How Long to Write Up Phd Thesis Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

Edited about 1 second later posted about 8 years ago really jane? oh that's reassuring, because that's exactly how much time i do have. Someone on this forum once told me, that if you have 6 months to write, it will take 6 months. 08 jun 08, 1 posted about 8 years ago i think what makes people panic and stressed, is knowing that they only have a certain amount of time.

It's the fact that they have a deadline irrespective of the length of it, that makes them panic. When a person knows they only have a certain amount of time to do something, it causes them to become panic and anxious. That when i set myself artificial deadlines, even though i set them, i tend to become anxious about meeting them. Its the fact that external factors have forced them to definately write up in that period of time, or they will fail. Dissertation for computer scientists and the like

by jason eisner 2006

this page is about how to turn your research once it's done into a readable multi chapter document.

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You need to figure out what to include, how to organize it, and how to present it. Following this advice will make me happier about reading your submitted or draft dissertation. A typical thesis will motivate why a new idea is needed, present the cool new idea, convince the reader that it's cool and new and might apply to the reader's own problems, and evaluate how well it worked. Just like a paper! the result must be a substantial, original contribution to scientific knowledge. Treat it as an chance to make a mark, not as a 900 page tall memorial to your graduate student life. The cynical view is that if you've written several related papers, you staple them together to get a dissertation.

Danksagung Schreiben Dissertation

That's a good first order approximation you should incorporate ideas and text from your papers. But what is it missing? first, a thesis should cohere ideally, it should feel like one long paper. Second, it should provide added value: there should be people who would prefer reading it to simply reading your papers. If your prose is turgid or thoughtless, misspelled or ungrammatical, oblivious or rude to related research, you're the one who looks bad. You can do it! your advisor and committee are basically on your side they're probably willing to make suggestions about content and style but they are not obligated to fix problems for you. In the following sections, i'll start with advice about the thesis as a whole, and work downward, eventually reaching small details such as typography and citations. That crucial early decision will tell you what to explain, what to emphasize, and how to phrase and organize it.

Pretty much everything in your thesis should be relevant to your chosen audience. Ask yourself: a computer science thesis can freely invoke basic ideas like hash tables and computational complexity without defining or even citing them. After all, do biologists read a computer science thesis? not unless they are pretty comfortable with computer science. You can also safely assume that your readers have some prior familiarity with your research area.

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Just how much familiarity, and with which topics, is a judgment call again, you have to decide who your intended audience is. Up to a point, it is possible to please both beginners and experts by covering background material crisply and in the service of your own story. How does that work? as you lay out the motivation for your own work, and provide notation, you'll naturally have to discuss background concepts and related work. But don't give a generic review that someone else could have written! discuss the background in a way that motivates and clarifies your ideas.

Present your detailed perspective on the intellectual landscape and where your own work sits in it a fresh even opinionated take that keeps tying back to your main themes and will be useful for both experts and beginners. In short, be as considerate as you can to beginners without interrupting the flow of your main argument to your established colleagues. A good rule of thumb is to write at the level of the most accessible papers in the journals or conference proceedings that you read. Just like a paper or a talk, your dissertation needs a point: it should tell a story.

Writing the abstract and chapter 1 at the start will help you work out what that story is. You may find that you have to do further work to really support your chosen story: more experiments, more theorems, reading more literature, etc. Especially for areas that i know less well, a dissertation is often more accessible than shorter, denser papers. It takes a more leisurely pace, provides more explicit motivation and background, and answers more of the questions that i might have. There are other reasons i might look at your dissertation: to better understand your cool idea: your grand vision, how you think about it, and what you did. To look up details, clarification, or further results after reading a shorter version of your work. For students, reading high quality dissertations is a good way to learn an area and to see what a comprehensive treatment of a problem looks like.

Smith once ran a graduate cs seminar in which the students read 8 dissertations together. Each student was also required to select and summarize yet another dissertation and write a novel research proposal based on it. The strong convention is that it's a single document that must read well from start to finish your committee will read it that way. Some will read only the introductory and concluding chapters so make sure those give a strong impression of what you've done and why it's important.

Some will read a single chapter in the middle, going back for definitions as needed. Some will scan or search for what they need: a definition, example, table of results, or literature review. Some will flip through to get a general sense of your work or of how you think, reading whatever catches their eye. Once you've chosen your target audience, you should outline the structure of the thesis. The canonical organization is sketched by douglas comer near the end of his advice. You do have as much space as you need, but the reader doesn't have unlimited time and neither do you.

5 Parts of a Dissertation

If you feel like your thesis is too short, it may need more ideas or thoughtful discussion or experiments talk to your advisor , but it doesn't need more padding. So it puts the most important news on page one, and leads each article with the most important part. A good strategy is to make chapter 1 an overview of your main arguments and findings. Chapter 1 should be especially accessible use examples: make it the one chapter that everyone should read.