Here is where this book aims to be useful, in helping PhD students and their advisers to think more systematically about authoring skills. On the basis of supervising my own students over the years, and of teaching a large and intensive course on PhD drafting and writing at my university for more than a decade, I take what might be launched an 'extreme' view by more conventional colleagues. I believe that in most of the social sciences and all of the humanities disciplines, a sat of general authoring skill determine around 40 to 50 per cent of anyone's success in completing a doctorate. Of course, your ability to complete doctoral-level work will be primarily conditioned by your own research ideas and 'native' originality, and your hard work, application and skill in acquiring specific knowledge of your discipline and competence in its methods. But unless you simultaneously grow and enhance your authoring abilities, there are strong risks that your ideas may not develop sufficiently far or fast enough to sustain you through to finishing your thesis at the right level and in a reasonable time. Doing good research and becoming an effective author are not separate processes, but closely related aspects of intellectual development that need to work in parallel. I also believe that authoring skills are relatively generic ones, applicable in a broadly similar way across a range of disciplines at doctoral level. Hence this book draws on a wide range of previous writings and insights by earlier generations of university scholars