I agree with Jeffrey that doctoral candidates need more help than they often get in planning the structure and content of their thesis. But at the same time they need something that’s appropriate to their work, and a sense of ownership of it.

Having a good structure planned is really important in the writing process, at least for me. However there are great disciplinary differences in what’s appropriate and one can only really talk about a limited field in terms of offering examples of structures. Even within that one field of study there can be large variations, as noted above, depending on the topic of the research, the design and the theoretical perspective/s adopted.

All of that is why I’ve been writing a short book for the Kindle platform on the topic, but only for a limited area of doctoral research. The title is: Doctoral Research into Higher Education: Thesis structure, content and completion.

There is a chapter about non-traditional thesis structures in there – my own PhD had no literature review chapter, for example. And I hope I’ve managed to provide advice and examples without being too prescriptive – sucking out the creativity. that’s been my aim at least.

It will be published next week – just a little section to add tomorrow morning.

Paul