, then they cease to have this organizing rationale and become heteronomous cogs, turning as your argument progresses but not doing any useful work. For
English-speaking readers, short paragraphs in academic work will also make your work look bitty, fragmented and uncertain.
You will appear to be casting around for what to say, starting to make points but then not properly developing them.
The optimal length for paragraphs varies a great deal from one kind of writing to another. In journalism paragraphs will be short, often around 50 words and nevermore than 100 words,
because newspapers and magazines are set in narrow columns.
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Read any book-form reprint of a journalist’s collected writings and you will notice that these short paragraph lengths do notwork at all with larger pages. Instead the journalist’s text comes across as far too chopped-up, with up to six or seven paragraphs on each book page, and twelve or soon each double-page spread. Professional academic work is always configured for printing as books or journal articles. Here the printed page typically holds around 500 words. The ideal length for paragraphs is one that divides each page several times, but not too frenetically. A good aim point is hence around 150 words (half an A4
page printed double-spaced). But paragraph lengths of between and 200 words (a third to two-thirds of an A page) are perfectly acceptable.
A good way to keep track of paragraph lengths is to make sure that you can see each paragraph in its entirety on the screen of your PC (using 1.5 or double spacing to make your text easily readable. Where a paragraph goes appreciably longer than a single screenful, consider whether it should be split up. Where a paragraph occupies only a small part of your screen, ask yourself whether it should be merged with the paragraph before or after it. Never leave very short (one- or two- sentence) paragraphs hanging around, because they are disruptive of the overall flow of the text. Always integrate them into one or other of their neighbours.
The sequence of material within paragraphs should generally follow the Topic, Body, Wrap formula. The first topic sentence makes clear what the paragraph addresses, what its focus is on.
The main body of the paragraph comes next, giving reasoning, justification, elaboration, analysis or evidence. The final
‘wrap’ sentence makes clear the bottom-line message of the paragraph, the conclusion you have reached. Readers will always pay special attention to the opening, topic sentence of a paragraph, to glean as economically as they can what it is about. And they will also focus more on the last, wrap sentence,
trying to garner the guts of your argument without reading the whole paragraph in detail. Many readers may only eyeball the
‘body’ text, or will skim it in advance of detailed reading, in effect deciding whether to read it and how intensively. Such people may fasten on little else but the topic and wrap sentences, which hence need to be written with especial care 1 AUTHORING AP H D

Some PhD students bridle at this advice, arguing that it would be wrong for them to adjust their writing pattern to accommodate lazy or non-serious readers of this kind. But it is always an author’s job to maximize her readership and to convey information accessibly. It is wise to bear in mind that readers have very diverse needs, which they know best and which authors cannot anticipate fully. Skim reading, for instance, is an entirely rational strategy for all readers to adopt at some stage,
however serious-minded or committed to your topic they maybe. An author’s task is precisely to attract and retain skim readers or ‘eyeballers’, and to convert them into intensive readers by providing text which is as accessible and as interesting as possible. So as with chapters and with sections, the beginning and end parts of paragraphs are crucial.
It is especially important that each topic sentence should accurately characterize a paragraph and give readers a sense of progression as they move onto that paragraph from its predecessor. Avery common problem occurs when authors instead misplace the wrap sentence, so that it misleadingly appears as the topic sentence of the next paragraph. Here the author uses the first sentence of paragraph Y to sum up the previous paragraph Xor to link back to it, instead of to launch Y out on a distinctive point of its own. The effect is very off-putting and misleading for readers, because it suggests that paragraph Y
focuses on exactly the same theme as X, rather than moving the argument on.
Another very common bad paragraph beginning is to put some other author’s name as the very first word, leading off thus Smith (1997, p. 56) argues … ’. Sometimes even accomplished authors will construct a whole sequence of paragraphs on random author list lines, where every topic sentence starts in this obvious and boring fashion. The implied message that readers always get is not that you have read the literature but that the paragraphs concerned are completely derivative, lacking in all originality or value-added content, merely précising someone else’s work. You should eliminate derivative-looking paragraph starts wherever they occur in your text. Replace them with topic sentences focusing on the substantive point of the paragraph. Your text will also look more organized if instead of reporting the views of individual authors you categorize them
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accurately) into an appropriate school of thought. The paragraph can then set out what that school of thought or intellectual position stands for, and only cite the relevant authors in support of this characterization. Where references are needed try always to place them at the very end of sentences, preferably in the Harvard format or by using endnotes (see next section. You may sometimes need to introduce the names of schools or authors into your main text outside references, but do so sparingly.
The wrap sentences at the end of paragraphs are often easier to write than the start, because you now have the paragraph text to goon. But wrap sentences should not just reiterate what has already been said. Readers are not goldfish. They will perfectly remember what you have written, especially when your paragraphs are not too ponderous or too long. Instead the wrap sentence should close the paragraph as a unit of thought, and clinch or reinforce its main point. It should have at least a little added value of its own. A last sentence is a good place to give a more clear-cut evaluative judgement, or to assess the significance of what has been established in the paragraph. It is a chance fora wise author to draw together the phenomena covered in the paragraph as a whole (stand back and spot the shape of the wood around here, rather than just itemizing details
(inspecting trees in closeup, one after another).

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