Is a longer PhD thesis a better PhD thesis?
Back when I was doing my PhD, many years ago, we had to write progress reports at the end of the first and second year.
I remember one student in our research group taking months to write his report, and I later heard that he’d written close to 300 pages because he’d tried to include every single experiment he’d done.
Eventually his supervisor told him to stop, but he’d made two really common mistakes.
Common mistakes
The first mistake is that he assumed he had to show how much work he’d done (which I see all the time in literature reviews where people try to show how many papers they’ve read) and the second mistake was that he’d assumed that the longer he made the report, the stronger it would be.
These assumptions are common because unlike an undergraduate degree where you have a clear syllabus and you know what you need to do in order to pass, in a PhD you have to decide what you include.
And if you don’t know what the examiner wants to see, the temptation might be to cover as much ground as possible.
Because of this, many university departments impose a maximum word count limit, specifically to stop students from submitting theses of half a million words or more.
But there are some people who say that if you have a word count limit then you should use ALL of it. And there are those who say they judge a thesis on its length, and that they think a shorter thesis is weaker.
But the logic of this falls apart pretty quickly if if we think about it.
A PhD thesis should be judged on the quality of the research and writing, and it only needs to be long enough to communicate what you’ve done and discovered, and to explain the relevant context.
Sometimes shorter is better
In my experience, the stronger the research and the more confident the writer, the shorter the writing tends to be.
And although there are some exceptions, the longest theses tend to be the weakest. They tend to be repetitive. They tend to be filled with irrelevant information that goes nowhere and contributes very little to the argument.
In many cases, the writing will also be over-complicated to try, unsuccessfully, to hide a lack of confidence in the research.
Or it will be bloated and unreadable because they’ve followed the standard advice of putting everything on the page before editing, so they’ve never learned how to edit or make decisions.
This puts the burden on the reader to try to figure out what’s relevant, with the strongest material and the most important points often being drowned out. The examiners attention is easily drawn to the areas where you’re weakest, inviting difficult questions in your thesis defence.
If you really want to show expertise, it’s not about showing how much you know. It’s about having the insight to cut through the noise and show what’s important.
The skill, then, as a writer is to be able to use words efficiently; getting your point across clearly and concisely.
Now I’m not saying you should make everything as short and concise as possible. There are times when a longer sentence is better. There are times when you should say more in order to include some nuance. And there are times when you can choose to go into more detail or give more examples to support a particular point.
The reader will appreciate the extra depth, but only if it’s well-written and you have something interesting to say. To add more just for the sake of padding out the thesis, or to show how many sources you’ve read, is a waste of both their time and yours.
What to do…
What I generally advise is to vary the amount of detail you give around the different areas or points you cover, saying more about the things that you’re more confident in and about the things that are most important.
You can say less about some of the things you mention just for context but which aren’t crucial. And you can say less about some of the things that have been covered in great depth many times before, using references to refer the reader to some of those sources.
And other things you can just leave out completely.
So it’s not a binary choice between great detail and concision- the skill lies in being able to do both and having the confidence to make those decisions.
One of the ways to help make these decisions is to focus on the essentials. Instead of thinking about showing everything you know, think about what you would do if you only had, say 5000 words to explain your work. What would be the key points that you would absolutely have to include?
Then you can think about what you can add to support those points and link them together.
Is a longer PhD thesis a better PhD thesis?
Returning to the question of whether a longer thesis is better; of course, there are some differences between different fields. A PhD thesis in the humanities will most likely be longer than a thesis in theoretical physics. But within the normal range for your field, longer does not necessarily mean better and often the opposite is true.
So it makes no sense to say you have to make it as long as you can. And saying that you should use 100% of the word limit is essentially saying that every thesis within a department should be exactly the same length. It’s just not PhD-level thinking.
Focus on the quality of your research and writing, not the quantity of words.
New Patreon page!
And if you really like this video and want more of this kind of content, you can now support this channel through patreon where I’ll be doing live sessions to go into some of these topics in more detail.
The idea of the patreon is partly to allow me to make more of these videos, but also to build a community where we can have a bit more interaction.
