The author of this piece is a computer scientist (as opposed to a humanities professor), and in that domain their advice is quite reasonably universal. It's al

The author of this piece is a computer scientist (as opposed to a humanities professor), and in that domain their advice is quite reasonably universal. It's almost unimaginable to write a (PhD) thesis in computer science without an extremely detailed outline. The thesis is not some thing you come up with whole-cloth, and it is certainly not a substantial dump of novel work. The CS PhD thesis is typically a function of between three and 10+ previously published & peer reviewed papers. The exact function used to combine these previous publications into a thesis can range from `concat` (the "big stapler" thesis) to a substantial rewriting. The level of rewriting depends on many factors, e.g., the advisor's style, the norms in the department/country, the quality of previous published papers, and of course pedestrian things such as the student's promised start date for their first post-graduation position and/or the amount remaining grant money. But in any case, there's going to be a rather small design space in terms of the overall high level outline. The choice of chapters -- and even the internal organization of those chapters -- will mostly match previously published work. In some sense, CS theses are closer to an anthology than a book. There's a bit of design work you can do around the edges to make things into a coherent whole, but you're not going to be making substantial modifications to the meat of the thing.