L5 format and substance of thesis
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The document outlines key strategies for writing a thesis, emphasizing the importance of progress reports and utilizing a structured outline based on existing templates. It suggests separating results from the discussion to clarify contributions and recommends maintaining backups of drafts. The process from writing the first draft to the defense involves multiple revisions and collaboration with advisors to ensure quality.
L5 format and substance of thesis
- 1. Format and substance of thesis Research Methodology Seppo Karrila 2017
- 2. Executive summary • The goal of this presentation is to make it easy for you to write your thesis • I encourage you to write good progress reports, almost like mini-articles, and use these together with your research proposal as parts in your thesis • Some details of thesis structure and outline are touched lightly
- 3. Overall outline • A generic outline of an MS thesis is given in Chapter 4 of Lowe. • However, practices can vary by school, so – Check if there is a ready-made template that you can follow – See a recent accepted local MS thesis, thesis advisors always get their copy so there are some around
- 4. Abstract, introduction and conclusions • Abstract – A short advertisement that people in a hurry can read. Half a page to one page long. Issue, significance, approach, results, conclusions. • Introduction – Some general background, then lead to the research question or hypothesis – This can largely come from the research proposal • Conclusions – For those who have read the whole thesis, highlight the most important things you would hope they remember next week. Things that are useful and affect something in the future.
- 5. Results and discussion together or separately? • My personal opinion: often they are better separately – The reason is that in many write-ups it is difficult to keep track of what refers to results of the current study, and what refers to prior literature – If the current results are clearly presented as a separate whole, there can’t be such confusion – This also highlights what are specifically your own contributions
- 6. Why starting to write is not a problem • You have your research proposal as the basis! • While you are working and producing results, you are also generating progress reports to your advisor • I suggest you copy your proposal, add to it some chapter titles (using outline in MS-Word), and start filling in the sections “Materials and Methods” and “Results” as you go along – This is much better than collecting a pile of results, then starting to ponder how to write it all up
- 7. Important • Keep backups of your draft – For example, start with “_1” at end of filename, then use save as and store under name ending with “_2”, etc. --- this leaves you a copy of version 1, you now only edit version 2, etc. – You can e-mail as attachment, to yourself or advisor, this also serves as a backup • Why do this? – Because MS-Word sometimes runs into problems if you insert figures, or if you edit the same file with different versions of Office software • I recommend that you keep figures separate while putting together the first draft – PowerPoint and OneNote handle figures very nicely, they are made for it. Make sure you have the data file for generating each figure! You may need to re-plot some graphs.
- 8. Avoid getting into a final crunch • Once you have a complete first draft, it will still take a lot of time – If you have written good progress reports, like sections in a chapter, you advisor may have helped you improve them all along the way. Not so if you just showed Excel files. – The first draft needs checking, commenting, and improvements: rewriting, deleting, adding… and again, then once more, and so on. Finally it gets polished enough that you can share it with your committee – Then the committee needs time to read it critically, and a suitable time to meet for your defense. It will not be next Wednesday… maybe in 6 weeks or so.
- 9. We have kept this short • For two reasons – Later on we have an extensive presentation about writing a manuscript, it expands on some topics – In case you are interested, you find lots and lots of detail guidance in the write-up by Lowe – however, it is important for us to get our hands on data visualization and basic statistics. And the approach suggested in these notes should be effective even if it is minimalistic.
- 10. Reference • Parts of the discussion were influenced by Lowe: A first textbook of research methodology… , 2016 Available online at www.scientificlanguage.com