Size and shape

 

Today I want to talk about structure. Notice I have left this until the fourth draft, and I have done that for a reason. It is only when we begin to edit material, that we can really get an overview of how this story should be told.

This section refers to structuring your individual chapters, not the thesis as a whole, but these are pretty simple concepts that you should apply to any type of academic writing, whether its a journal article, a book, a PhD chapter, the whole PhD, or grant application.

Getting a good structure is critical to writing a good chapter. A PhD is a large piece of technical writing, and as such, it needs to be written very tightly without excessive verbiage or it quickly becomes very unwieldy and no-one can understand what you are trying to say, including you. You may think 100,000 words is a lot of space to fill, but in fact it is just the opposite. When you factor in all the references and other component parts of a PhD, you find there is not much space at all to advance your arguments!

Breaking it down

Let’s say each chapter is 10,000 words including the footnotes/Endnotes. So perhaps the core part of the text is 8000 words. Depending on your discipline and accepted conventions (you can find these in journal articles of your discipline) you might want to divide your chapter into say 4/5 sections. An introduction, S1, S2, S3 and conclusion. If introductions and conclusions are shorter, writing a chapter might look like this (this is only a rough example).

  • Intro - 850 words

  • S1 - 1700

  • S2 2500

  • S3 2200

  • Conclusions 850 words

If you break down what is going into each section - so, for example, section 1 will have a subsection on literature, then perhaps some theory / method, then perhaps some data, then the analysis, you can start to see how you would break up each chapter and each section into manageable sub-sections. You might need 2 levels of sub-sections but never 3, as this starts to look very convoluted and messy. They should all be roughly of equal length. When they are not, it means you need to add that material into an existing section: it is not substantial enough to warrant a section of its own.

Titles

Each of the chapters, sections and subsections need a title. These titles should indicate what will follow, not in a descriptive way, but in a way that literally tells the take home points of that section: what is the point of this chapter, section or sub section? It is a précis or thumbprint of what is to come. I am a terrible writer of titles of journal articles, and often I ask colleagues to come up with one for my papers! On my PhD this took a lot of time for me to work out. It may or may not come naturally to you, so don’t sweat this stuff too much until the end of the thesis but do make an effort to do more than just descriptive titles even at this early stage. Ask your supervisor to give you feedback on this aspect of your writing.

The structure of the chapter is all about signposting to your supervisor and your eventual examiners what is the point of this chapter/section/subsection and how does it advance my claim to make an original contribution. You are meant to be able to tell that from the titles alone. As you get to the point of multiple drafts of each chapter, this is the sort of thing you can refine and refine. In this first iteration, the purpose of thinking about your titles is to distill in your own mind: why I have included this material? What work does it do in building my argument?

Today I will…

  • Write for 2 hours minimum on my PhD;

  • Review anything I have written, and look only at the structure of my chapters - is it clear by the titles what I am doing? Have I linked the titles to my overall argument or are they flabby and descriptive (do they look like something I might see in a textbook for example?).