ABSTRACT
The Ph.D. thesis or dissertation1 has no t been researched as a text genre as much as one might expect. The Ph.D. thesis is im portant as the rite of passage to an academic career, required by universities around the world and anguished over by thousands of research postgraduate students and their supervisors/ advisers.2 The Ph.D. thesis has been the subject of many guidebooks for students, giving advice on how it should be written and the structure it should follow. Increasingly in universities today, it is the subject of workshops, or even courses, in thesis writing. But as Mauch and Birch (1993: vii) state in their guidebook, ‘One of the surprising weaknesses in the thesis or dissertation process is that there is relatively little scholarly literature and a remarkably small num ber of empirical investigations about it.’ Ventola and M auranen (1996: vii) also note that ‘innum erable guidebooks and manuals on writing up research have been published; however, very few of these are based on serious linguistic analysis of the kinds of texts that a novice academic m ight have to m aster’.
