Authoring a PhD

in several ways. Some thesis authors pickup the passive verb forms and anonymized subjects favoured by government bureaucracies or lawyers It was felt that …’, It was decided that …’. Others create implied subjects by verbal means, such as using this without an accompanying noun as the subject:
‘This entailed …’. All such usages need to be carefully excised.
There must be no ambiguity either about which is the main verb. It should be highlighted in the sentence structure, and it should be clearly superior in importance to any other secondary verb forms included in the sentence. Not all sentences have objects, but most do and it is worth following through the same discipline for them also. Do not interpose any other element between subject, verb and object. Nothing should impair their double-bonding or breakup the sentence core. This rule means that qualifying or subordinate clauses are always best placed at the beginning or ends of sentences, never in the middle, which should be reserved for the core. And other terms or phrases in sentences, such as adjectives and qualifier or descriptor words,
should generally be placed before or after the subject/verb/
object also.
In order to keep the subject/verb/object core clearly visible,
sentences should not get too long and they should have the simplest feasible grammatical construction. Many PhD students seem to feel that writing professional-looking text requires them to construct great, rambling sentences. The tone of their writing differs markedly from their conversational approach. It becomes replete with subordinate or qualifying clauses, so that their sentences require complex grammatical constructions to hold them together. All the main word-processing packages have facilities which will identify for you the average number of words per sentence in any piece of text, and usually the maximum sentence length also. (Look under Tools for the
‘Word Count facility in Microsoft’s Word, and under
‘Document Information in Wordperfect.) My suggested rule of thumb here is that you should never write a sentence longer than 40 words, and that you should aim for an ideal sentence length of around 20 words. Wherever a sentence is more than words long, you should always chunk it up into two or three sentences. Where it is between 20 and 40 words, you should assess if it would be better split into two. Problems with long
W RI TING CLEARLY 5

sentences usually reflect either the author writing inauthenti- cally in a pompous style, or trying to do too many things within a single sentence, typically by loading in qualifying clauses beginning with although, however and soon. A sentence should express a single thought or proposition, not multiple ones.
Each sentence is also important as a fundamental building block of your thesis as a whole. You should routinely run a checklist over new sentences in turn to ensure that you maintain quality control. The basic ethos here is that sentences can only do one of three things for you – build, blur or corrode.
They can build the thesis, forming part of the coral-reef accretions of your core argument. Or they can blur the thesis, creating patches of text (like repetitions) which perhaps are not actively damaging but which fail to advance the argument. Or they can corrode your argument, misstating propositions and actively weakening your chances of getting a doctorate.
Unless a sentence builds your thesis, you are best cutting it out.
You must ruthlessly eliminate all corrosive sentences, which are liabilities if left alone. You may need to retain a few blurring sentences with little new content, to help give continuity or to make rhetorical linkages at certain points.
Every author has a meaning in which all the contradictory passages agree, or he or she has no meaning at all.

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