While editing my thesis Dr. Dillon would give me handwritten comments and I would make the changes and often expand the text to make things clearer. Then I gave the new drafts back to Dr. Dillon and the process would repeat itself. I kept the hard copies of all of the stages of my thesis, including the handwritten pages. I was not keeping them for posterity, to prove I did the work, or because I had a fond attachment to them. No, I kept them because I planned to have a bonfire using the drafts of my thesis once I was done. I was accumulating quite a large pile of canary yellow tablet sheets and computer printouts for this purpose. I was on track to graduate in winter, which is the perfect time to burn stuff—in the snow of a Michigan winter.

I must have been on the third or fourth set of corrections of a key section of my thesis when I got a new bunch of corrections back from Dr. Dillon. I had been living with the thesis as an all-consuming entity. It was more like a nurturing a child than writing a 164-page document. Every word on those pages represented time, thought and hard work. Each page represented 68 hours of work over the course of my Ph.D. thesis studies, so these were important and hard-earned pages. Dr. Dillon handed me some red-lined text and said we should discuss his corrections. He had made some changes and suggestions and I noticed that he changed the construction of one sentence back to a version I had written previously. He was changing his corrections to be more like my writing. I told him that and he said,

“That’s interesting. When I was writing my own thesis Dick Murphy did the same thing to me. That means you’re ready and I need to let you go.”

Dick Murphy was Dr. Dillon’s former Ph.D. supervisor. Dr. Murphy was a very senior and highly respected scientist, mentor and author. Dick Murphy might be considered my intellectual grandfather in my own educational pedigree. Pedigrees in science are as important as pedigrees in horse racing, and his was a good line to be in. Dr. Dillon paused for a second and I was trying to comprehend the significance of what he had just said.

“I don’t need to see any more versions unless you have specific questions or requests. The thesis reads well and the science is solid. Finish what you have and start the process for scheduling your thesis defense.”

Again, I heard his words and was slowly processing them. This meant I was very close to finishing the thesis and he was giving me the go-ahead to move forward. I felt a sense of accomplishment and even some pride at getting such a positive reinforcement of my writing, a hint that the end of my Ph.D. journey was close at hand. This was an important moment but I remained calm and finished our briefing and left Dr. Dillon’s office with a growing sense of confidence in my work.

I went home and told Ann about my conversation with Dr. Dillon. She wasn’t all that impressed. Perhaps she thought it was a foregone conclusion that I would get to the point of independent writing of my thesis, but it was something I had been concerned with from the beginning, so it was a big deal for me. I took the whole thing as a good sign and a big step in my career.

From Dr. Dillon’s example I learned a lot about to how to write a thesis and how to teach my students when writing a thesis. I learned the difference between general suggestions and specific editing. Dr. Dillon would say that a whole section was unclear or incomplete, but not make the changes. He wanted me to spot problems and make the changes. This taught me how to re-read my own work critically and how to spot deficiencies and read text with a fresh eye. Specific editing means making changes to text as opposed to suggestions. Dr. Dillon was a master at making specific changes, while keeping enough of the original text to ensure that I still considered the thesis my writing. As a thesis advisor and committee member I have tried to use these techniques whenever I can because I know that the students want to be proud of the thesis as their work and that they need to use it as a tool to pass the thesis defense. I therefore do not re-write theses, but make specific changes only to improve readability and may request general changes while avoiding altering the student’s writing style.