dissertation writing advice

dissertation writing advice

Effective Strategies for Dissertation Writing

1. Introduction

Effective strategies for dissertation writing reflects on the organization and preparation of the dissertation report. The book provides the reader with a clear idea of how to prepare the dissertation and provides a generic framework for a dissertation. The book is well structured and is easy to follow. It is laid out in a logical manner and is user friendly. The chapters progress in a way that the reader is taken through the steps involved in writing and preparing a dissertation in order. The book is broken down into different parts that focus on preparing and writing various sections of a dissertation. It helps the reader to understand what is required of each section and provides guidelines and examples on how to carry out research for the dissertation. This is very helpful as the reader has a better understanding of what is expected in each section as well as providing a clearer picture of how to carry it out. One of the strengths of the book is Kjell Erik Rudestam’s awareness of the common issues faced by students. Throughout the book, he has provided preventative strategies in order to avoid common problems students face when preparing a dissertation. Issues such as working with a weak data set, time management, and stress are common issues faced by students. Rudestam has identified that writing a dissertation is a stressful and daunting task for students and has provided coping methods to manage and/or avoid stress and make the experience of writing a dissertation a worthwhile and beneficial task. In addition to this, the book takes into consideration students who are writing the dissertation as a requirement of a higher degree by providing tips on how to maintain work and family obligations. These situations are quite common to older higher degree students who have family responsibilities and full-time jobs. This is great help as there are limited resources available that cater to this, with the majority of resources providing information for undergraduate students.

2. Choosing a Topic

One of the most necessary acts in the management of dissertation writing is the choosing of a suitable and interesting topic. At the end of the day, no matter how well you think you can write or how interesting or interested you are in the subject, without having the right topic you won’t get the quality your work needs. A solid dissertation always has a strong and clear topic. No. Without a proper topic, usually presented by a question, there won’t be a ‘point’ to the writing. When looking at how you should come about in selecting the right topic, firstly, find something that you are genuinely interested in. It is difficult to stress how much of a difference it makes to the quality of your work when the writer is actually interested in what he is writing about. Interest and passion will come about with much more reading and research, and these are parts of dissertation that markers look for in particular. If you write about something that is an interest to you, you can expect it to generally be of a higher standard than other work and you may find the process of writing it to be more enjoyable.

3. Planning and Organizing Your Research

Formulate a clear thesis about your topic and narrow it down to your research questions/hypotheses. The clearer the research problem, the more likely you are to be able to narrow it down further into something manageable. Build on your ideas and see how many different research questions you can come up with. At this stage, doing some preliminary literature review will help, but it should answer enough questions to suggest a viable method (see next section). This stage can be time-consuming, so leave enough time to think about it. It demonstrates you have the capacity to differentiate between important/relevant information and less important/relevant information. This also applies when it comes to the statistical analysis of your data. Sketch out how you plan to gather and test your data. This will be rather sketchy, as you will not know until you have done it, but it’s good to make this plan concrete from the start. Finally, it’s worth giving yourself a week to consider your research. You will become too knackered if you give an unrealistic amount of time to this stage. You will likely have to change it at various stages, so do not worry about doing it perfectly first time. Then write it all up into a little document, even if it’s just for yourself. This will keep your research coherent and avoid the temptation to jump around between random threads documenting ideas that may end up being irrelevant.

4. Writing and Structuring Your Dissertation

You should aim to narrow down your objectives and try to be as specific as possible. It may seem like a lot of extra work, but taking the time to write an objectives list is worth it. If you only have a vague idea of what you want to cover in a chapter, there’s a good chance it’s going to be muddled and confusing for the reader. A well-laid-out list of objectives will help prevent you from going off on a tangent. This does not have to be a lengthy document; it’s just the sort of thing that can be a very useful reference and reminder when you’re actually writing up.

Once you have nailed down your research questions, you should start planning the structure of your paper. Know your word limit and stick to it; irrelevant material is not your friend. If you’ve only got 8,000 words, you can’t waste valuable space with a 1,000-word literature review. A clear, tightly structured outline is the sign of an organized mind and a well-structured argument. It’s essential to have a clear idea of what your argument will be before you start writing. Having a good introduction that sets you up for a clear and comprehensive thesis is imperative. Then you will develop on this in the upcoming chapters.

5. Editing and Proofreading Your Dissertation

We recommend that you do this in parallel with the examination.

It is very important to carefully edit and proofread to catch any errors, but it is also valuable to get someone else to do this as it is often difficult to assess your own work. Get a copy of the marking scheme if it is available. This will let you check whether your dissertation is on the right track and whether you have included all the major areas that need to be included. If you have a marking guide, then apply it to your dissertation and see if there are aspects that you can improve. While you are writing the examination, it is quite possible that your dissertation will give away new angles and approaches; this is not a problem. If this is the case, you will be able to return to your dissertation and elaborate on the comments that you made while taking the examination. An important skill of the researcher is to define and narrow the research problem. It is not new to us that defining the problem is often seen as the most difficult part of the research process.