A thesis is an academic text that is usually assigned to be written by students that aim to get Master’s and Ph.D. degrees. Sometimes, a Bachelor’s degree also requires one to write a thesis. Yet, it’s less ordinary and more specific to such subjects as philosophy, law, history, or literature.
Many students consider writing a thesis to be a piece of cake. Well, it’s understandable – It’s not like it requires a description of methodology or thoroughly structured chapters with specific contents. Yeah, it’s not that easy.
The most common mistake made by students is reviewing random sources without any analysis. However, there are many others that may put your success at risk. Read the guidelines below to avoid them and simplify the process of writing as much as possible.
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Choose a Relevant Topic
It might sound obvious, but you do need to think about it. The first thing you have to remember is that a good thesis topic requires a problem. It can be an ethical dilemma, an area that hasn’t been researched in full, or an old topic interpreted anew. For instance, a political-geographical conflict may require digging into earlier historical events.
The conflict should be at the head of the discussion, but uncovering the past will provide a good context. Meanwhile, simply discussing this past that was researched numerous times before won’t do you any good. If you retell sources and describe the course of events, your thesis will hardly resemble a literature review, let alone a doctoral academic paper.
So, whenever you opt for using previously covered topics, make sure you add some new interpretations and use new facts and sources. In other words, make a contribution to academic research. Or, you can choose to write my paper with WritePaper writers and get extra help. You can split the work, delegate it in full, or ask a writer to handle preliminary research we’ll talk about further.
Conduct Preliminary Research
In order to find a relevant topic, proper research is a must. Picking up a random topic you find on the internet may result in a situation where you write a voluminous draft, submit it for approval, and end up rewriting half of it – if not the whole thing – from scratch. Of course, you can get the help mentioned above, but that’s not always an option.
First of all, choose reliable databases. To find relevant sources, you need to not only insert a couple of keywords:
- use Boolean operators
- add a literature matrix to keep track of the primary sources
- go through several databases
- use synonymic words for comprehensive research
Write an Outline
To avoid having to scrap the whole draft and start over, compose a very detailed outline. Submit it for approval to your professor first. From the outline, it should be clear what exactly you intend to write in this and that section. Make sure you reflect on what part of the problem or which research question you will answer in each of them.
The main body should be divided into subtopics and, what’s more important, not be a wall of text. Leave a couple of subsections for comparison of phenomena and dedicate a part of the word count for tables with clear and concise contrasts. You probably want to create the tables first since they are what will guide you further and help develop your ideas.
Be ready that the professor will ask you to move the tables to the appendices, yet, usually, they do that when students take advantage of the tabular form. Your tables should be shorter than one page and never drag out for several pages.
Also, expand the comparisons by explaining them in the text, interpret the bullet points from the table, but do not simply repeat them. That way, your thesis content will be both useful for attentive readers and those who just need to skim through the pages to get the main idea.
Make Sure You Have Enough Sources
Before settling on the topic, look for the sources you can access in full. Resorting to online articles that offer only abstracts for free can do more harm than good. For instance, using them a lot will lead to citations that will indicate the first page. Professors do not admire this. Either directly or not, they check whether you read the whole article.
For instance, they may ask you to use some of those sources a bit more. What most students do in such cases is add more information from the abstract and cite it with the same page or even put a random number. The latter is called fake citing which won’t help you a lot but may worsen the situation and lead to accusations of plagiarism.
Anyway, don’t submit the topic for approval before you find enough sources. Most of the time, the required number is indicated in the university guidelines, but you can also be guided by the rule 1 page = 2 sources.
Choose More Primary Sources
Since most theses do not presuppose primary research, you are going to need to add some information someone else received first-hand. In case you just cite conclusions from some other theses and literature reviews, the grade won’t be high. Maybe, the work won’t even get a pass. So, list the sources you have retrieved from the search and split them into two columns. The primary sources should prevail, the secondary ones should constitute about 30% of the whole list.
Another con of using secondary sources is that they interpret the primary ones. If you employ them mainly, you will add the second layer of interpretation which may distort the real facts. As a result, you will probably come to false conclusions or just won’t have anything significant to conclude.
Work On Referencing
The most common citation formats indicated in guidelines for theses are:
- Chicago
- Turabian
- OSCOLA
These are not the easiest styles. First of all, they all presuppose adding footnotes which is a pain. Although Turabian and Chicago overlap a lot, OSCOLA is totally different and used in legal works. The very variety of formats in it can be both amusing and shocking. One needs to cite legal cases differently depending on the year of the case as well as the country it is related to. In other words, do work on citing – some professors may not even accept your thesis if the referencing is poor.
Summing Up
When starting a thesis, make sure you plan it in detail and get it approved by someone at the university. Do not ever draft the whole 30+ pages to show your professor the final version. It won’t be final anyway, and you may have to delete most of the information. Also, do not neglect preliminary research. It may take a lot of time but it will also save it once you get around to the real thing.
One more tip would be to start your thesis as early as possible. When you have it planned long before the deadline, you can write it in about a week (the preliminary research is included in the planning). So, plan ahead and good luck!
