Authoring a PhD

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Authoring a PhD How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation Patrick ... ( PDFDrive )
BOLALAR UCHUN INGLIZ TILI @ASILBEK MUSTAFOQULOV, Ingliz tili grammatikasi

Blaise Pascal
3
The process of producing and banking chapter drafts is always a slightly inconclusive one, because what you put in a subsequently written chapter may always have implications for already settled text. Later text may not live up to promises made early on, requiring an important change of tone. Or it may cut across the themes and structure of what has already been written so as to create the need for revisions and reallocation of materials between chapters. In the worst cases later text may contradict earlier chapters, showing no relationship where you expected to see one, or suggesting a quite different story- line or interpretation. Just as current developments often produce a change in how we see established historical events, you can never be sure that a chapter banked early on will not need radical alterations at a later stage.
So it is a magic moment when you can for the first time spread out all your chapters on the floor and physically hold and review all the elements of the thesis as a whole. From hereon your task should be consolidation, rather than producing new elements to add into the picture. Only in very unlucky circumstances will reviewing the chapter first drafts as a whole lead you to conclude that the thesis is not in fact complete and you must go back to primary research to fill a major hole in the analysis. This problem is most likely to occur if your chapter drafts taken together greatly undershoot the thesis word norm words fora big book thesis, and perhaps 60,000 fora papers model dissertation. Otherwise a genuinely complete
T HE ENDGAME 9

2 0 AUTHORING AP H D
first draft signals that from hereon the elements of your thesis are pretty fixed.
The best organization and presentation of these elements is not fixed, however. Instead there will normally be a period of three to six months after getting a complete first draft during which you must reorganize the elements you have so as to produce a much stronger and more integrated final text. Drawing out the intellectual themes of your work is a key focus of your effort at this stage. You need consistent themes that run all the way through the thesis, synthesizing your arguments, setting up and framing your research conclusions, and putting the thesis value-added into sharp focus. Figure 8.1 shows that this is not a matter of mechanical reiteration or repetition, but rather of flexibly creating and enhancing linkages across five key elements the thesis title the abstract the first chapter
(plus any other lead-in chapter the conclusion sections of the middle chapters and the final chapter.
The thesis title
Your title should introduce the central analytic concepts used or the major argument themes developed. Normally thesis titles have a colon in the middle, which authors use to separate out thematic, analytic or theoretical ambitions on the one hand,
and empirical references or limiting features on the other.
TITLE, ABSTRACT, CONTENTS PAGE

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