Authoring a PhD

Does the sentence say exactly what you want? Read it aloud.
If anything niggles at the back of your mind, if you have some undefined uncertainty about the sentence, always rewrite it.
Choosing vocabulary
We only think through the medium of words.
Abbé Etienne de Condillac
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How you pick words makes a difference to how sentences work.
Doctoral authors are renowned for overusing jargon and producing pompous prose, perhaps wrongly but certainly not without some cause. In the humanities and social sciences many people routinely substitute longer noun forms of words where they could use short verb forms, saying ‘configuration’
instead of configuring just to get an extra syllable. Or they choose complex forms of words which sound more abstruse, for very little reason. For instance, methodology means the science or study of methods, but many social scientists use it just to replace method itself, because it seems to give a more
‘professional’ feel to do so.
You cannot avoid necessary jargon in your discipline, nor should you try to do so. Academic jargon often does specialist things, has more precise meanings and allows expositions or conversations to quickly reach targetted subjects which would be hard to reach or cumbersome to define in other ways. But you should maintain a constant check that you fully appreciate the meanings of words you use. Do not pointlessly substitute portentous vocabulary for ordinary language words where there is no extra value in doing so. In general, try to write as you would speak if you were sitting across the table from someone in your discipline and giving a carefully grammatical oral explanation of your work. Trying fora professional voice more strained or more pompous than you would use in such a considered conversation will not make your work seem more doctoral. It will make it seem inauthentic, and perhaps ungrounded, since you will be more likely to make mistakes in meaning.
W RI TING CLEARLY 7

Nowise manor woman will wish to bring more long words into the world.
G. K. Chesterton
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Managing verb forms and tenses well can have important consequences for your text. Using active verb forms with real subjects will make your text much more lively, and fits closely with the subject/verb/object focus above. You should strictly avoid passive verb forms because they tend to create avoidable ambiguities. If you are using Microsoft Word the spellchecker facility will automatically highlight all the passive sentences in your text, and offer a more active way of saying the same thing:
make sure that you do not just click Ignore at these points. If your doctorate is in history or any of the social sciences, you can save yourself a lot of time by writing chiefly in the past tense. If you write any passages in the present tense about real-world events or situations, then developments after you write are likely to render what you say anachronistic or inaccurate within the span of your research period. During the time that your thesis sits on library shelves in unpublished or published forms this danger obviously grows. If you write In autumn 2001 American public opinion supported military intervention in Afghanistan’,
your proposition will not go out of date. Whereas if you write:
‘The British public supports limited military intervention in
Iraq’ (which was true in early 2002), the statement is falsified when a majority of people no longer endorse this strategy. Never use the pluperfect tense, and avoid the future conditional form beloved of biographers Ina small cottage anew baby cried,
who would in less than two decades become a force in world history In other humanities disciplines, such as literature or cultural studies, these rules may not apply universally. But it may still pay to be cautious about writing in the present tense.
Intellectuals are prone to some particular style lapses, which can sometimes spillover into quite serious flaws in reasoning.
People who use greater than normal levels of theorization and abstraction can sometimes commit two classic errors. ‘Reification’
means that you convert an abstraction into a thing, to which you then ascribe agency, the power to act, as in Society can exact a price for nonconformity It is a short step from thereto anthropomorphism, where you ascribe human capacities or attributes to nonhuman entities, as in A learning organization 1 AUTHORING AP H D

always wants to look after itself Combining the two, you can first convert an abstraction into a thing, and then endow this artificial agent with humanlike qualities, as in The hurt done to society causes it to seek retribution Each of these conceptual slips creates abroad pathway to writing absurd propositions.
A closely related problem concerns the handling of collectivities. Academics should know better than to use generalizing stereotypes. But in fact when discussing the behaviour of groups of people they often write in a style using the archetypal singular. Here a statement is made about the behaviour of a mythical archetype who somehow stands for all the people occupying a certain role or having certain characteristics. For instance The bureaucrat is interested primarily in achieving a quiet life and a comfortable sinecure, whereas the politician seeks only to be reelected Or The writer’s lot is not a happy one.’
The problem here is that any statement using an archetypal singular is only true if everyone in that role or with that characteristic behaves in the way cited, a claim that is almost always bound to be wrong and is additionally never provable. Some bureaucrats are no doubt interested in slacking, but we could never establish that all are, just as some writers will be happy and others miserable. Any author who uses the archetypal singular, in virtually any context, will immediately degrade her intellectual grip on whatever she is discussing, debasing her reasoning to a subprofessional level and affecting adversely the accuracy of her text.
When discussing collective entities use plural forms of phrasing,
such as Politicians are interested only in reelection The great virtue of the plural form is that as soon as you read this sentence,
a question will occur to you Do I mean all politicians, most
politicians, some politicians, or normal politicians? And then you might further ask What evidence or other argumentative token can I offer to corroborate my claim In this way you might end up with worthwhile empirical propositions that positively build your doctorate – whereas any sentence including an archetypal singular can only be a corrosive liability.
A miscellany of other minor but common errors in theses are discussed in the style guidebooks listed in Further Reading
on p. 289. Be careful in using other well-known style guides that are now quite old they tend to be more tolerant of complex grammatical forms and overlong sentences than current professional standards. And they often mix up advice for WRITING CLEARLY 9

creative fiction writers with that for nonfiction authors. The sources I recommend are worth consulting, but do also bear in mind the caveats I make about each book and the general need not to overdo a search for style improvements. Let me close by briefly pulling out just one instance of this detailed advice here,
concerning capitalizing words and acronyms. It is best to minimize the use of capitals in your text for two reasons. Capitals tend to make the text less readable, especially when used in headings for sections or for tables, charts and diagrams. Try to keep all these elements in lowercase after the first letter, except for proper nouns that are normally capitalized. In addition,
most journals and book publishers pursue a minimum capitalization policy, so that you will reduce later editing changes by following this pattern in your text from the outset. Be careful also about the use of acronyms in your thesis. A page with lots of acronyms, that is, with many organizations or concepts reduced to initials, will be less readable than normal text. Only use acronyms for specialized concepts that recur a lot (at least three or four times) and choose the simplest form of the acronym possible (for instance, Nato or NATO, but not
N.A.T.O.). Each acronym should be carefully explained on first use, and if you start reusing it after a period when it has not been present. Consider sometimes using substitute words or descriptors instead of an acronym on pages where it appears a lot it will make your text easier for readers. You must also post a comprehensive glossary of acronyms and abbreviations at the start of your thesis, placed just after the contents page and the lists of tables or figures, so that bemused readers can remind themselves what you are referring to.
Effective referencing
When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

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