COREFocusedliterature reviewSequence of chaptersBreadth of coverageFigure 3.4

beginning to appreciate your research contribution. Your core stuff thus comes across much earlier, leaving more space at the end of the thesis for you to do a couple of chapters or one decent, long chapter of analysis. The first part of these concluding materials might focus on bringing together and integrating the conclusions from your core chapters, each of which should cover a different component of your research. The second part of these concluding materials can then do a more limited opening out from the results of your analysis back into the wider literature. By saving much of the theory discussion and literature discussion to handle at the end of the argument, you should be able to form a strong theoretical or broad-view chapter. This way you can conclude your thesis on an upbeat,
confident and professionally salient note.
Four patterns of explanation
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way did not become still more complicated.
Poul Anderson
7
When you try to communicate a set of connected information to someone else there are only a limited number of ways that you can do it. If your chosen way cuts across the other person’s expectations then crossed wires may occur in the communication. This problem is made worse when your audience does not listen intently to every twist and turn of your account. For instance, people of different genders famously tend to choose incompatible modes of communication. Most women like to give and receive process-organized explanations, often running through the history of an event or an interaction from beginning to end in narrative succession. But most men prefer to receive ‘bottom-line’ information first. They want to know at the start what the key point of a story is, and only then will they be ready to listen much more selectively to the detail of how the story’s outcome ended up as it did. Hence men easily get annoyed by what they code as women rabbiting on’.
Equally, women often get turned off by men’s overly terse and AUTHORING AP H D

inaccessible explanations of complex phenomena. A variant of this particular contrast in modes of communication (serialistic rather than holistic) also runs through two of the alternative patterns discussed here. My thesis is that in the humanities and social sciences there are only four fundamental ways of handling long, text-based explanations, which I shall discuss in turn. These organizing patterns are descriptive analytic argumentative and a matrix pattern, combining elements of any two of the other three approaches.
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Descriptive explanations
Suppose that I am asked to give an account of the room where
I am sitting and writing these words, which is my home study.
Figure 3.5 shows the main features of the room, which are reasonably complex. A descriptive mode of explaining something is to take the way that things are organized externally or exoge- nously tome and to then use that pattern to structure the sequence of what I say. For instance, in explaining about my study I might start at some particular point, like the door, and then decide to sweep my arm around the room in a particular direction (clockwise in this case) listing everything that comes into my line of sight as I do so, as shown in Figure a. Here
I might say First there is a white door, and next to it in a clockwise direction is a green painted wall, and a grey beaten- up sofa, and above it a noticeboard with papers pinned on it, a
CD rack, then a series of long bookshelves with four-drawer filing cabinets underneath, and then a printer, an old desk-top
PC, and anew laptop on a desk surrounded by papers, then a window with three frames …’ and so on.
This listing account already illustrates some obvious deficiencies of a descriptive way of explaining things. The sequence of objects being named is united in only one way, namely proximity in the room. The things I list are next to each other. But in every other way the different objects described together are jumbled up randomly and unpredictably. The list may work OK
if readers get to see Figure 3.5 (I certainly hope so. But without this visual support, the list could be very hard to take in and to visualize. The account I give of my study could also easily
P LAN NI N GA NI NT E GRATED THESIS 3

b) Analytic approach
(c) Argumentative approach
(a) Descriptive approach
(for example, start from door and go clockwise)
Good points
(e.g. space, storage)
Basic size,
shape, etc.
Soft furnishings
(e.g. sofa, cushions,
books, curtains)
Door
Sofa
Cushion
Notice board
Painting
Books

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