Writing from the PhD isn’t always easy. You may finish the PhD full of enthusiasm for your topic and really want to get stuck into publishing. Or you may not. You may never want to see or hear of your PhD again. This happens. If you just cant bring yourself took at your text again, you need to be kind to yourself. Don’t beat yourself up. You have to find a way to be OK with leaving it behind, ignore the haters and move on. Don’t feel guilty. And, yYou never know, you may find you can come back to it later.

But if you are up for writing from your PhD, better still, are even feeling energised by the prospect, then there are some risks you need to consider. I’ve talked before about the risk of trying to write a summary of the entire thesis in one paper. Cramming the elephant into a telephone box. Possible but not easy. So I’m not going to say more about this risky task now. This post is about another risk. It’s one which applies mainly to social science and humanities type PhDs. And it’s not talked about enough.

I call this the Repetition Risk. The Repetition Risk can appear when you unpack your thesis into potential papers. Oh no, they all seem like more of the same. In other words, you’ve looked at your thesis and found some different data sets that could be the basis of different papers. But each paper you try to write ends up arguing the same thing. Every paper seems to lead to the same conclusion – and it’s the same conclusion you reached in your thesis.

Let me give you an idea of what I mean and then I’ll explain further.

Imagine you’ve done research looking at the impact of audit policies on academic work. I know your thesis is unlikely to be this, but stay with me. Your imaginary research was a mixed methods study which combined a policy analysis with a survey and some interviews. Your big conclusion was that audit policies were making life impossible for academic staff. (Yes I know this is too absolutist for a real PhD, but this is a hypothetical, right?)

So now imagine Paper One. It’s drawn from your work on policy. It’s a decent bit of discourse analysis and your conclusion is that policy positions university staff in an impossible situation. Paper Two is a survey of selected university managers and your conclusion is that university managers have been placed in an impossible position by current audit policy demands. Paper Three is some interviews with academic staff which, yes, you’ve guessed it, shows that they are  currently placed in an impossible position.

That would never happen you say? Well humour me – let’s stay with it for a bit longer. The most obvious problem is that for each paper to be arguing the same thing means that only one of the papers will make a novel contribution. Only one paper can argue that university staff are in an impossible situation, the other two papers need to be arguing something additional. Sure, you might get away with exactly these three papers if you submit them to different journals. But it’s really not doing your work justice, because you could do much more.

The additional trouble you’re in is that saying that audit policy positions university staff in an impossible position is hardly new news. Even if we want to dispute the absolute nature of this statement, it is pretty accepted that audit regimes haven’t made academic life any easier. So, when reviewers get any one of your three papers, they are likely to do a big hohum and suggest you try again.

There’s a reason they say that. Every paper has to place itself in its field and in the current scholarly conversation and show how it is adding to what is already out there.

So back to our hypothetical papers – how to do this? The good news is that there are multiple ways to address repetition and not-much-of-a-contribution. Basically they all involve a thinking shift. You have to loosen the grip of the thesis and its argument on your thinking, and look at the data and its analysis afresh. You need to see what it could do standing alone.

So what does that look like? Well here’s one way it could be done. It’s not the only way and I am sure that you can think of more, using my example.

So my example is simple. Flip the conclusion to the introduction. All of the three papers can start with your big conclusion, because it is one that is generally accepted- the work of academic staff is made (OK near) impossible by current audit policies. Then you can change the focus of each of the paper to an explanation of process and/or details of experience and/or discussion of consequences etc.

And here’s how that might go. Paper One says, Everyone knows that university staff are in an impossible position and that audit policy is (at least partly) to blame. This paper shows why and how the policy matters –  the devil is in the detail. Paper Two asks why university managers don’t moderate the effects of  audit policies on their staff – the survey shows that it’s because their mandated everyday work is so consuming that it makes resistance impossible. Paper Three focuses on the lived experience of university staff and how they respond to audit requirements. The analysis of the interviews shows a paradox – staff don’t prioritise the things that aren’t counted even though these may be very things that produce the differences the audit policies want as outcomes. I hope you agree that these are slightly more interesting papers.

Do remember I’m making this all up. This is not your research or your thesis. But what I’m hoping to say and show is that each paper that cones from the thesis has to be seen as a distinct contribution in its own right. Each paper has to address a question or problem – one that is likely not the same as your overall thesis. Each paper uses data and analysis from the thesis and odds are that it makes a case which you had integrated into the thesis text as a step along the way to your big conclusion.

So your job with the papers from the thesis is to untangle these steps from the larger text and argument and to temporarily imagine each one as a separate thing. And write it as a separate thing too. So, if you ever find yourself planning papers where each paper bears a striking resemblance to the others, then you know that you need to step back. Reorient. Reimagine.

Dealing with the Repetition Risk means you need to take each paper as if it were on its lonesome. As if it needed to make its own case and state its contribution to what is already out there in the literatures and in the wider conversation.