A Ph.D. candidate in architecture at the University of British Columbia has successfully defended a 149-page, 52,438-word dissertation without any punctuation, The National Post reported. Patrick Stewart, the doctoral candidate, said that there are no rules at the university requiring punctuation. He also did not use uppercase letters, so that the writing appears to be a run-on sentence. In deference to some professors who objected to his approach, he started each chapter with a short abstract, written in standard English. Stewart's dissertation is about indigenous architecture and he said he wanted to reject the conventions of the English language. He said he was opposed to “the blind acceptance of English language conventions in academia.”