Managing themes

One of the things you do in redrafting the whole as a big book thesis is to look for the themes you are exploring and draw them out across the text. For example, if you are doing a PhD on Data Protection, you could do that topic from a variety of perspectives. It might be about legitimacy of Big Data, it might be about transparency of collection methods, it might be about societal development and sociological phenomena that occurs due to big data manipulation. 

When you are down in the detail examining law, policy and collecting raw data, and explaining your findings it is easy to lose sight of key themes in the dense writing of the substance of the chapter. Although your literature review (or the surviving sections of it in your introduction) may talk about themes and highlight them, it is important that these themes are revisited, either though the introductory text in each of your chapters that deal with the specific theme(s) you have highlighted, and/ or through use of particular heading that mention these key words. Weaving these themes across 100,000 words is a bit of technical drafting to make sure the overall thesis hangs together and doesn’t look like 8 different but related pieces of work. The thesis is one piece of work at the end. It is now the elephant.

Redrafting the whole makes the elephant look like an elephant, not Frankenstein’s monster.

So when you arrive at this stage, please do take a week or two to do your technical drafting. Look at how you weave in themes and look at how your headings signpost your text and how the bigger picture, or meta thesis is being communicated.

Today I will…

• Write for a minimum of 2 hours on my chapter working my way down my list of tasks;

• Review my PhD timetable. Have I scheduled sufficient time to work the themes, titles and signposts so that the thesis hangs together?