Authoring a PhD

A controls or oversees B? Try and avoid using double-headed arrows, which are very confusing for readers, and usually indicate that you do not know what is going on. If you have a situation where A gives Borders, and then B passes information back to A, you should show this by using two different kinds of one-directional arrows, a command and control arrow from A to Band an information flow arrow from B to A in a different colour or format.
These recommendations may seem fairly obvious and basic.
But a large minority of PhD students infringe many of these suggestions in their attention points, as indeed do too many senior academics in published articles and books. Most professional readers now are quite sceptical about diagrams and other images which do not follow proper conventions and guidelines. They will interpret poorly designed or badly labelled diagrams assigns either of careless authoring or of intellectual soft-headedness on your part. The ultimate useless diagram is one with a large number of boxes, each of which connects using double-headed arrows to all the other boxes in the figure. If that is what you have got to, you need to recognize what its subliminal message is for readers Everything influences everything else. But don’t ask me how, because I haven’t got a clue.’
Conclusions
Good attention points can greatly strengthen your text, but their importance does not stop there. The further you goon in your academic and professional career, the more likely it will be that you will need to summarize or dramatize long screeds of text for an impatient audience. You will begin with seminar presentations, then goon to conference papers, then perhaps journal articles, and if you go into university teaching then lectures to wider public audiences. Learning the skills of designing effective attention points early on will always pay dividends. In the social sciences especially it is becoming harder and harder to publish text-only articles in many fields, and here papers with data components and good charts and tables are generally much more attractive for editors and reviewers. Some of the
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humanities subjects (like history) show not dissimilar trends.
And the days when university teaching consisted of academics rereading from their previous works have long since gone.
There is a strong emphasis instead upon designing and presenting even primarily textual materials in an accessible and imaginative way. If you progress from your PhD into other walks of professional lifelike business or most professions, the premium on graphical communication and on simple, readable tables and charts is far greater than within universities. So handling attention points well is a key life skill, not just a thesis skill. In its own way it can be almost as important as the ability to get things finished (and published, to which I now turn.

The Endgame Finishing Your Doctorate
The tension between making it better and getting it done appears wherever people have work to finish or a product to get out a computer, a dinner, a term paper, an automobile, a book. We want to get it done and out to the people who will use it, eat it, read it. But no object ever fully embodies its makers conception of what it could have been.
Howard Becker
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The art of writing does, in fact, give to those who have long practised it habits of mind unfavourable to the conduct of affairs. It makes them subject to the logic of ideas … It gives a taste for what is delicate, fine, ingenious and original, whereas the veriest commonplaces rule the world.
Alexis de Tocqueville
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own the ages dispassionate observers have long complained that intellectuals are diffident, unbusiness-like types. They are happy to start projects but reluctant to finish them. Interested in books and ideas and potentialities, they are perfectionists who cannot close a deal, cannot say this is good enough, cannot easily make a sale or cut a compromise. It is a familiar and discomforting stereotype, which unfortunately has a large measure of truth (certainly in my case. If writing is psychologically difficult as a form of commitment, how much more troubling is the letting go involved in ceasing to work on
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a project, recognizing that its imperfections and deficiencies so intimately familiar to the author) have just to be lived with,
tolerated, perhaps never remedied or improved upon?
An apt parallel for writing a PhD is taking part in an amateur dramatics society’s production of a play. In the early days there are apparently endless casting meetings and leisurely orientation sessions. The actors, the director, the producer and the art director endlessly swap differing visions of the play’s period and setting, its visual look and feel, the characters motivations and the significance of different scenes and plot developments.
The early rehearsals are wracked by personality conflicts and tensions about who is more important than whom, and what overall emotional or dramatic style should be achieved. But as the actual performances get nearer and nearer suddenly the motivations of actors and director coarsen up in a miraculous way. The actors worry more about remembering their lines and not looking a fool onstage, getting through all right rather than being the star of the whole show. And the director becomes more accommodating, grateful for any scene or performance that passes halfway professionally rather than stumbling into disorder. Finally the curtain opens on a production that everyone involved knows would benefit hugely from another four weeks of rehearsal, another stab at this or that.
Except that it would never have got this focused this quickly without that curtain opening. If we put back the start of the show, everyone involved would simply adjust their timescale to reach much the same condition of preparedness/unprepared- ness four weeks further on, rather than now.
Getting to a first draft of your entire thesis is a very important milestone in your work. At this point your priority shifts away from doing more research or adding new bits to your text mountain and towards finishing things off, having done with it, putting it behind you, moving onto other topics and other projects. This is not an easy transition to make. There comes a point in the life of any book or thesis project where the fear and loathing factor tends to top out on your other enthusiasms and your original motivation. This is an infallible sign that enough is enough, and that the time to enter the completion phase has arrived. Ending is not simple, however. Your first challenge will usually be to upgrade a patchy draft text into
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a fully integrated thesis, unified by a clear intellectual direction and looking like an industrial standard product, with all the necessary bits present and working. The second aspect is less visible but still important, and involves formally submitting the thesis for examination. The final challenge is for you to be prepared inmost cases fora viva or oral examination.
From a first full draft to your final text
The last thing one settles in writing a book is what to put in first.

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