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Authoring a Phd How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Thesis Or Dissertation

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Authoring a Phd How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Thesis Or Dissertation Authoring a PhD How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation Patrick Dunleavy Visit our online Study Skills resource at www.skills4study.com Palgrave Study Guides A Handbook of Writing for Engineers Joan van Emden Authoring a PhD Patrick Dunleavy Effective Communication for Arts and Humanities Students Joan van Emden and Lucinda Becker Effective Communication for Science and Technology Joan van Emden How to Manage your Arts, Humanities and Social Science Degree Lucinda Becker How to Write Better Essays Bryan Greetham Key Concepts in Politics Andrew Heywood Making Sense of Statistics Michael Wood The Mature Student’s Guide to Writing Jean Rose The Postgraduate Research Handbook Gina Wisker Professional Writing Sky Marsen Research Using IT Hilary Coombes Skills for Success Stella Cottrell The Student’s Guide to Writing John Peck and Martin Coyle The Study Skills Handbook (second edition) Stella Cottrell Studying Economics Brian Atkinson and Susan Johns Studying History (second edition) Jeremy Black and Donald M. 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Forster Novel Nigel Messenger How to Study James Joyce John Blades How to Study Linguistics (second edition) Geoffrey Finch How to Study Modern Poetry Tony Curtis How to Study a Novel (second edition) John Peck How to Study a Poet (second edition) John Peck How to Study a Renaissance Play Chris Coles How to Study Romantic Poetry (second edition) Paul O’Flinn How to Study a Shakespeare Play John Peck and Martin Coyle How to Study Television Keith Selby and Ron Cowdery Linguistic Terms and Concepts Geoffrey Finch Literary Terms and Criticism (third edition) John Peck and Martin Coyle Practical Criticism John Peck and Martin Coyle Authoring a PhD How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation Patrick Dunleavy © Patrick Dunleavy 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1191–6 hardback ISBN 1–4039–0584–3 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dunleavy, Patrick. Authoring a PhD : how to plan, draft, write, and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation / Patrick Dunleavy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1191–6 – ISBN 1–4039–0584–3 (pbk.) 1. Dissertations, Academic–Authorship–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Academic writing–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title: Authoring a Ph. D. II. Title. LB2369 .D85 2003 808Ј.02–dc21 2002042453 109876543 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Printed in China For Sheila and Rosemary Thanks for the encouragement All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create. Friedrich Schelling Contents List of figures and tables ix Preface x 1 Becoming an author 1 Authoring is more than just writing 2 Different models of PhD and the tasks of authoring 5 Managing readers’ expectations 11 2 Envisioning the thesis as a whole 18 Defining the central research questions 18 Doing original work 26 3 Planning an integrated thesis: the macro-structure 43 The whole and the core 44 Focusing down or opening out 53 Four patterns of explanation 62 4 Organizing a chapter or paper: the micro-structure 76 Dividing a chapter into sections 76 Devising headings and subheadings 84 Handling starts and finishes 89 5 Writing clearly: style and referencing issues 103 The elements of good research style 104 Effective referencing 120 VII VIII ◆ CONTENTS 6 Developing your text and managing the writing process 134 Drafting, upgrading and going public 135 Remodelling text 143 Organizing the writing process 148 7 Handling attention points: data, charts and graphics 157 Principles for presenting data well 159 Handling tables 165 Designing charts and graphs 172 Other techniques for data reduction 185 Using diagrams and images 192 8 The end-game: finishing your doctorate 197 From a first full draft to your final text 199 Submitting the thesis and choosing examiners 209 The final oral examination (viva) 217 9 Publishing your research 227 Writing and submitting journal papers 227 Re-working your thesis as a book 251 Afterword 264 Glossary of maxims, terms and phrases 266 Notes 277 Further reading 287 Index 291 List of Figures and Tables Figures 3.1 Interrelating the whole and the core 50 3.2 The focus down model 55 3.3 The opening out model 59 3.4 The compromise model 61 3.5 Three ways of viewing my home study 64 3.6 Examples of a matrix structure 74 4.1 The tree structure of a chapter 102 5.1 How PhD students’ writing can develop 105 7.1 Eight main types of chart (and when to use them) 173 7.2 How health boards compare 182 7.3 How Scotland’s health boards compared in treating cataracts, 1998–9 financial year 183 7.4 An example of a box-and-whisker chart comparing across variables 189 7.5 An example of median-smoothing 191 8.1 Integrating themes 200 9.1 An example of a journal article evaluation form 236 Tables 5.1 How different pressures on authors improve or worsen the accessibility of their text 107 7.1 How health boards compare 166 7.2 How Scotland’s health boards compared in treating cataracts, 1998–9 financial year 167 IX Preface he conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott Tonce argued that: A university is an association of persons, locally situated, engaged in caring for and attending to the whole intellectual capital which composes a civilization. It is concerned not merely to keep an intellectual inheritance intact, but to be continuously recovering what has been lost, restoring what has been neglected, collecting together what has been dissipated, repairing what has been corrupted, reconsidering, reshaping, reorganizing, making more intelligible, reissuing and reinvesting. 1 Even if we leave aside Oakeshott’s evident antiquarian bias against any genuine or substantive innovation here, this ‘mis- sion statement’ is extensive enough. Indeed it is far too large to be credible in the era of a ‘knowledge society’, when so many other people (working in professions, companies, cultural and media organizations, governments, civil society groups or as independent writers and researchers) also attend to ‘the intel- lectual capital [of] a civilization’. This book is written in the hope of somewhat assisting any of these people who produce longer creative non-fiction texts. It is especially directed to research students and their advisers or supervisors in universities. In undertaking or fostering the X PREFACE ◆ XI doctorate they still pursue the most demanding ideal of original research. ‘Nothing was ever yet done that someone was not the first to do,’ said John Stuart Mill, and that is what the doctoral ideal always has celebrated and always should.2 Each doctoral dissertation or thesis is to a large extent sui generis. But this book reflects a conviction that in the humanities, arts and social sciences research students also need to acquire a core of generic authoring skills that are substantially similar across diverse disciplines and topics. While research skills training has been formalized a great deal in the last two decades, these ‘craft’ skills of authoring have been relatively neglected and left unsystematized. For Oakeshott and other traditionalists my enterprise here will seem no more than another brick in the wall, a further step towards the bureaucratization of modern society foreseen by Max Weber.3 But I believe that learning the craft of how to plan, draft, write, develop, revise and rethink a thesis, and to finish it on time and to the standard required, is too important and too often mishandled a set of tasks to be left to the somewhat erratic and tangential models of induction and training that have pre- vailed in the past. There is a long and honourable tradition now of scholarship reflecting upon itself. It stretches back through Friedrich Schelling’s idealist vision in On University Studies, to Francis Bacon’s musings in The Advancement of Learning, and before him to some significant reflective writings of the medieval thinkers and the ancient Greek philosophers.4 Now, as in those earlier times, scholars and students are not (cannot be) immune to external influences and rationalization processes.
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