Yet some aspects of academic differentiation and cue-giving are not just extraneous elements. Labels and jargon are great time-saving devices in academic life, just as they are in ordinary existence. If I can say to you, 'Dolly Parton is a country and western singer’ then this four-word label sums up a lot of different features-dressing up in fake cowboy clothes with fringes on them, singing in a yodelling fashion with a slide guitar accompaniment, and favouring songs about rural backwoods themes, the trials of married love and American patriotism. If have to spell out these features every time it will take a lot longer than three words to explain. Similarly, academic jargon is an essential element of maintaining a professional conversation (in person and in print) where meanings are precise and specialist topics can be handled flexibly and economically. If your PhD thesis is to be interesting at all then it is inevitable that it will focus to a great extent on some kind of controversy in your discipline, some nexus of debate between different theories, or thematic interpretations, or methodological positions, or empirical standpoints. You will thus have to discuss positions, register criticisms, affirm some loyalties- in short take sides. Beginning students often underestimate the importance and pervasiveness of the side-taking cues which their text conveys. They pick up and use 'loaded' terminology or concepts without appreciating how some readers will decode its presence. So to manage readers' expectations effectively requires that you carefully judge all elements of your presentation, the explicit promises and the implicit signals which you give to readers about the intentions of your work and its relationship to the discipline