ABSTRACT
Writing the thesis is always about textwork/identity work. The completed thesis reports and represents your research. It argues your contribution to knowledge. Creative writers often talks about a stage of writing, before they get to the final editing and proofreading. This is sometimes called styling. Styling means attending to textual matters that give the writing 'voice', our particular stamp on the text. The idea of a mantle can be helpful for anxious DRs in the last throes of thesis writing. It suggests that the expert is not yet part of the DR, but is something to be assumed while the writing is going on. Academic writing is obscure, difficult, abstract, self-indulgent, and lifeless, of little interest to the public. In Stylish academic writing, Helen Sword masochistically analyzed the literary style in a sample of 500 scholarly articles and found that a healthy minority in every field were written with grace and verve.
