A Short Guide to Writing a Thesis

Book excerpt: This book is about how postgraduate students might choose a topic for their thesis that they can investigate and turn into a short paper or a long dissertation. The book looks at questions like the following. What should feed into their choice of a supervisor? How should they compile and organise their bibliography and set about writing the introduction? What are some tips for writing paragraphs and entire chapters and producing conclusions? What are ways of providing references, using helpful (or at least correct) punctuation, avoiding common mistakes in spelling, and improving their level of writing? When difficulties arise for instance, with their supervisor, how might they cope with and resolve such difficulties? This book is a guide. It aims to offer straightforward suggestions about doing research, putting the results into a convincing form, and dealing with difficulties that inevitably arise. The overall objective of this book is to provide students and their supervisors with some down-to-earth proposals about things to do and things to avoid when preparing and producing a long essay or a thesis. This book is the result of many years of teaching and supervising students.