Ten Tips For Your Dissertation

Ten Tips For Your Dissertation – This post focuses on ten tips for your dissertation, and using them will help you in writing your own dissertation and to support you in its successful completion. The below ten tips cover the planning, analyzing and presentation stages of the dissertation project itself. Your dissertation is an exciting and fulfilling challenge and should not be seen as daunting in any way. Trust me, once you start writing you will not stop, and you will complete your first 10,000 words in no time.

Ten useful tips for writing your dissertation

1. Analyse the question, again and again, make sure you are answering the questions you have deployed in your dissertation research

2. Plan your dissertation – Planning your workload will help you get your dissertation done on time. Make a plan, be realistic and try stick to it

3. Keep sentences short and straightforward. By keeping your sentences concise but meaningful, you will lessen the chances of grammatical and punctuation errors

4. Take care with spelling, particularly subject specific words if you are not sure how to spell a word, check a dictionary

5. Only include one argument or point of information per paragraph, this will make your work easier to read, digest and understand

6. Do not include any new information in your conclusions, the conclusions of your work should draw only upon what has already been written in your dissertation. If there is new information to be presented, it should be included in the main body of your dissertation

7. Ensure all information is correctly referenced. Any ideas you have taken from others, whether quoted directly, paraphrased or summarized, must be referenced

8. Keep it Interesting and Relevant – To try to keep the reader engaged and to make them read on

9. Check your dissertation brief for any specific format requirements – if specific format requirements have been set, i.e. for line-spacing or font, then you must adhere to them. Have this clarified by your dissertation supervisor. You do not want a lesser grade due to an oversight with the formatting

10. Proofread your work – Proofreading is such an important step, get a colleague or family member to proof read your dissertation and listen to any constructive feedback

Writing a dissertation is an enjoyable challenge!

My final piece of advice on the this topic is to keep the dissertation milestones at the forefront of your thoughts. Always keep track of the project duration and never exceed the deadline. Arranging regular meetings with your dissertation supervisor are a must to help keep you on track should you find yourself going off track.

Dissertations or theses are typically required of graduate students. Once completed, the dissertation or thesis is often submitted (with modifications) as a manuscript for publication in a scholarly journal.

Thus, the dissertation or thesis often provides the foundation for a new researcher’s body of published work. Writers will first want to determine whether the work in their dissertation or thesis merits publication. If it does, we then provide guidance on how to adapt a dissertation or thesis for submission to a journal.

Deciding To Submit a Dissertation or Thesis for Publication

When deciding to publish the work in a dissertation or thesis, it is important to consider whether the findings tell a compelling story or answer important questions. Whereas dissertations and theses may present existing knowledge in conjunction with new work, published research should make a novel contribution to the literature.

For example, some of your original research questions might be suitable for publication, and others may have been sufficiently addressed in the literature already. Likewise, some of your results may warrant additional analyses that could help answer the research questions more fully, and you may want to conduct these analyses before seeking publication.

You may also want to consider such factors as whether the current sample size provides sufficient power to adequately inform the analyses and whether additional analyses might clarify ambiguous findings. Consultation with colleagues can help evaluate the potential of the manuscript for publication as well as the selection of an appropriate journal to which to submit it.

Ten Tips For Your Dissertation – Adapting A Dissertation or Thesis for Publication

Once a decision is made to convert your dissertation or thesis into a manuscript for submission to a journal, you will want to focus attention on adapting it for publication. By attending to brevity and focus, writing style, relevant literature review and data analyses, and appropriate interpretation of the results or findings, you can enhance the fit of your manuscript for journal publication.

Editors and reviewers readily recognize an article that has been hastily converted; careful attention when reformatting the dissertation or thesis is likely to increase the manuscript’s potential for serious consideration and eventual publication. There are several steps writers seeking to prepare their dissertation or thesis for publication can take beforehand:

1 – Look at articles in the field and in relevant journals to see what structure and focus are appropriate for their work and how they are formatted.

2 – Request and consider the input of advisors, colleagues, or other coauthors who contributed to the research on which the dissertation or thesis is based.

The original research reported in a dissertation and thesis can then be reformatted for journal submission following one of two general strategies: the multiple-paper strategy or the conversion strategy

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