FREE BOOK : Authoring a PhD: How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation

This book is written in the hope of somewhat assisting any of these people who produce longer creative non-fiction texts. It is especially directed to research students and their advisers or supervisors in universities. In undertaking or fostering the X doctorate they still pursue the most demanding ideal of original research. ‘Nothing was ever yet done that someone was not the first to do, ’said John Stuart Mill, and that is what the doctoral ideal always has celebrated and always should. 2 Each doctoral dissertation or thesis is to a large extent sui generis. But this book reflects a conviction that in the humanities, arts and social sciences research students also need to acquire a core of generic authoring skills that are substantially similar across diverse disciplines and topics. While research skills training has been formalized a great deal in the last two decades, these ‘craft’ skills of authoring have been relatively neglected and left unsystematized...

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