Piles of French Novels Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Paris, October-November 1887 oil on canvas, 54.4 cm x 73.6 cm): Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Musings on the PhD-thesis-to-book-draft rewriting process
By Ryan Beaton
Ryan is a lawyer working at Juristes Power Law. He completed his postdoctoral research at Peter Allard School of Law, where has has taught indigenous-settler relations and aboriginal law.
What’s the value of reworking a PhD thesis into book format? For the thesis-writer, at least, it might prove something of a rescue mission, a chance at saving the story you wanted to tell in the first place from two predictable sources of deadweight. First, in writing a PhD thesis, we necessarily have academic norms and expectations in mind, which often drag on any storytelling flow and page-turning momentum. Second, for many of us, the PhD thesis is a first, or at least an early, attempt at developing a compelling book-length argument. As with most things, first tries can be awkward. For my part, the PhD in law included writing several chapter-length articles, which I ultimately cobbled together, somewhat after the fact, into the thesis. I did my best to weave the pieces together coherently, and each chapter was in itself an attempt to tell part of an overarching story, but the result was undoubtedly patchy. Reworking the thesis into book format was a chance to rewrite from beginning to end while keeping a much tighter focus on the overall story I wanted to tell and to cut anything that seemed to derail the flow. This blog revisits the rewriting process to give a sense of how my own thesis-salvage project played out.
In September 2021 I submitted the final version of my PhD thesis to the University of Victoria. The following month, in October 2021, I started a two-year postdoc at UBC’s Allard Law School with a SSHRC grant. Over those two years, I’ve rewritten my PhD thesis into book form.
The basic contention of the thesis is that key fault lines in Canadian Aboriginal law today are shaped by clashing positivist and pluralist judicial impulses. But the overarching story I wanted to tell is that a loss of faith in certain state-founding myths—myths of a civilizing mission by European peoples taking Indigenous peoples under tutelage—has exposed suppressed fault lines and unresolved problems in the relationship between the Canadian state legal system and Indigenous legal orders. I envisioned the detailed, technical legal analysis of recent case law as a careful study of how a widespread loss of faith in national myths, indeed a reassessment of those myths and associated history as a disturbing national legacy, translated into doctrinal developments in the case law. That’s the big-picture story I had in mind. The University of Victoria was a great place to work on it, and I could not have asked for more supportive and insightful co-supervisors than I had in John Borrows and James Tully to help me develop the story.
Of course, there were immediate practical goals in writing the PhD thesis, objectives of a more mundane and straightforward kind than big-picture storytelling. I wanted my committee to sign off on my final draft and then to have it approved after my defence. Yes, I also hoped to tell a convincing story underpinned by clever analysis. But that substantive goal was shaped by the fact that a PhD thesis is inevitably geared towards committee approval. And the committee’s job is necessarily to enforce basic academic norms, even if the individuals on committee are encouraging as can be about writing in one’s own voice, etc.
So the PhD thesis is, among other things, a long writing project aimed at satisfying academic norms. This does not typically make for good writing—good in the sense of something that is a joy to write and a joy to read. A PhD thesis is generally expected to situate itself with respect to a mountain of secondary literature, to formulate and justify a methodology, to convey a depth of scholarly research, to anticipate and respond to potential critiques, and overall to prove itself as a serious academic contribution. This is often a recipe for stuffy and defensive writing.
Now, the stifling quality of academic norms can be hard to grasp clearly while writing a PhD thesis. I mean, yes, I knew as I was writing the thesis that it wasn’t exactly a joy to read. The sentences often felt convoluted, entire sections too worried about successfully drawing conclusions and heading off objections, chapters as a whole too weighed down by sign-posting (“tell what you’ll tell, tell, tell what you’ve told”), too much trying to show what I know and what I’ve read, and too many footnotes everywhere you look … too much this and too much that to be good writing. I’m not saying that no PhD thesis can be a joy to write or read, just that the format and expectations tend to work against it.
But, again, the heaviness of the writing was not always so clear to me as I was writing the thesis. Only once I devoted two years to rereading and rewriting did passages strike me as truly cringe-worthy in their at-once pleading and pretentious tone, seeking to ingratiate, to find academic approval. Not every passage, of course. But many. It can be disheartening at the outset of rewriting, because I would think, “well, whatever tone or voice I adopt now might also make me cringe two years down the road.” And that remains entirely possible. In any case, with a bit of distance from the PhD process and relieved of any pressure to defend the thesis as such, I could see many of its faults more clearly.
What was encouraging, though, was that the basic story I wanted to tell still seemed right to me—in fact, clearer, simpler, and more accurate than I had myself really believed while writing the PhD thesis. True, some details of the story didn’t hold, some parts would have to fall out, while other pieces fell into place more easily. But the overall story seemed more compelling to me than it had during the PhD as I was putting it together, and I knew I could tell a clearer, more readable version of the story, while also dialling down the pleading, proving tone that is—unfortunately but maybe inevitably—such a distinctive calling card of academia.
In terms of my own motivation, there was one further saving grace in the PhD thesis. I had decided to insert somewhat random poems and creative fragments of my own between the chapters. I greatly appreciate that my committee members were open to this, even as it injected considerable weirdness into the thesis. In a very loose sense, the poems and fragments poke at themes of authority, power, standing-aside—sometimes seriously, sometimes just for fun. The poems and fragments formed something of an alter ego to the sustained argument of the properly academic chapters.
Academia, certainly in the humanities, has (lately?) developed an idiosyncratic form of evangelizing or proselytizing, as we’re all encouraged to present our work, our arguments, our writing as part of a grand struggle to make the world a better place. Statements of intent by incoming law students, for instance, are predictably loaded with confessions of the candidate’s earnest good intentions and longing to take up that struggle. And that more or less carries through the whole enterprise. Which is all to the good, for who doesn’t want the world to be a better place? But we can also acknowledge that it creates a somewhat oppressive moralizing atmosphere in academia, with a good deal of pressure to establish and keep up one’s bona fides. The poems and fragments in my PhD thesis, and now my book draft, have played a modest counterpoint to my own personal experience of that academic atmosphere. The poems and fragments offer a visceral take, stripped of academic formalism, on the themes of the book and some of the foibles of academia. This brought some balance to my own writing process, as it strikes me that over-intellectualization is our distinctive disease as a human species, one that academia sometimes exacerbates to critical condition.
The rewriting process also allowed me to trim convoluted sentences, ease the flow of argument, take some signposts down, and tell a clearer story. It remains an academic work, of course. I have no pretentions that it has been transformed into a roaring page-turner. Throughout the book, apart from the poems and fragments, I keep faith with basic academic norms that a reader will rightfully expect for the subject matter I address. But the rewriting process has also incubated a kind of ideal of scholarly subject matter as, at its best, scaffolding for clambering to a clearer view of your own inner landscape and how you work problems through. Eventually you want to hit on a problem—not necessarily a “scholarly” one—that says, “this, this only you can work through.” That is a deeply personal and subterranean process of developing character and awareness. It’s a process that can play out across any profession or aspect of life. Academic writing is perhaps not the most obvious place to find it. But to the extent we devote large chunks of time and effort to our academic work, we might as well look to bring the inner self into meaningful relationship with it.