All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.
We never think entirely alone: we think in company, in a vast collaboration; we work with the workers of the past and of the present. [In] the whole intellectual world… each one finds in those about him [or her] the initiation, help, verification, information, encouragement, that he [or she] needs.
All good universities in either the classical or the taught PhD models still demand that the thesis or dissertation should be novel research making some form of distinctive contribution to the development of knowledge in discipline.
All rules of study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create.
Making a substantive contribution to the development of a discipline, which are still key criteria for awarding a doctorate in good universities. Acquiring authoring capabilities is very important in finishing a doctorate on time and avoiding the long delays for which PhD students were once notorious.
The most fundamental aspect of authoring is to manage readers’ expectations successfully, ensuring that they see the text as coherent, well paced and organized, and delivering upon your promises in a credible way. And for new PhD students, a critical step in beginning to manage readers’ expectations is to define clearly the intended overall thrust of their thesis – its central research question.
Even in the most traditional view of PhD education, which still stresses one-to-one induction of each student by a single supervisor, the transmission of authoring skills is vulnerable.
Here is where this book aims to be useful, in helping PhD students and their advisers to think more systematically about authoring skills. On the basis of supervising my own students over the years, and of teaching a large and intensive course on PhD drafting and writing at my university for more than a decade, I take what might be labelled an ‘extreme’ view by more conventional colleagues. I believe that in most of the social sciences and all of the humanities disciplines, a set of general authoring skills determine around 40 to 50 per cent of anyone’s success in completing a doctorate. Of course, your ability to complete doctoral-level work will be primarily conditioned by your own research ideas and ‘native’ originality, and your hard work, application and skill in acquiring specific knowledge of your discipline and competence in its methods. But unless you simultaneously grow and enhance your authoring abilities, there are strong risks that your ideas may not develop sufficiently far or fast enough to sustain you through to finishing your thesis at the right level and in a reasonable time.
Doing good research and becoming and effective author are not separate processes, but closely related aspects of intellectual development that need to work in parallel. I also believe that authoring skills are relatively generic ones, applicable in a broadly similar way across a range of disciplines at doctoral level. Hence this book draws on a wide range of previous writings and insights by earlier generations of university scholars.
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