Here is some advice I just sent a doctoral student (made anonymous and generic to protect innocent parties involved).
Somehow just about every student makes the same mistakes, so I am putting it here for everyone to save you tears.
- At the outset, make sure that your automatic styles, (headings, sub-headings, captions, footnotes and automatic referencing) are flawless. It may mean taking some time to learn how to use your word-processor and your referencing software properly.
- In citing the literature, remember to foreground your voice and not that of the authors. In other words, don't use "According to so and so..."
- Please watch my precis video again and make sure each paragraph has a topic sentence and then supporting sentences in descending order of importance, unless you are trying to convince, in which case the sentences build up from least to most important and end with the topic sentence. Also make sure you do ONE TOPIC per paragraph.
- Check for duplication. Because you sometimes put different things in the same paragraph, you tend to repeat them again somewhere else.
- All the diagrams and tables must be explained in full. If the examiner were to ignore the table they must still be able to understand the thesis. You may want to consider where you want to put the diagrams about research methods.
- Finally you need to take the reader with you. I find it quite hard to see the "golden thread" in the chapter (and in all the others for that matter). Under each heading state what is to follow. Then begin with a powerful statement that summarises the whole section. If the examiner is lazy, they can then skip the whole thing and still know what you mean.
- You may find it useful to drop everything for now and go and do this free online writing tutorial. It will help you avoid all the pitfalls: Effective Writing Practices Tutorial | Northern Illinois University (niu.edu).
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