The three kinds of signposting in academic writing (and when to use them)

Signposting is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a lot like driving, but you’re the one designing the road to make it as easy as possible for your reader to navigate, figure out where they’re meant to go, and know when to slow down and pay particular attention to something. Signposting is crucial to academic writing including books and journal articles – and particularly so for longer pieces of writing, such as theses or doctoral dissertations. You can absolutely include signposting while you're still writing, but I find the editing phase ideal for adding new signposting (or bolstering existing signposting), because by this point, you can see the big picture of your draft. 

Signposting is like giving directions – ‘you can find my discussion of methods in Chapter 2’. It can take the form of speedbumps, where you slow the reader down and make sure they’re paying attention – for example, ‘to recap…’ or ‘put another way…’. It can be you telling them what to expect: ‘first I discuss the existing literature in Chapter 2, then I introduce my theory and methods in Chapter 3, and then I discuss each of my case studies in Chapters 4, 5, and 6’. It also lets you connect different ideas or parts of your dissertation: ‘as I noted in Chapter 4, these ideas have been extensively explored in recent anthropological literature’.

The idea of signposting is that you’re telling the reader where they’re going, and where they can find all the important things. You’re reminding them of what they’ve already read, and giving them advance notice of things they are going to come across soon. You want your reader’s journey – your examiner’s journey – to be as smooth as possible. You want them to feel like they know what’s going on around them; you don’t want to deliver any big surprises; and you want them to get to the end of your dissertation in one piece feeling like they’ve had a pleasant enough time. Signposting is your not-so-secret weapon for doing this.

I like to think of signposting as being of three different ‘flavours’. There’s overview signposting, summary signposting, and navigation signposting.

Overview signposting is the kind that you use in the introduction to your dissertation and also in the introduction of each of your chapters. ‘In this chapter I do this. I first do this, before doing this. Then, I do this, before concluding with a discussion of this.’ It is the easiest of the three. (Well, it is as long as you know what you’re going to write and the order you’re going to write it in!) It offers your reader an overview of what’s to come –  a bit like a menu, or an agenda for a meeting. First this, then that, and finally this third thing.

 If overview signposting is a menu, then summary signposting might be the restaurant review; if overview signposting is the agenda for a meeting, then summary signposting is the minutes. You’ve now eaten the meal, or discussed the key agenda items. And so we want to restate the key points, but now we can offer a bit more information because we’ve had the experience. You have made your arguments; your reader is now familiar with them. You use summary signposting to reiterate the important bits after the fact. You use this second kind of signposting in the conclusion of your chapters (it will usually get its own paragraph or two) and in your conclusion chapter. Like overview signposting, this is also reasonably straightforward. ‘First, I considered this thing. I showed how this happened, and what its effects were. Then I looked at this other thing. It was interesting because of this and challenged my initial assumptions in this way. Finally, I turned to this last thing. I found this and this and came to realise this’.

Overview and summary signposting are nice and easy in the sense that we know with some certainty when and where to use them and how to frame or phrase them.

Overview signposting will usually come towards the beginning of the dissertation or chapter, while summary signposting will almost always be in the conclusion of the dissertation or chapter.

It’s the third kind of signposting – what I’ve called ‘navigation signposting’ – which can be a bit trickier, because it’s a lot more subtle. This signposting appears in two key ways: the first is when there’s a transition, like at the end of sections within your chapters and at the very end of your chapters. You’re about to make a new point or move on to a new chapter, and you need to warn the reader that this is about to happen so they don’t get too startled. It’s easy to do navigation signposting in a very blunt way – ‘In this section, I have discussed Mozart. In the next section, I look at Beethoven’. That’s okay sometimes, but it gets repetitive if that’s how you transition between every section and it doesn’t do much for the flow of your writing. So, we need to find ways of offering this kind of navigation signposting with a little more finesse.

The second way that we can use navigation signposting is to make links between ideas in our dissertation. This is a nice way to help the reader connect things they may have already read, or remind them of research that you refer to in an earlier chapter – that kind of thing.  It might look something like this: ‘I introduced the work of Georges Perec in my review of the literature in Chapter 2. His concept of the everyday is particularly relevant in this case, because…’. Or: ‘These findings echo the interview data that I discussed in Chapter 4, and offer an intriguing perspective on this thing’.

This second kind of navigation signposting helps to strengthen the sense that the dissertation is a dissertation and not separate sentences, paragraphs, and chapters squashed together – they help to explain to the reader that these ideas fit together to make an overall argument.

It's important to use the three different types of signposting in your dissertation because they connect everything together. They help your examiner link your research question, methodology, literature review, and theoretical framework to the empirics (and the empirics to each other). 

You can also bring signposting together with your thesis statement in your introduction and conclusion.

In your introduction, you want to introduce your thesis statement or core argument, however you want to think about it, really clearly. You want your reader to know that this is your core argument. You can actually say ‘The core argument of this dissertation is…’ or ‘The key proposition that this dissertation advances is…’. We can bundle this up neatly with some overview signposting in the form of an overview of your chapters: ‘My core argument is this. I develop it over the following five chapters. In Chapter 2, I survey the literature…’ and so on. For example, as you can see in the following excerpt from Civil Society, Care Labour, and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (which I co-authored with Anu Mundkur and Laura Shepherd), we state the thesis statement very clearly and then go straight into the chapter outline:

Simply put, this is the core argument of our book: the undervalued, under-appreciated, and often invisibilised labours of civil society, which we conceive of as nourishing and sustaining relations of care, are what make the WPS agenda work. The care labour of civil society is the very condition of the WPS agenda’s success. We develop this argument over the remaining five short chapters, before offering a brief conclusion. Chapter 2 follows and elaborates the concept of civil society, before providing an overview of the mobilisation of civil society in the form of civil society organisations in the work of the WPS agenda… Chapter 3 completes the framework for analysis, as we bring to the foreground the intellectual labour undertaken by feminist global political economy scholars… Chapter 4 tackles directly the persistent and chronic under-resourcing of the WPS agenda that remains one of the key challenges to its implementation.

You do something similar in the conclusion, but one thing I do like to do is to draw it out a little more and sandwich the summary signposting – what you did and found in each chapter – between your core argument and a longer answer to the ‘so what?’ question. That means it will look something like this:

In this dissertation, I have argued *core argument*. I began by demonstrating *sub-argument 1* in Chapter 3, before doing *sub-argument 2* in Chapter 4. Then, in Chapter 5, I made *sub-argument 3*. Together, these chapters indicate *core argument rephrased and expanded a little*. This is important because *answer to the ‘so what?’ question*.

I suggest being this direct in your dissertation because you want to drive home to your markers that you are hitting all these points. It goes back to that idea of not having any mysteries for the reader to try to solve. You want your examiner to be like: ‘Great, I understand what we’re doing here’. Your dissertation isn’t just a matter of presenting your research; it’s also an exercise in demonstrating that you know how to do research. The three different kinds of signposting – particularly when used in conjunction with your thesis statement, a strong sense of why your research matters (the ‘so what?’ question), and a really clear structure – is one way that you can show your examiner that you understand what a PhD research project looks like.

Need some help sharpening your signposting? Book a free consultation call with me, and we can chat about your writing flow, structuring arguments, or any other academic challenges you’re facing – or just share tips on how to make your work clear and compelling.