How not to write a PhD thesis - Tara Brabazon

Here is were you can find the whole of Tara Brabazon's top ten tips for doctoral failure. Summarised, don't do this if you want to successfully finish your Ph.D.:

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