The Thesis and the Book: A Guide for First-Time Academic Authors (review)

For almost thirty years, The Thesis and the Book, edited by Eleanor Harman and Ian Montagnes and published in 1976, was the volume acquisitions editors recommended to newly minted PhDs wishing to publish their dissertations. It was not, strictly speaking, a book of advice, containing as it did musings on the publishing industry and on the worth of dissertations and comprising articles that originally appeared in Scholarly Publishing(now The Journal of Scholarly Publishing).

As the decades wore on, the book's antiquated references and gender-exclusive language made it something of a museum piece, even as the advice it offered continued to be helpful and relevant. Fortunately, the editors of the second edition have found a way to retain, for the most part ,the best of the first edition while making the book more useful for authors. First, they have given it a subtitle, thus making its purpose more clearly evident. Second, the language is no longer gender biased. Third, three chapters from the first edition have been cut, two new chapters have been added, and the three parts of Olive Holmes's article 'Thesis to Book' have been fused into one.

The volume opens with Francess Halpenny's 'The Thesis and the Book,' an effective starting point for the first edition that remains a sound opening piece, with valuable information presented in a polite tone. I do wish that the comment 'The new readers of a scholarly work may be imagined as a thousand or five thousand in number' (7), as well as some equally misleading remarks, had been changed or cut.

The unfortunate hold-over from the first edition is the second chapter, Robert Plant Armstrong's 'The Dissertation's Deadly Sins.' I never liked this chapter in the first edition, partly because of its haughty tone but also because it's not all that useful. The editors did soften the language a bit for the second edition, but some traces of the original remain, for example, 'By regarding the dissertation as a pre-professional piece of work, the graduate school postpones its students' maturation and encourages in them contentment with amateurishness and unprofessionalism' (11). Aren't the days of hyperbolic utterances à laProfessor Kingsfield in The Paper Chaseover? Even if they're not, they don't belong in a book like this.

Armstrong's 'Revising the Dissertation and Publishing the Book,' which follows, was and is generally helpful, even though it retains a brief discourse on 'neurotic revisers' that, although it is a spot-on observation, is one that authors would find off-putting. It is followed by William Dowling's solid 'Avoiding the Warmed-Over Dissertation,' a staple of the first edition because of its approachable, first-person perspective.

The heart of the first edition was Olive Holmes's three-part piece, an extremely practical, nuts-and-bolts guide to revision that appears in this new edition as one chapter: 'Thesis to Book: What to Get Rid of and What to Do with What Is Left.' All of the original material appears. My only quibble is that the abundant examples of the works and words of Great White Men – Emerson, Whitehead, Orwell, Einstein, Darwin, Dewey, et al. – remain. I'm thinking it might have been advantageous to update the references, thereby presenting a more diverse group. That criticism aside, the entire book is worth its price just for this sentence: 'Cutting a manuscript is not simply a way of reducing length; it is also a way of strengthening communication' (51).

There are two new chapters. The first is 'An Academic Author's Checklist,' by Barbara Reitt. It is just that – a list of questions authors can ask themselves as they prepare and revise a manuscript. To my mind, it will be beneficial primarily for those...