If a student is called upon to write a thesis, usually as the culmination of his or her college major studies, it is likely to be the longest piece of work that he or she has to write in an academic context. (At a more extensive, elaborate, and specialized level, is the dissertation of graduate students.) Because of the length and importance of theses, most academic institutions provide guidance for the writing of them. The same or similar guidance is also available on the Web, and, obviously, it should be carefully followed. For the purposes of this book, we shall mainly be concerned with length, because managing length is perhaps the main skill that has to be mastered.An Extended Essay?A thesis has something in common with an essay in that it must have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. But the similarities only go so far. If a thesis extends to, say, 10,000 words or more, then this is equivalent to roughly 10 essays, and if a thesis is divided into chapters, as it generally is, then it might be helpful to think of each chapter as being a separate essay. Each chapter must, of course, have the same kind of internal coherence that you will find in a good essay. But 10 internally coherent chapters do not necessarily make a good thesis. There must be some overall coherence; the reader must have the sense of the argument proceeding not simply from paragraph to paragraph but also from chapter to chapter. Each chapter will probably have its own introduction and conclusion, like an essay, but the conclusion of one chapter must contain a pointer to the next, and the introduction of the next should contain some kind of reference to the chapter that went before. A thesis should be a chain rather than a collection of essays.A thesis also involves more in-depth research than an essay. On the one hand, a thesis should represent the writer's individual and original contribution to an ongoing academic debate on a subject. You will, therefore, need to know your subject well in order to find an area of it to which you can make a contribution. At the same time, you will also need to show that you understand and appreciate the contributions made by other writers in the same area. You will need to be able to review the literature, that is, to comment critically on the work of present and past scholars. Once you have found an area that you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about, you will need to select a topic, narrow it down, and arrive at a thesis statement that your paper will set forth and defend. The procedures here are essentially the same as those you would use when preparing an essay topic and working out a thesis statement.The style of a thesis should be somewhat more formal than that of an essay. Informality would be out of place in a work of this size and gravity. On the other hand, the prose of academe is often insufferably dull and turgid. Your aim should be to be suitably formal without becoming too heavy. Look again, perhaps, at chapter 3 of this book, "The Qualities of Style." Also, use active verbs. For example, even when you are reviewing the literature, you do not have to say,As was demonstrated by Smith and Jones (1995), based on the earlier work of Chadwin (1993), the availability of debt relief is often conditioned by the political relations between creditor countries and debtor countries. You could write,Smith and Jones (1995), following Chadwin (1993), demonstrate that the political relations between creditor and debtor countries often decide whether debt relief is made available or not. Finally, the usual tense for writing theses is the present tense.Managing LengthThe reader should first be reminded of the principle set forth at the beginning of this section on extended writing: the longer a document is, the greater the care required in planning it and in giving it a clear and solid structure. A really long document such as a thesis requires very careful planning and organization. Even if you are in the habit of breezily setting off into an essay, relying on inspiration and your instinctive feel for form to shape the work for you, you would be well advised to change your habits when you have to write a whole series of essays organized as a chain.But, as usual, you are not the only person who has to manage the length of the document. The reader has to do the same. To assist the reader you will need to provide additional direction-finding apparatus. You will need to write an abstract, or summary of your thesis, which is usually placed at the beginning and should not be more than two pages in length, and provide a table of contents. It may be useful to provide headings within your chapters. Finally, in order to preserve a reasonable degree of flow, it may be necessary to relegate additional information that does not fit easily into the body of the text into footnotes, endnotes, or appendices. Footnotes are preferable if the information tends to be short, because the reader does not have to look anywhere other than the bottom of the page for it. If the notes are longer than, say, four or five lines, it is probably better to gather them together at the end of the relevant chapter as endnotes. If you have additional material that is a page or more in length, it should be put into an appendix. You will, of course, have to provide a full list of the works that you have cited and those that you read in the course of your research but did not actually quote from. This goes in a bibliography at the back of the book.Planning and ExecutionThe plan of any particular thesis will differ depending on the subject matter and the requirements of the institution to which it is being presented. A standard skeleton outline, however, might look like this:Title Abstract Table of contents I. Introduction II. Review of the literature—a critical summary and discussion of relevant works on the topic III. An account of how you planned and conducted your research IV. A presentation of the findings from your research (this may take more than one chapter) V. A discussion of your findings and their significance (this may also take more than one chapter) VI. Conclusion Reference list Appendices Most theses will contain all of these elements.More than most documents, perhaps, theses tend to be written "from the inside out"; that is to say, it is unwise and sometimes impossible to attempt to start at the beginning and work your way through to the end. As The Facts On File Guide to Good Writing explains, having a detailed plan frees you to begin work at a point of your choosing. The most important parts are the presentation and discussion of your own research. Many people start by writing those chapters or, possibly, by writing a review of the literature or an account of their methods. The abstract and introduction are usually only written after you have completed the body of the thesis, including your conclusions. When you are redrafting and revising the work, however, you should begin at the beginning in order to check that everything flows, hangs together, and is consistent.
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