Authoring a PhD
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BOLALAR UCHUN INGLIZ TILI @ASILBEK MUSTAFOQULOV, Ingliz tili grammatikasi
| Conclusions Just as in athletics or a professional sport, finishing a thesis well usually requires a lot of advance preparation. In earlier chapters I have touched on many different logistical issues which if left unaddressed can cause you days or weeks of delay at the final version stage. These issues are time-bombs, which may lie apparently dormant only to explode under your feet as you rush to complete. Poor style, long sentences, complex grammar, padded writing and repetitions left alone at an earlier stage all have to be fixed. Hard-to-justify research methods or odd choices of research strategy can require complex explanation later onto try and disguise them or explain them away. Interview quotations have to be firmed up and attributed exactly, and weak methods of evidencing will show up more prominently in the referencing (or lack of it) at key points. Poor-quality charts, diagrams and tables, often left unscruti- nized in separate pages at the ends of draft chapters, will now look ragged if incorporated into your text. Partial bibliographic entries have to be filled in. The most common problems are Web references that prove evanescent and cannot be recaptured for checking source documents in faraway archives that cannot be revisited and newspaper or magazine clippings where T HE ENDGAME 5 you recorded inadequately source details at the outset. If you are using notes, significant version control problems between the notes and bibliography can become apparent at this stage. Even the suggestions made in this chapter mostly cannot be last-minute operations. Many require you to do things almost from the first stages of your research. For instance, if you are to participate in nominating examiners, or to be able to handle a general professional conversation well in an oral exam, or to choose useful (sales pitch) words for your thesis title, you cannot switch on these capabilities overnight, or even in your last year. You need to get out into your discipline’s conference circuit at least two or three years ahead of time – so that you know the personalities of possible examiners, and have a good sense of where the profession has been so far and is going now. Planning ahead fora smooth endgame is something you always need to keep an eye on. The comforting thing is that these efforts at professional orientation will also be of benefit to you beyond the submission and examination process. A doctorate is more than just a pile of words, or a smartly bound thesis with your name on the front in gold letters. It is a process of change, and the crystallization of a substantial slice of your intellectual life. So ending a doctorate is not as simple as just completing the mandatory submission and examination stages. These mark the bureaucratically defined terminus of your apprenticeship. But they do not in themselves give meaning to three or four years of intense effort. Fora more lasting way of getting your research acknowledged, you need to get it published and into print, to which I turn in the next chapter 2 AUTHORING AP H D Publishing Your Research What good is a good idea if no one ever hears it? AT & T advert 1 P ublishing your work is the key way in which you can insert it into the slipstream of academic ideas, and so avoid your thesis becoming just ‘shelf-bending’ research, sitting in your university library and slowly bending a shelf over the years. The main route is to submit papers to professional journals. More rarely you can reshape your whole thesis into book form and get it accepted by a publisher as a monograph. Neither form of publication is quick or straightforward. They can protract your endgame long past the formal date at which your title metamorphoses into Dr. Writing and submitting journal papers How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service. Charles Darwin 2 A journal paper is an apparently simple-looking artefact, but it is not shaped just by the author. The professional community as a whole influences what is published, by fixing the norms and conventions of learned journals. And the editors and referees of a journal normally set specific conditions for each article. To be effective in publishing papers you need first to 9 understand the journals market in your discipline and form a clear idea of what gets published in the discipline’s journals, and what does not. Only then can you begin to effectively target an appropriate journal and to get your material accepted and into print. Understanding the journals market Academics arrange orthodox print journals into a rough hierarchy of excellent, above average, average, below average, and marginal journals. There are four major influences on journals’ long-run reputations their methods of refereeing their citation scores the journal’s type and its circulation (which are closely interrelated and the overall time lag from first submitting a paper through to its eventual publication. Download 2.39 Mb. Share with your friends:
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