How To Tame Your PhD

by Inger Mewburn

good researchers are very curious people: they want to KNOW stuff. But to write a thesis you have to learn to channel your curiosity in productively narrow ways. Many students and academics (including myself) find this hard. Curiosity, once unleashed, can be relentless. A person who can't finish their literature review might have a curiosity problem, not a project management problem.

A person with an intelligence problem may never think their work is good enough to hand in to the examiner.

“Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking” • What is the argument about and what is being claimed? • What are the reasons given to support the conclusion? Is the reasoning flawed in anyway? • What kind of evidence is being presented (i.e. intuition, appeals to authority, observation, case studies, research studies, analogies, etc) and how good is it? • What other explanations might be plausible than that offered? • Is the conclusion provided the most reasonable? Can you identify alternatives?

There is no such thing as 'the best' thesis - only good and bad ones.

"The literature suggests..."

call this the Incredible Hulk Complex: too much man, too little shirt (your poor thesis text is the shirt in this metaphor by the way). I am no stranger to the Incredible Hulk complex. I originally got into a PhD program proposing that I would investigate the use of genetic algorithms in architectural design. I ended up looking at how architects use gesture as they are designing together.

What is a thesis or dissertation? We can learn a lot about the problems of writing a PhD thesis or dissertation from studying the medieval origins of doctoral study.

You are only a ghostly presence in your text avatar. It has to speak for you.

This is why it's important that the thesis text is very, very good. Or as I like to think about it: big, blue, strong and sexy.

There are two dead hands actually: conventional thesis structure, known as the 'IMRAD' formula (introduction - methods - results - discussion), and a certain kind of 'scholarly style of language': mannered, distancing, defensive and lacking the personal

pronoun ('I').

The IMRAD formula follows the experimental method cycles and the language is designed to present the results as facts, which exist apart from the researcher.

In the scientific method the questions are raised before the experiments designed to answer them. Sure fresh questions will probably emerge as the scientific work progresses, but always to drive a new cycle of research.

Virtually none of the 'how to' books provided advice on other ways of structuring a thesis, most likely because the author is trying to address multiple disciplines.

"It's a PhD, not a Nobel Prize: how experienced examiners assess research theses" by Gerry Mullins and Margaret Kiley.

There aren't too many academics that are truly broadminded. It's best if you have someone who will be sympathetic to your methodology.

most universities, including ours, include an option for you to send a list of people who would not be appropriate. In my opinion every student should send a list of inappropriate

people to their supervisor - if only for the record.

the amount of experience the examiner has matters in the way they come to a judgment.

The longer you teach, the more forgiving you become because for every new student you encounter, you have probably seen another who was worse.

Most examiners read the abstract, introduction and the conclusion to see what the work is about and then look in the references, so you should write these last - or rather rewrite them at the end. Any questions you raise in the introduction should be answered in the conclusion. If these parts act as righteous 'bookends' the examiner will form a better impression of you as a scholar - and is likely to be more forgiving of you if you slip up a bit in the middle parts.

simple, but competent run through of the major authors with a thread

of an argument running through the whole. The argument should be connected to why you are bothering to do the study.

do a lot of favours for a grammar enabled friend and ask them to perform the duty for you. It's hard to see the mistakes in your own work on the 700th read.

A PhD thesis or dissertation is supposed to make a "significant and original contribution to knowledge".

why I enjoyed reading a paper that attempts to measure social interconnectedness and the relationship with ideas generation called "Social origins of good ideas" by Ronald Burt.2 Burt explored the production and uptake of good ideas in a supply chain logistics company by exploring the nature of discussion networks amongst managers.

Managers who had a diverse social network, ie: those who 'bridged' between clusters of smaller discussion networks were "at risk of having more good ideas".

A mundane idea in one area can be a spectacular one in another because the recipient determines the value of the idea, not the person who thinks it up.

The literature review is the thesis component that gives you the most scope to demonstrate your mad skills of scholarly warfare.

The key point they all make is that the lit review must be more than a list of things you read – it has to have an argument and a point of view.

nature of the field relevant to the inquiry

major debates and define terms,

studies, ideas and/or methods are m...

gaps in the...

warrant for t...

the contribution the study...

You must work at forming critical judgment on the literature by reading it, at the same time as you work on finding patterns in the mess of information.

This sorting process makes the raw information legible

Wurzman argues that there are only 5 ways to organise information, which he calls LATCH: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category and Hierarchy.

Location

Make a table in word and arrange the authors according to different ‘locations’. This is a good way of choosing which authors you can use to illustrate the dimensions of each debate.

Alphabet

Time

Fashions will have come and gone; ideas will have grown and died.

Category

‘colour by numbers’ technique

to visualise them in a spider diagram.

Hierarchy

You make a hierarchy by exerting critical judgment on each of your categories:

I realised how conditioned I was to believing teachers unquestioningly.