Yes PhD students are only rarely taught authoring skills in an explicit way in universities. The knowledge involved has not often been codified or written down. Great effort is normally put into communicating to students the substantive knowledge of each discipline, with an intense socialization and training in its research methods. By comparison the teaching or training of students in authoring has been given little attention. Partly this reflects a widespread conviction amongst academic staff that at the PhD level becoming an effective writer is completely bound up with becoming a good researcher, and with mastering the subject matter of one individual academic discipline. Authoring a doctorate has often been seen as too diffuse an activity to be legitimately or usefully studied in universities