{"id":1024,"date":"2015-03-24T09:18:20","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T13:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/?p=1024"},"modified":"2015-03-24T09:53:47","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T13:53:47","slug":"ecos-how-to-write-a-thesis-in-15-maxims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/archives\/1024","title":{"rendered":"Eco’s “How to Write a Thesis” in 15 Maxims"},"content":{"rendered":"

(or, Thesis Advice, Click-Bait Style<\/strong><\/em>)<\/p>\n

Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco released How to Write a Thesis<\/em>\u00a0in 1977, well before his rise to international intellectual stardom. It has just been released<\/strong> in English for the first time by MIT Press<\/a>. I’ve just read it.<\/p>\n

\"9780262527132_0_0\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I was thinking of assigning it in doctoral seminars, but I regret that a great deal of the book involves scholarly practices that are no longer relevant to anyone. For instance: Is it OK to insert an unnecessary footnote<\/strong>\u00a0in the middle of your text so that your footnote numbering matches up correctly with what you’ve already typed? (Meaning: So you don’t have to re-type the entire manuscript. On a typewriter.)<\/p>\n

It turns out that it is not OK to insert unnecessary footnotes.<\/p>\n

And there’s a whole bunch of things about index card management, <\/strong>diacritical marks,\u00a0and library union indices. And some stuff about the laurea<\/em>.<\/p>\n

However, even if I do not find the book\u00a0relevant to assign as a whole, Eco’s great wit and strong opinions<\/strong> did lead me to compile the best quotes from the book. I present them to you here:<\/p>\n

Eco’s 15 Maxims for PhD Students:<\/strong><\/p>\n

From How to Write a Thesis <\/em>[1977\/2015], selected by me.\u00a0These are slightly paraphrased to make them work in a list. I hope you like them as much as I did.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Academic humility is the knowledge that anyone can teach us something. Practice it.<\/li>\n
  2. A thesis is like a chess game that requires a player to plan in advance all the moves he will make to checkmate his opponent.<\/li>\n
  3. How long does it take to write a thesis? No longer than three years and no less than six months.<\/li>\n
  4. Imagine that you have a week to take a 600-mile car trip. Even if you are on vacation, you will not leave your house and begin driving indiscriminately in a random direction. A provisional\u00a0table of contents will function as your work plan.<\/li>\n
  5. You must write a thesis that you are able to write.<\/li>\n
  6. Your thesis exists to prove the hypothesis that you devised at the outset, not to show the breadth of your knowledge.<\/li>\n
  7. What you should never<\/em> do is quote from an indirect source pretending that you have read the original.<\/li>\n
  8. Quote the object of your interpretive analysis with reasonable abundance.<\/li>\n
  9. Use notes to pay your debts.<\/li>\n
  10. You should not become so paranoid that you believe you have been plagiarized every time a professor or another student addresses a topic related to your thesis.<\/li>\n
  11. If you read the great scientists or the great critics you will see that, with a few exceptions, they are quite clear and are not ashamed of explaining things well.<\/li>\n
  12. You are not Proust. Do not write long sentences.<\/li>\n
  13. The language of a thesis is a metalanguage<\/em>, that is, a language that speaks of other languages. A psychiatrist who describes the mentally ill does not express himself in the manner of his patients.<\/li>\n
  14. If you do not feel qualified, do not defend your thesis.<\/li>\n
  15. Do not whine and be complex-ridden, because it is annoying.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    (or, Thesis Advice, Click-Bait Style) Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco released How to Write a Thesis\u00a0in 1977, well before his rise to international intellectual stardom. It has just been released in English for the first time by MIT Press. I’ve just read it. I was thinking of assigning it in doctoral seminars, but I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2132,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4M7Bm-gw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2132"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1024"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1034,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024\/revisions\/1034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}