Word Counts and Pages
At this month’s meeting with my supervisors, we discussed word counts and page counts for my dissertation. I have seen that they vary across disciplines, and I wasn’t sure what my goal should be. They directed me to the PhD handbook, which I haven’t actually found yet, but in poking around on OneDrive I found a file called “Thesis Word Limits - Student Guidance.” It says:
College of Social Sciences, Art and Humanities
In the College of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, the length of the thesis – including footnotes, but excluding the table of contents, tabulated data, diagrams, any appendices, the bibliography, and table(s) of cases/legislation/treaties cited – must not exceed the following limits:
PhD - 80,000 words
My supervisors had said the bibliography was included, but this says otherwise. My school also has the longest word requirement by far - the College of Science and Engineering and the College of Life Sciences each require 50,000 words for a PhD dissertation - though I suppose they have a lot more diagrams and so forth, which aren’t counted.
Although I am now beginning the official “writing up” process, I’ve been writing for years already. Scrivener and Zotero, though they don’t play well together, have been my workflow since at least 2021. I compiled my paper, ran it through citation conversion, and the output was … 27,459 words. (Page count doesn’t really matter, but it’s 85 pages; also, the bibliography was an additional 3,000 words by itself.)
If we take that as a percentage, I have completed 34.3% of my doctoral dissertation. Of course a lot of it should be rewritten, and there is a lot more to write - but that’s where I stand as I start writing up.
The idea of writing 50,000 words before 27 September 2027 is daunting, but that’s my deadline, and it’s doable. I’ve got my nose too close to my data, so we also discussed taking a more bird’s-eye view to get myself situated to begin the process.
I got this, right? Right. Write!