This page is specifically for students at KAA FF MU writing their dissertations. MA info here.
Use heading styles as you can automatically create table of contents (TOC), and update it as necessary.
Heading styles also creates a navigation window for your own ease of navigation.
Do not use heading styles for anything on your title page - only for sections you want in your TOC.
A dissertation should rarely have more than two levels - chapters and sections.
Keep numbering to two levels only. KAA is strongly opposed to overdoing this.
Use indented paragraphs, not block style and certainly not both.
Do not indent the first paragraph under a heading.
Writing numbers as words - check style manuals.
The sources you consult from the very outset are likely to influence your thinking. It is not always easy to judge if something is reliable and well-respected. One window into this is the citations they receive in other publications, especially journal articles related to their field. This in turn leads to a source of sources: in general methodology books, further reading is often listed.
Another issue is currency: books written in the 1970s about anything to do with current language education are likely to have been superseded. There are exceptions, but by and large this is the case. Given that recent resources typically build on previous work, as does yours, the more recent, the more advanced they should be.
Reading a dissertation that cites something from 1972 and a few sentences later from 2012 is problematic unless the author is distinctly making a comparison. In my experience of reading dissertations, this is often the result of the student-candidate cherry picking.
Depending on your topic, Czech researchers can be better placed to provide you with their findings than general, internationally-oriented authors of major British publishers.
In education and linguistics, we use APA. This is not negotiable.
See especially this page for examples. This website contains everything regarding referencing, except corpora!
Owing to the ever increasing number of dissertations, drafts and sections can be read a maximum of once, but even less often if submitted shortly before the thesis deadline.
Please indicate in different coloured type the sections you want read, and explain what needs checking. Text can be read just to see if it is OK!
When submitting drafts to your supervisor, document names like "first draft" or "beta version" are not very helpful. Please include your name and a fairly specific label, e.g., "thomas_intro_2nd_draft".
The "theoretical half followed practical half" structure has been confined to the dustbins of history. No-one is even quite sure where it came from. Your work will have a structure that flows logically from beginning to end, and will be peculiar to your aims and research.
A conclusion is not a summary. A conclusion should be a statement of how the primary and secondary research has impacted on the researcher and its implications for further research in the field.
Do NOT include the names of students, teachers or even schools in your dissertation. You might refer to a school as an urban four-year grammar school specialising in languages, etc.
This is a new and quite earnest requirement in the Department.
See the Contents listing on the right side of this page. Of particular interest is the Resources page where problem areas are identified and material is linked to.
A dissertation is likely to be more academic if it sounds academic. And this partly emerges from the vocabulary used. Academic vocabulary expresses academic concepts. If your writing does not include sufficient academic vocabulary, it might not be expressing academic concepts. Or it might not be expressing them in the language of the academic community.
Use the Vocabulary Profiler to see if you have enough "yellow" words which are general academic words. The "red" words are mostly terminology and proper nouns.
The file name should be Surname_mgr_diss_2015.
Short link to this page:
http://bit.ly/maelt_diss
Other pages in this website relevant to academic writing: