I am in a period of reflection about my PhD. I don’t think that’s surprising as it took an enormous part of the last six and a half years of my life. If you include the preceding two years to complete Honours which was a precursor to being admitted into the PhD program, it has been the best part of a decade.

I still subscribe to blogs from various sources that provided inspiration, advice and support during my PhD. In my feed for today was Pat Thomson’s Patter where she discussed how much writing goes into completing a PhD.

Across my PHD friends have often asked about the length of my thesis. It was about 115,000 words. My friends seemed shocked it was that length. For those interested, I say that writing it took perhaps a million or more words. They are dumbfounded. However, completing a PhD is about writing every day, something that gets drummed into every PhD student from the time their candidature commences. The writing might be noting a journal article in memo form as a prompt for the thesis; it might be something I describe as “Thesis Thoughts”, memo’s on critical topics or the thesis itself. Across my PhD, I noted hundreds of articles which were the basis for the 40 pages of references that supported my thesis. “Thesis Thoughts” were where I collected ideas that I could not afford to forget. Memos were where concepts, findings and my discussion started to form. Each, in its way, was integral to my thesis.

In writing my thesis, each chapter was written and rewritten. It was submitted to supervisors for review and then rewritten. On many occasions, large slabs of text were written and subsequently removed. This was the case for my Methods Chapter, where my approach changed more than once. I completely removed one chapter as it just didn’t fit, and that was after it had been written, polished and reviewed!

My million words doesn’t count the writing and rewriting of a journal article, several seminar papers and a book chapter I wrote. It also does not include my Honours thesis, which was 20,000 words, which I assume was probably the result of writing at least 100,000 words.

At 406 pages and 115,000, my thesis s just the tip of the writing iceberg that constitutes a PhD.

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PhD Blogs: I found the following blogs invaluable as a source of inspiration advice and support:

Pat Thomson’s Patter – www.patthomson.net

The Thesis Whisperer – www.thesiswhisperer.com

Doctoral Writing SIG – www.doctoralwriting.wordpress.com

Image source: https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/from-the-sponsors-desk-beware-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-syndrome/