Guide: How to Write a Dissertation
Writing a dissertation is crucial for a person who decided to pursue academic career and achieve higher summits than PhD. A dissertation is a quintessence of a person’s academic interests in a specific area, and writing requires at least two conditions to be observed: 1) a person’s extensive knowledge in the chosen branch of science; 2) aiming for scientific discoveries (and the opportunity to do so--for example, the presence of under-researched topics within a chosen field). A dissertation is written with the intent to either reveal what has been yet unknown, or to synthesize new knowledge based on the previous research; a successfully written dissertation is a proof of a person’s capability to embrace pursued academic degree. If you are writing a dissertation, you have up to six months (sometimes up to one year) to prepare it. During this period of time, you will have to conduct solid research and process vast amounts of data.
Below is the key information regarding dissertations that you should be aware of.
To this section you should include the title page, table of contents, any acknowledgements or thanks you would like to express to those who contributed to your work, technical information regarding the research process, or any other important preliminary information.
The abstract is an important part of any dissertation, although seen by many people more like an academic formality. In fact, abstract has a purpose: its main task is to briefly inform a reader about what the entire dissertation is about, what was the hypothesis, the key findings, and the results.
This is where you provide your audience with the information necessary for fully understanding your research. For example, background information and the overall context, in which a topic has been researched, can set the audience’s perception of your theses and arguments in the right direction. Except the context and the background, an introduction usually covers your objectives, research questions, hypothesis, and a thesis statement.
Here you research and evaluate the level of the subject’s scrutiny. Provide your audience with an excurse to the history of your subject’s research: name the main discoveries that were made in its field; describe the major opinions existing on your topic, as well as the alternative points of view; point out what has not yet been researched sufficiently, and so on.
In this section, your task is to describe and substantiate the methods that you have been using (or plan to use) for your research.
As the title of the section suggests, in it you should list and describe all the key finding you came across during research.
This section is for the analysis of the information retrieved during research.
- List of references
- Appendices (if any).
Writing a dissertation implies conducting thorough and extensive research. In order to do it properly, follow the recommendations below.
- To start with, keep in mind that you should use only recent and credible sources. This means that the sources you use should be 1) published no longer than 2-4 years ago (depends on a discipline: sometimes even 2 years is already too much); 2) written/created by trusted, respective, authoritative contributors.
- Pay attention to the rate of scrutiny of the topic you are going to research. If it is a brand new topic that you are writing about, you might have difficulties with finding information on it; on the other hand, if the topic is too popular, you might have nothing new to add to it.
- Do some preliminary research and consult with your supervisor on its results. This will help you 1) identify the main problems existing in the field of your interest; 2) come up with appropriate research questions/hypotheses (or concretize the already existing ones). After your supervisor confirms them, prepare and submit a research proposal.
- Do the research. Remember that it is always better to record, sort out, and organize information in the process of research, not after it is finished. Analyze and process all the information you have obtained through the research. Pay attention to whether your research questions have been answered, and/or the hypothesis supported/refuted.
- Create an outline of your dissertation based on the results of your studies. After processing a number of sources, you should be able to at least approximately imagine the structure (in this case, the allocation of information within each section) of your future dissertation. .
- Start writing the dissertation. Leave the abstract and the literature review sections for later; begin with the introduction, since you will need a clearly formulated thesis statement/research questions/hypothesis to write further.
- Continue writing the dissertation section by section; in each of them you should move from general theoretical review to specific informations such as the outcomes of your own research, and provide supporting evidence to the claims you make.
- Work on the bibliography. Some educational institutions require it to be prepared as an annotated bibliography, although the requirements may differ. This is when you will need all the information you gathered during the research to be thoroughly sorted out and organized.
- Check your dissertation several times, rewriting and modifying its content without hesitation whenever it is needed. Remember that plagiarism is totally unacceptable.
- Consult with your supervisor and ask them for feedback.
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