Planning an Integrated Thesis: the Macro-Structure

Abstract

Any large text has to be broken up and arranged into a set of chapters. This task may seem unproblematic. First think about how many thousand words you want to write, and then how many chunks of text you need to split up this total effectively. Next settle on what topics to begin with, and where you want to end up. Then fix on some way to get from alpha to omega. So far, so straightforward. But there is a bit more to it than that. One of Neil Young’s ironic songs has a record producer telling a rock artist that they have a ‘perfect track’, although they don’t yet have either a vocal or a song. ‘If we could get these things accomplished,’ he says, ‘nothin’ else could go wrong.’² Planning a thesis from a blank-canvas requires a similar heroic optimism and there are multiple considerations to keep in mind.

The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.

Vladimir Nabokov ¹