THE FORM OF A PhD THESIS ■ 63

students tend to say things like, ‘I’m worried about that - I don’t know how creative I am.’ Students in their third year are more likely to say, ‘Now I know it can be just a small advance in everyday life; before I knew this, I was worried about being original enough.’ Eventually, as part of their academic development, students acquire a similar grasp of what is expected in the way of a small step forward, but do not seem to be helped towards this realization by their supervisors. Be warned that once students get over their initial worry about their ability to be original in their thesis, there is a tendency to go almost to the other extreme and decide that doing a PhD is not really creative at all. The good news for you is that, typically, students get to the point where they are no longer worried about being original enough. This section should have helped you to reach the point of feeling confident about being original sooner, rather than later. Do remember that because the PhD is awarded for ‘an original contribution to knowledge’ it remains an extremely important concept.

■ Writing the thesis

Writing as a process of rewriting

Your thesis is the product on which you will be assessed. Writing it is far more than merely reporting the outcome of several years of research. Students experience a great deal of discomfort when attempting to present results in written form because writing makes people think about their work in a different way. If writing leads to discovery and not, as is generally supposed, discoveries merely need to be put into writing, then it is easy to understand why writing the thesis is experienced as the most difficult part of the work. Torrance et al. (1992) suggest that ‘ think-while-you-write’ strategies be consciously adopted from the start and not lapsed into when ‘think-then-write’ strategies have failed. One student said,

Obviously you don’t formulate what you’re going to say completely until you come to write it down ... it was only when I was writing it that I realized that in one section my interpretation was completely wrong. The point I was trying to make just wouldn’t embody itself verbally, so I thought it out again and rewrote the whole section.

If you are able to read what you have written as though it were the work of someone else, you will find it easier to be critical of your own imprecise phrases and sloppy style. The way to achieve this ‘distance’ between yourself and your work is to put it aside for a few days and then come back to it as though you had never seen it before. Alternatively, if there is no time for that, you might try doing something else - make phone calls, meet friends - and then come back to it. The psychological switch will help to create