I always smile when I see Ph.D. students complaining on Facebook about how they are frantically trying to chase down weekly word counts for their dissertation. If you were ever to write your dissertation with me, one thing would be very clear. You will never be forced to meet a prescribed number of words or pages. Each additional page must serve a clear purpose, not just fill space. Thicker is not necessarily better. That's not scholarship. That's busy work.
Learn a lesson from journal articles: Essays must be a) concise, b) succinct, and c) complete in fewer than 25 pages, often 20. Bloated submissions are almost always rejected. Most recently-minted dissertations, in my opinion, contain way too much padding. A great dissertation can be done in 250 pages. It can be done in 200. Depth is never a word count issue. So cut out the fat. You can cut one or two words per sentence simply by turning passive sentences into active ones!
Below: My Basel dissertation, all 214 pages of it.
