Category: Thesis Writing

 

1. The earlier you start writing, the less you will know about your project. If you don’t know your story (see Structure your Project), then doing the general introduction might be a mistake. Writing about specific sections that you already have results for is more worthwhile. Often you can cut and paste these straight into your introduction later.
2. Many people start with their materials and methods section as it is the easiest, and likely to remain relevant to your final draft. However, everyone is different, so do what works best for you.
3. Make sure you know the stats and graphics software in advance of writing. It is stress you don’t need if you have to learn how to make your graphs at the same time as doing your thesis. Most theses do not contain Excel graphs.
4. Use your results to plan your introduction and you will ensure your introduction is relevant. Think about why you followed those procedures and what previous research paved the way.
5. Also plan how much information is required for each section so you allow enough time for research. Assess the relevancy of the details you mean to include.
6. Make your plan as detailed as possible, including sub headings and sub-sub headings.
7. Check your plan with your supervisor before you start writing. Or if that is not possible, at least have someone look over your plan before you start writing. Other people can be a lot more objective about your work.
8. A late start does not mean you don’t have time to plan. If anything it is even more crucial, and will save you time as you progress.

 
I am not a planner. I hate planning, and for much of my life I’ve got by without it. The result of this attitude when it came to my thesis was vast sections of irrelevance. I’d talked about the things I found most interesting rather than the ones necessary for my project. I read widely in areas of less relevance, and as the deadline approached I rushed others. A tight, to the point thesis requires planning.

 

1. It is a good idea to rate the importance of each section so that you know roughly how much time you need to spend on it.
2. No one will congratulate you on the size of your thesis. Your examiners are busy people and the more you write the more they have to read. Cut bits if they aren’t relevant. It may hurt, but it needs doing.
3. If you are struggling to write a section, make bullet points of all the important bits you have covered thus far and the ones you still need to do. Come back to it later with fresh eyes.
4. When writing the sections you find most interesting, repeatedly refer back to your story and ask yourself if what you are writing is relevant.
5. Don’t ignore the bits you find boring. If your examiners see noticeable gaps in certain areas, then they will spend more time on these in the viva and you may have to add them in your corrections.

 
When I started writing my thesis, I was going to read every paper ever written that was remotely related to my project. It was going to be perfect.

This is impossible.

After a few very thoroughly researched sections, I semi-quickly realised that the workload was unsustainable. Unfortunately, I’d started on the more general topics which were not so relevant to my project. It made for a good opening to my thesis, but that work would have been better placed in later sections where more detail was expected.

 

1. Whenever a review on a subject says something is incorrect or debatable, look up the paper they are talking about and see if that author wrote a review on the subject. This is likely to be a good source of the opposite opinion.
2. For the important points within a review, make sure you look at the primary data. It is not so rare that people misinterpret other people’s work according to their own biases.
3. Don’t reference reviews in your thesis. If you can’t find the primary research that shows something, then you don’t know it’s true. There are plenty of myths out there.
4. The exception to the above tip is direct quotes of someone’s opinion – which can come from reviews.
5. Don’t judge the strength of conclusions based on the opinions of reviewers. Sometimes, the reasons people write “showed” instead of “indicated,” can be arbitrary. Read the primary data and come to your own conclusion on the strength of the data.
6. If the reviews you read are older, then it is important to check more recent discussions of the subject. Perhaps bits have been disproved or expanded on. Your examiners will want to know your knowledge is current.

 
I’ve read multiple reviews where the author has ignored or downplayed evidence that runs contradictory to their argument. Simply basing your discussion on one person’s opinion can make your thesis look biased or sometimes even wrong. If the review is older it can even be talking about information that has since been disproved as if it is still current.

 

1. No one will congratulate you for the length of your thesis. If the work is poor or irrelevant your examiners will want to know why you included it. They may also insist work is redone or completed when its absence would not have been questioned.
2. Only include work that is both relevant to your story and of high quality. Adding unnecessary data only increases the chances your examiners will find problems.
3. Check the conclusions of your data. Always ask yourself if there is another interpretation.

 
I was overly enthusiastic about research and was always doing my own experiments, most of which never went anywhere. However, there were a few that I spent so long on that it was impossible to leave them out of my thesis.

As it turned out, this was a disaster. My examiners were not impressed as the data was not related to the rest of my work, did not contain all the necessary controls, and the error bars were large. They said my conclusions were unfounded and nearly made me do the experiments again, but decided that I should simply cut them from my thesis.

My advice is to remember that sometimes you waste time. Regard your bad analyses as a learning experience and don’t include them in your thesis – this will only waste more of your time.

 
There was a boy in my undergraduate degree who pasted a single paragraph from a review into his dissertation. Why he felt the need to do this – when he’d written the rest of the lengthy project – is probably not even known to him, but the consequence was that he got zero for the piece. The university considered this lenient as they often expelled people, but his degree still dropped a grade and he no longer fit the criteria for the job he had lined up.

 

1. Schedule how much you need to write at the start of each day. Meeting smaller targets is easier.
2. Reward yourself for good work with breaks.
3. Don’t stress yourself if you have procrastinated for too long. Everybody does it. Just start work again in the knowledge that you are now fresher than everybody else.

 

• After a particularly gruelling section of my thesis, I once stopped for a five minute break to play some Plants vs. Zombies. I told myself five more minutes so many times that by the time I finally finished, the sun was rising again and the idea of returning to my thesis had only become more repellent.
• I once returned home to find that my flatmate had completely run out of ways to procrastinate. He’d cleaned the entire house, including the rooms no one ever went in so that the entire place smelt like perfume. I lived with him for a year before that and he’d never so much as changed his bedsheets, but clearly anything was better than thesis writing.

 

1. Don’t wait until you have written every section to start checking it through. This will be a huge barrier. Check through one section while you write the next one. Break your thesis up as much as you can.
2. Giving your first draft to your supervisor will impress no one, and if they don’t just hand it back they’ll end up changing things you could have done yourself and miss more important things.
3. After you have made all your supervisor’s corrections, check it through once, leave it for a while, and then check it again with fresher eyes.
4. Likely by the time you have a polished product you know it so well that it is impossible for you to notice mistakes. If you can, give it to someone else to read. They don’t even have to understand it as long as they know what words and sentences should look like. Silly mistakes make your work look more rushed than you might like to believe.

 
During my undergraduate degree it took me forever to realise why my essays were not coming back with the marks I thought they deserved. Finally, I was so annoyed that I sat down to re-read one of them. I could hardly believe it was the same essay. Why? Because I hadn’t checked it through. The moment I started doing this – even if I put less effort into actually writing it – my marks rocketed.

 

1. Re-read the more important papers you referenced. By the time of your examination it may have been a while since you last looked at them.
2. Check to see if you have all the relevant controls that give your results meaning. If you don’t have them, start thinking up excuses.
3. If there was a section you were not particularly keen on writing then that is a good candidate for a weaker section.
4. Any bits where you weren’t 100% clear what someone was talking about, but you still wrote about it should receive specific attention.
5. Bits where the literature is not clear and you could be asked to give your opinion are also good candidates for revision.
6. Make sure you read up on what your examiners focus on for their own research. Start thinking about the parts that link their research to your own. You may receive heavy questioning on these areas.
7. Write down some questions they could ask you and practice answering them.

 
After my friend told me he got loads of questions on his materials and methods, I spent ages revising this for my viva, but my examiners skipped the section entirely. On the other hand, the work I did re-reading my references came in very handy. Not everything you do will come up, but make sure you have a good all round understanding for the bits that do.