Doctoral students experience many challenges on the long journey towards completion. Common problems include: synthesising data, working at a conceptual level, clarifying the relationship of the parts of the thesis to the whole, finding a voice and completing a viva successfully. Few authors have addressed the use of visualisations to meet these challenges. This paper focuses on the use of visualisations in doctoral writing. It presents narratives about seven ways that visualisations can help students to make breakthroughs in their writing, namely, as an organiser of the relationships of the parts of the thesis to the whole, a trigger for peer discourse, a vehicle for conceptual work, a metaphor to express key concepts, a trigger for professional development, a visual aid for the viva and as a prompt for freedrawing and freewriting.