Academic Pride of the thesis

The tricks of academic work are innumerable, and innu­merable are the traps into which you can fall. Within the limits of this short treatment, we can only provide, in no particular order, a series of instructions to help you avoid such traps. Although these instructions may not help you navigate the Bermuda Triangle that you must cross in writ­ing your thesis, they will at least alert you to the existence of such perils, and that you must ultimately face them on your own.

Do not credit or cite notions of common knowledge. Nobody would think of writing “Napoleon who, as Ludwig states, died in Saint Helena,” but this kind of naivete happens often. It is easy to say, “The mechanical looms, as Marx says, marked the advent of the industrial revolution,” though this was a universally accepted notion even before Marx.

Do not attribute to an author an idea that he cites as belong­ing to someone else. Not only because you will appear to have used an indirect source unmindfully, but also because that author might have cited the idea without accepting it. In a little semiotics manual of mine, I cited, among the various possible classifications of signs, one that divides them into expressive and communicative versions. I then found in a student paper the assertion that, “according to Eco, signs are divided between the expressive and communicative.” How­ever, I have always been opposed to this coarse subdivision. I had cited it for objectivity, but I did not appropriate it.

Do not add or delete notes only to force the numbering to add up. When you have already typewritten your thesis (or even if you have simply written it legibly for the typist), it may happen that you must eliminate a note that turned out to be incorrect, or that you must add a new one at any cost. As a result the numbering of the following notes does not add up, and good for you if you have numbered notes by chapter and not from the very beginning of your thesis. (It is one thing to correct notes from 1 to 10, another to correct them from 1 to 150.) To avoid changing all the note reference numbers, you will be tempted to insert a filler note or elim­inate another note. This temptation is human. But in these cases it is better to insert an additional superscript sign, such as a plus (+) sign, to refer the reader to the inserted note. However, this is surely a makeshift solution that may displease some advisors, so rearrange the numbering if you can.

There is a method for citing from indirect sources while still observing the rules of academic honesty. It is always better not to cite secondhand information, but sometimes this is impossible to avoid. Two systems are common, depending on the situation. First, let us suppose that Sedanelli quoted from Smith the statement that “The language of bees is translatable in terms of transformational grammar.” In this case, we wish to highlight that Sedanelli assumes responsi­bility for this statement. We will then say in a note, using a not-so-elegant formula:

1. C. Sedanelli, II linguaggio delle api (Milan: Gastaldi, 1967), 45, quoting C. Smith, Chomsky and Bees (Chattanooga: Vallechiara Press, 1966), 56.

In the second case we wish to highlight that the statement belongs to Smith, and we quote Sedanelli only to assuage our conscience, since we are taking Smith’s quote from a second­hand source. We will then write the note:

1. C. Smith, Chomsky and Bees (Chattanooga: Vallechiara Press, 1966), 56, as quoted in C. Sedanelli, Il linguaggio delle api (Milan: Gastaldi, 1967), 45.

Always give precise information on critical editions, revisions, and the like. Specify if an edition is a critical edition and indi­cate its editor. Specify if a second or more recent edition

is revised, enlarged, or corrected. Otherwise you risk mis­representing the opinions that an author expressed in the 1970 revised edition of his 1940 work as if he had actually expressed them in 1940, when some discoveries had perhaps not yet been made.

Pay attention when you quote a pre-1900 author from for­eign sources. Different cultures name the same figures differ­ently. For instance, while we Italians refer to “Pietro Ispano” and the French to “Scot Erigene,” in English you will find “Peter of Spain” and “Scotus Eriugena.” In an Italian text you will encounter “Nicholas of Cusa” in the form of “Nic- colo Cusano,” and you should easily recognize personalities like “Petrarque” or “Petrarca,” “Michel-Ange,” “Vinci,” and “Boccace.” “Roberto Grossatesta” in Italian appears as “Rob­ert Grosseteste” in English, “Alberto Magno” as “Albert the Great,” and “San Tommaso d’Aquino” as simply “Aquinas.” The person known in Italian as “Anselmo d’Aosta” appears in English as “Anselm of Canterbury.” Do not speak of two painters when you refer to “Roger van der Wayden” and “Rogier de la Pasture,” because they are one and the same. “Giove” is “Jupiter,” naturally. Also, pay attention when you are copying Russian names from an old French source. You would probably avoid writing “Staline” or “Lenine,” but you may still fall for “Ouspensky,” when you should instead transliterate “Uspenskij.” The same applies to names of cities: “Den Haag,” “La Haye,” and “L’Aia” all refer to “The Hague.”

How do we learn these naming conventions, of which there are many hundreds? We read various texts in various languages on the same topic. We join the club. Music lov­ers know “the King” is Elvis Presley, sports fans know that “Doctor J” is Julius Erving, and American high school stu­dents know that “Mark Twain” is Samuel Clemens. Those who do not know these things are considered naive or pro­vincial. A literature student who discusses in his thesis the relationship between Arouet and Voltaire after reading a few secondary sources might be considered “ignorant” instead of merely provincial.¹⁴

Pay attention when you find numbers in foreign texts. For instance, in an Italian book you will find 2.625 for two thousand six hundred twenty-five, while 2,25 means two and twenty-five hundredths.

