Authoring a PhD
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BOLALAR UCHUN INGLIZ TILI @ASILBEK MUSTAFOQULOV, Ingliz tili grammatikasi
| Bernard Lonergan 8 Conference makes a ready manor woman]. Francis Bacon 9 After your supervisors or advisers have commented on your draft, and perhaps you have also accumulated some ‘outside’ commentary, then you should quickly make any changes that seem necessary, while these criticisms and reactions are still fresh in your mind. This second round of revisions is the final element in producing a settled first draft of the chapter. Your first draft will normally be along way from your original raw text. It is aversion of the chapter that you can safely bank, leaving it as it is, not to be reassessed until you have written a complete draft of the whole thesis and are moving to a final D EVE LOPING YOUR TEXT 1 version of the entire text (see Chapter 8). It is important for your later morale that before you bank the chapter you make some effective modifications to meet suggestions or comments from your advisers and criticisms in seminars. This does not mean scrapping and starting again. Nor does it mean throwing up your hands and filing your existing version of the chapter with a lot of disabling commentaries attached, your own and other peoples. Instead keep faith with your chapter, and with the work that it embodies, but try to find away of adjusting what you say and how you say it that meets or skates around the points made against your argument. It may not be a good idea to painstakingly try to remodel the chapter into a completely different form now, because later changes when you move from first draft to a final text could supersede any major restructuring which you do now. But when you ‘bank’ your chapter in first draft and move onto the next, it is important that it is in a reasonable working format, one that counters criticisms and incorporates important suggestions. In that way you will think of the banked chapter as viable, up to date, genuinely a first draft – rather than seeing it as imperfect, conditional or in need of a major overhaul before reaching proper first-draft status. Phase 4 of developing text is a desirable but more optional one, of going public in wider professional settings by giving seminars at other universities and papers at conferences. Do not attempt this stage until your chapter or paper is well worked- up, so that you are reasonably confident about taking outside criticism of your ideas. If you meet this test then presenting to an outside seminar at another university can be a very useful first step. Alternatively there maybe small-scale specialist group meetings which occur regularly within academic professional associations. These occasions can offer more focused criticisms and evaluations from people working inexactly your field. Any outside audience (especially at conferences) will tend to be more heterogeneous, less committed to the theoretical ideas or methods of research that hold sway in your home department or university. They will be franker about possible problems and more radical in challenging your ideas with alternative approaches. Going beyond this level involves presenting a paper to a larger professional conference, at national level 4 AUTHORING AP H D Later on in your doctorate, when you have a developed version of a chapter in a tightly written and short conference paper format, then you may also find it valuable to apply for international conferences. As you go up this ladder of increasing scale the potential audience for your paper widens. But the time you get to present it falls, from 30 to 40 minutes in a university seminar, to maybe only 15 or 20 minutes at large conferences. Remodelling text One changes one’s ideas the way an animal sheds its coat, in patches it’s never a wholesale change from one day to the next. Umberto Eco 10 All of the advice above assumes that your text already works tolerably well, sufficient for you to be able to absorb comments and to upgrade it incrementally. But sometimes, perhaps rather frequently in the early stages of developing your thesis or with more argumentative or theoretical chapters, you may find that the overall feel of a chapter is not right. Here more fundamental changes maybe needed. Text remodelling is a particularly powerful technique for this kind of situation. It is psychologically difficult to use, because none of us likes to admit to ourselves that some writing we have produced really does notwork. The idea of starting over can seem very threatening and nonconstructive if you have no clear alternative idea of how to proceed. Remodelling is designed to cope with the fact that at the normal full-chapter length of 30 to 40 pages any piece of text becomes very difficult for us to hold in our heads as a whole. We tend to cope by selectively forgetting parts of the text as we move through it. Authors use many different linking words, phrases and sentences to convince readers that one paragraph leads on seamlessly to the next. These devices can all effectively disguise the structure of a chapter from the author as well. Even if you have gone over a finished chapter several times making incremental changes and revisions, the chances are still very high that you will not fundamentally understand what you have done. D EVE LOPING YOUR TEXT 3 Three steps provide the foundations for remodelling Write out the chapter heading in full, and then all the subheadings in full as they come up, in the same font as used in the chapter. It is best to do remodelling with pen and paper, and not on a PC. (There area couple of specialist PC packages which might assist authors doing extensive remodelling, especially people whose research already uses a lot of interviews or case study materials. Download 2.39 Mb. Share with your friends:
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