The Hertfordshire Thesis: 80,000 Words, and What Practice-Based Work Replaces It With

Hertfordshire's research degrees run through the Doctoral College. The headline number is easy to remember and consistent enough to plan against.

The awards and their durations

These are the normal expected periods from enrolment to submission, which is the useful way to read them: the clock is measured to the point you hand the thesis in, not to the viva or the award.

What each is awarded for differs in kind, not just in scale:

• A PhD is awarded for a substantial programme of individual research leading to a significant original contribution to knowledge or its interpretation.
• A Masters by Research is awarded for a substantial programme of individual research involving the exercise of independent critical powers.

That distinction is worth taking seriously if you are deciding between routes. The Masters by Research asks you to demonstrate critical capability; the PhD asks you to add something that was not there before.

80,000 words

The PhD thesis is 80,000 words, and that figure holds across disciplines. History, English Literature, and English Language and Communication all publish the same number, which suggests it is a university-level expectation rather than a departmental preference.

The thesis is defended in a viva voce led by an external examiner.

Eighty thousand words is a common UK figure, but treat it as a ceiling to write toward rather than a target to fill. An argument that lands in 70,000 is not short; it is efficient.

Practice-based work, with actual numbers

This is where Hertfordshire is more useful than most universities, which tend to describe practice-based submissions in prose and leave candidates to negotiate everything.

A Creative Writing thesis is two things:

1. An original full-length creative work
2. A critical work on a subject or subjects integral to the creative component

The critical component

The inverse relationship is the point. A shorter creative work carries a longer critical one. The submission is being weighed as a whole, so a candidate producing a slim volume of poetry should expect to write considerably more criticism than one submitting a full novel.

The creative component

And a genuinely well-drafted exception:

An exception may be made if the limit of 80,000 words would leave the creative work with clear gaps that would prevent the work being a publishable document.

Note what that does and does not permit. It is not an allowance for a novel that grew in the writing. It applies where the limit would leave the work structurally incomplete. The standard invoked is publishability, which is a reasonable test and a demanding one.

What the critical work can be

Two accepted approaches:

• A critical investigation of a related author or authors' work
• An investigation of your own creative practice and the practical or theoretical underpinnings of your creative component

These are genuinely different pieces of writing. The first is conventional literary scholarship. The second is reflective and methodological, and it is harder than it looks: writing analytically about your own decisions requires enough distance to treat them as evidence rather than defending them. Choose early, because the reading you need differs.

Supervision

You work under one or more academic supervisors, with the supervisory team guiding both the selection of the research topic and the conduct of the research.

For Creative Writing candidates, the supervisory team also carries the negotiation over the critical component's length, so this is not a matter to leave until the writing is underway.

What to confirm rather than assume

Hertfordshire publishes its regulations in numbered University Policies and Regulations documents, and the research degree UPR is not openly accessible at the time of writing. The following were not verifiable from public pages:

• Formatting requirements: margins, font, line spacing, binding
• The examination outcomes available to examiners, and correction deadlines
• Resubmission rules
• Whether the word count includes or excludes footnotes, bibliography and appendices, which materially changes an 80,000 word target
• Citation style, which is a disciplinary matter
• Similarity thresholds or any policy on generative AI use
• Embargo durations for deposit in UHRA

That penultimate point is worth chasing specifically. A word limit that excludes references and appendices is a very different constraint from one that includes them, and it is precisely the sort of thing candidates assume rather than check. Ask the Doctoral College and get the answer in writing.

Pre-submission checklist

• Within 80,000 words, and clear on what that count includes
• For practice-based work, critical component agreed with my supervisory team and at least 20,000 words
• Creative component within its form's limits: prose, poetry pages or drama pages
• Any request to exceed the prose limit justified on publishability grounds, not length
• Critical work has a settled approach: related authors, or my own practice
• Submitting within the normal period from enrolment
• Formatting requirements confirmed with the Doctoral College
• External examiner arrangements understood, since the viva is externally led
• Read several completed theses in my field on UHRA

Where to get help

The Doctoral College owns the regulations, the process and everything this guide has flagged as unpublished. Your supervisory team owns the topic, the conduct of the research, and for practice-based candidates the negotiation over the critical component.

If the writing itself is the bottleneck, our thesis writing support works through it chapter by chapter, and our PhD thesis help covers doctoral work specifically.