Pay attention to references to centuries in foreign sources. For instance, in Italian you will find references to Cinque- cento, Settecento, Novecento and not the XVI (sixteenth), XVIII (eighteenth), and XX (twentieth) centuries. However, in a French or English book the Italian word Quattrocento indicates a precise period of Florentine culture. Do not make facile equivalencies among different languages. The Italian Rinascimento covers a different period than the Renaissance, since it excludes seventeenth-century authors. Manierismo is another tricky term because it refers to a specific period in Italian art history, and not to what is known in English as mannerism, or in German as Manierismus.

Acknowledgments. If someone other than your advisor provided verbal suggestions, lent you rare books, or gave you similar kinds of help, it is good practice to acknowledge them in a section at the beginning or end of your thesis. It also shows that you were diligent enough to consult knowledge­able people. However, it is bad taste to thank your advisor. If he helped you, he has simply done his job.

Additionally, you may happen to thank and to declare your debt to a scholar that your advisor hates, abhors, and despises. This is a serious academic incident, and it is your fault. You should have trusted your advisor, and if he told you that someone is an imbecile, you should not have con­sulted that person. Or, if your advisor is open-minded and he accepts that his student has used resources with which he disagrees, this incident will simply become a matter of civil discussion at your thesis defense. If instead your advi­sor is an old capricious baron, spiteful and dogmatic, you have probably made the wrong choice for an advisor. How­ever, if, despite these flaws, you truly wanted this advisor because you believed that he would treat you like a protege, then you must be coherently dishonest and ignore this other person in your acknowledgments, because you have chosen to become the same kind of person that your mentor is.

Academic Pride

In section 4.2.4 we discussed academic humility, which con­cerns the research method and the interpretation of texts. Now let us discuss academic pride, which concerns confi­dence in writing.

There is nothing more annoying than a thesis in which the author continuously gives unsolicited excuses (and this sometimes even happens in published books):

We are not qualified to deal with such a topic. Nevertheless we would like to venture a guess that …

What do you mean, you are not qualified? You have devoted months and maybe years to the topic you have chosen, you have presumably read everything there was to read on it, you have reflected on it, taken notes, and now you say that you are not qualified? But what have you been doing all this time? If you do not feel qualified, do not defend your thesis. If you defend it, it is because you feel ready, and in this case you have no right to make excuses. So, once you have illus­trated other scholars’ opinions, once you have illuminated the particular difficulties of the issue, and once you have clarified that there can be alternative answers to a specific question, jump in at the deep end. Have no qualms about say­ing, “we think that …” or, “it is possible to think that …” When you speak, you are the expert. If you are to be exposed as a fraud because you have not done rigorous work, shame on you, but you have no right to hesitate if you have done good work. On your specific topic, you are humanity’s func­tionary who speaks in the collective voice. Be humble and prudent before opening your mouth, but once you open it, be dignified and proud.

By writing a thesis on topic X, you assume that nobody has discussed this topic so exhaustively or clearly before you. Throughout this book I have shown that you must be cautious in choosing a topic, that you must be wary enough to settle on a topic that is extremely limited, perhaps very easy, and perhaps despicably specialized. But on the topic you have chosen, be it even “Variations in Newspaper Sales at the Newsagent on the Corner of Washington and State during the First Week of August 1976,” on that topic you must be the utmost living authority. And even if you have chosen a litera­ture survey in which you summarize all that has been said on a topic without adding anything new, you are the authority on what has been said by the other authorities. Nobody must know better than you all that has been said on that topic. Naturally, you must work with a clear conscience. But this is another story. Here I am discussing a matter of style. Do not whine and be complex-ridden, because it is annoying.

Attention: the following chapter is not printed but instead type­written. It provides a model of the thesis’s final draft. The final draft entails two specific documents: the final written draft, and the final typewritten draft. It may first seem like writing the final draft is your responsibility and that this is wholly a conceptual issue, whereas typing is a manual matter that is the responsibility of the typist. But this is not really the case. Giving a typewritten form to a thesis also means making some method­ological choices. If the typist makes them for you, following certain standards, your thesis will still have a specific graphic- expository format that also affects its content. It is more desir­able that you make these choices yourself, and in this case, any kind of draft you have adopted (writing by hand, typing with a single finger, or—horror!—using the tape recorder) must con­tain formatting instructions for the typist.

For these reasons, you will find formatting instructions in this chapter that will help you impose a conceptual order as well as a “communicative facade” on your thesis. Also, you may or may not use the services of a typist. You could type it yourself, especially if your work requires special graphic conventions. You may be able to type at least a first typewritten draft on your own, and the typ­ist will have only to clean up what you have already formatted. The question here is whether you can type, or can learn to type. If the answer is yes to either, remember that a used typewriter costs less than paying a typist to type your thesis.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.