This conventional approach assumes that beginning PhD students will be sustained by discipline-specific study skills inculcated in their earlier education, at first degree or masters level. As their research goes on they will presumably learn how to produce good (or at least acceptable) writing in the style of their discipline via a process of trial and error, 'learning by doing' over successive drafts -first of papers, then of chapters, and ultimately of a complete thesis. Doctoral students are mentored intensively and hence should get detailed criticisms and individual advice from their supervisors and perhaps other colleagues. This advice is always text-specific and discipline-specific, focusing on this or that substantive argument or piece of research, on whether a particular point has been proved sufficiently, or whether a given way of expressing an argument is legitimate or appropriate in its context, and so on. From many repeated instances of these comments and interactions the hope is that students will progressively build up their own sense of what can and cannot be said, how it may be said, and how other professionals in their subject will interpret and react to their text.