Today I am showing you the three sentences that let an examiner see your gap for themselves, and the four-minute test that tells you whether yours is showing or only stated.
16 September 2026
Read time: 3 minutes
Pass or Revise is tomorrow, and there are still places. Full details at the end of this issue.
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Today I am going to repair the comment I write in more theses than any other, because I named it this week and did not show you the solution.
The sentence was this: "Few studies have examined wellbeing in SMEs. This study addresses that gap."
Read it the way I do.
Cold, with three hundred pages in front of me, and no reason to take anything on trust.
What have I been given? A claim that something is missing, and no way to check it. I do not know this literature as well as you do. That is the whole reason you are writing the chapter. So when you tell me there is a hole in it, I have only your word, and your word is the thing being examined.
A stated gap is a guess with a full stop after it.
Here is the same gap, shown.
"Wellbeing research has concentrated on firms large enough to have an HR function, because that is where formal provision can be measured (Bertrand, 2019; Nwosu, 2022). In firms without one, provision is informal and leaves no record, so the existing instruments cannot detect it. What reads as an absence of provision in small firms may be an absence of measurement."
Nothing in there really shows me a gap. By the third sentence I can see it, and I got there myself, which is a very different thing from being told.
Three moves, in fact, accomplished that.
- What has been done, and why it was done that way.
- What that choice made invisible.
- What follows for your study.
The second move is the key one here. It does not show me what the literature missed, but why its own design made the missing inevitable. A gap that is nobody's fault is one I will accept. Whereas a gap that makes everyone before you look careless is one I will argue with.
Here is tonight's job, and it takes four minutes.
Find the sentence in your chapter that names your gap. Delete it and read the paragraph again.
Can a reader still see the gap without it?
If they can, you have shown one. If the paragraph now says nothing, you had a single sentence doing all the work, and that sentence was a guess.
The Gap Test, one page: Download it here
Pass or Revise is tomorrow. I read three real anonymised pages cold and say what I would be writing on the examiner's report.
Thursday 17 September. 10am New York, 3pm London, 4pm Berlin and Johannesburg, 6pm Dubai. Sixty minutes, free.
Capped at 50, and I will stay until every question has been answered.
Take a place: https://www.phdtoprof.com/pass-or-revise
Until next week,
Prof. Emmanuel Tsekleves
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