Authoring a PhD

and establishing or anticipating what might be said about them later on. But do not give any form of potted version of your later arguments in the lead-in chapter, lest you crudely travesty your major points to come. Instead linkages must beset up,
which then need to connect with your research in the rest of the thesis.
The conclusion sections of the middle chapters
Each of the substantive chapters (that is, those numbered 2 or through to 7 in an eight-chapter PhD) should be flexibly linked via their conclusions to the themes from the opening chapters. The conclusions (note, not the chapter openings)
should pickup on at least one or two of the themes developed in the lead-in chapter, but in a variable-geometry way. The theme that each conclusion links to should be wholly relevant to the specific materials in that chapter and also adapted to the role which the chapter plays in the thesis as a whole. Do not try to cover all the thesis themes in the conclusions to every chap- ter. Such an approach can easily look mechanistic and inauthentic, as if you are running a kind of intellectual bookkeeping operation, rather than using genuinely relevant key ideas for analysing what that chapter has shown. The job of the conclusions section is to pull the focus away from the research detail,
to bring out the chapter’s key findings in a stand-back mode.
You can make some small sideways links to other middle chapters relevant to the same themes, especially those chapters which have just been covered or are the next to be covered. But you should not make comparative comments at these points,
nor begin discussing material from other middle chapters in any substantive way.
Refocusing the middle chapters and sharpening up their conclusions is also an opportunity to make some crucial checks that your work is structurally well founded. Each of your chapters should do a discrete and distinctive job, well signalled from its start, and effectively building the thesis. If there are overlaps in chapter jurisdictions, now is the time to simplify them.
Assign one function to each chapter, and make sure that this role does not overlap with those of its neighbours. Think 0 AUTHORING AP H D

through how you can reach a say it once, say it right pattern of chapter organization. If you still have a methods chapter embedded in the main sequence of your chapters, consider whether it is really necessary, or whether some or all of its material might be better handled in a Research Methods Appendix.
Try to ensure that your sequence of chapters makes sense in a designed way, and does not just follow a What I did in my
PhD’ pattern. Check carefully that the need to know criterion is being met in terms of the order of chapters so that contextual information arrives in the right sequence for readers to follow the analysis at all points.
The final chapter
The end of the thesis needs to have a clear character. It cannot just be a tell em what you’ve told em section that only repeats points already made. It must first of all reprise each of the same themes or theory ideas used to structure the first chapter (and any other lead-in chapter. But this time the discussion of each theme should be grounded securely in the experience of the middle chapters. The focus should be on establishing clearly what has been shown by your research, and how it is relevant to your central thesis question and the themes set out at the start. The last chapter should answer the twin questions:
What has been achieved by your research How much has your thesis moved professional discussion along Its discussion should not go again into detailed accounts from the middle chapters. Instead it should compare across those chapters,
pulling together their themes and connecting up their key messages. As you move towards a close, use the second part of the final chapter to group its themes together under broader labels or higher-order issues. From there you can open out into a discussion of relevant wider professional debates and controversies. It is often useful to conclude this closing debate section by considering some viable directions in which future research might go from where your work leaves off.
There area few final checks to make at this stage also. You must ensure that your overall main text is still the right length, around four-fifths of any formal university limit, that is 80,000 words
T HE ENDGAME 7

with a 100,000 limit. The formal limit is inclusive of everything except the bibliography, so your notes, appendices, preface,
acknowledgements and soon must all be able to fit within the remaining fifth of the word limit. It is very common for people who thought that they were comfortably inside the word limit to find out that they have run over not just the four-fifths rule, but even the formal thesis limit by 10 to 20 percent. Often the problem occurs because they are repeating similar material at different places indifferent chapters, or they are overdoing the level of detail that readers need to know. When you are pressing to reach closure on the thesis this can be a depressing realization to make,
since it may mean that you must spend extra weeks or even months just cutting away text which took you so long to write in the first place. But bear in mind Robert Browning’s famous dictum Less is more’.
4
Any text can be fairly painlessly cut by around 10 percent, and this operation almost always improves its overall look and feel, sometimes out of all recognition.
Considered as a single problem of cutting, say, 12,000 words from the entire thesis, this order of cuts will always seem daunting. But try thinking about it instead as cutting 30 out of 330 words on each page of your A typescript, which maybe easier to do. If you have greatly overwritten, by more than 10 percent, then you will almost certainly have to find a bulk cut by losing one of the chapters, appendices or other sections. If you can, try to make more cuts in the lead-in chapters and to safeguard the thesis core. If you are over your limit, bear in mind that you can now very easily put data and other bulky materials on a CD bound into the covers of your thesis, instead of having to get them printed up as text. Most university regulations about length still assume paper-only theses,
and so as yet say nothing about CDs.
Normally the closing months and weeks of writing up make a surprising amount of difference to PhD theses. You may find yourself moving materials that have been stuck in a given sequence for two or three years into radically different configurations. You may drop concepts that have long been important in your research in favour of new themes, of which you were only dimly aware before you could look at your first draft as a whole. This burst of rethinking and remodelling is quite usual and predictable. It does not show (as many students worry) that 0 AUTHORING AP H D

THEE ND GAME your research plan was badly flawed all along, or that you did not previously know what you were doing. Instead it reflects the intellectual developments and advances which you can often only make once all the building blocks of the thesis have come into being. Redefining the thesis title and abstract in closure mode, and redoing the opening and final chapters in an integrating way, all create a crucially important opportunity for you to adjust your intellectual focus squarely back onto your central thesis question. Even if you have faithfully maintained a rolling synopsis throughout the period since your first year of PhD studies, the chances are that you will have a lot of catch-up activity to do. Inherently you could not recognize any earlier than this what has worked in the thesis and what has not, and what you have achieved or missed achieving. And if the theoretical literature in your field has also moved on substantially since you started the thesis, you should expect to make some revisions of important terminology and to rescind some intellectual judgements made early on. At this late stage, however, it is also very important to keep faith with what you have done. Do not lapse into an overcritical mode characterized by regret at what you did not attempt, or what you tried but that did not work.
Nor should you fall prey to the illusion that another three- month push on anew aspect of your topic would sort things out.
You must not try at this late stage to add yet another building block to the thesis, unless you have the clearest possible steer from your supervisors or advisers that the dissertation is not viable without it. Recognize that, for better or worse, your work is now in its final configuration and that there are good reasons for that.
Focus on defining the boundaries of your thesis appropriately and restrict new research efforts only to essential infilling activity needed to get a viable boundary. There will be other writings and other research projects in your life, especially if you become a professional academic. Perhaps in future you may return productively to these problems and themes after an interregnum.
Submitting the thesis and choosing examiners
I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.

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