How not to write a PhD thesis | General | Times Higher Education.

Many of these apply to papers submitted for publication, generally. I have lost track of how many game papers I have reviewed where the authors had an idea, did what appeared to be a quickie Google search in their own discipline, and concluded that their idea was NEW! This seems to be ESPECIALLY true in Education.

1. Submit an incomplete, poorly formatted bibliography.
2. Use phrases such as “some academics” or “all the literature” without mitigating statements or references.
3. Write an abstract without a sentence starting “my original contribution to knowledge is…”
4. Fill the bibliography with references to blogs, online journalism and textbooks.
5. Use discourse, ideology, signifier, signified, interpellation, postmodernism, structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstruction without reading the complete works of Foucault, Althusser, Saussure, Baudrillard or Derrida.
6. Assume something you are doing is new because you have not read enough to know that an academic wrote a book on it 20 years ago.
7. Leave spelling mistakes in the script.
8. Make the topic of the thesis too large.
9. Write a short, rushed, basic exegesis.
10. Submit a PhD with a short introduction or conclusion.

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