---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: ! 'Doctoral Thesis Editing: Cutting Words'

wordpress_id: 1947
wordpress_url: https://www.martineve.com/2012/03/08/doctoral-thesis-editing-cutting-words/
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categories:
- Technology
- Academia
tags:
- academia
- PhDchat
- tips
comments:
- id: 6651
  author: Sarah Robins-Hobden
  author_email: sarah@robinshobden.com
  author_url: ''
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  content: So many styles, such little time… this is a very useful tip, thanks Martin.
    For most outputs I'm required to APA, which impacts little on word count, so thankfully
    this hasn't been an issue for me (and my 'pamphlet-thesis'. ;o)
---
<p>A quick tip that I think it's worth raising, as it's just come to the fore in my life(!), is that the citation style you employ can have a large impact on the number of words over the course of an 80,000 word thesis.</p>
<p>I have been using, until today, the Chicago style with a full note on every page. Thankfully, I use Zotero, so I am easily able to switch the style throughout my whole document, albeit not so easily to an autor-date mode from a footnote. When I switched, though, to Chicago with an abbreviated note, I shaved a good 4000 words off my thesis; 4000 words that I would otherwise have had to lose from the body text.</p>
<p>In short: watch out for styles that overly repeat your bibliography.</p>
<p><i>Featured image by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/azriadnan/">semuthutan</a> under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.</i></p>