A warm welcome to my corner!
The importance of writing a good thesis summary is often underestimated, and it is not too difficult to understand why. Even in the cases where a student has seriously engaged in writing his thesis, the summary is usually the last thing that gets done.
Tầm quan trọng của việc viết một bản tóm tắt luận văn tốt thường bị đánh giá thấp, và không quá khó hiểu tại sao. Ngay cả trong trường hợp một sinh viên đã nghiêm túc viết luận văn của mình, phần tóm tắt thường là phần cuối cùng được hoàn thành.
The typical scenario is therefore the following: the bulk of the work has finally been done, and the deadline to submit the thesis is imminent. Time is running out and, consequently, when it comes to set the summary down, this is written in a very hasty way… I am pretty sure that you can relate to this situation and – trust me – you are not the only one.
Do đó, kịch bản điển hình là như sau: phần lớn công việc cuối cùng đã được hoàn thành, thời hạn nộp luận văn sắp đến. Thời gian không còn nhiều và do đó, khi đặt bản tóm tắt xuống, điều này được viết một cách rất vội vàng… Tôi khá chắc rằng bạn có thể liên quan đến tình huống này và - tin tôi đi - bạn không phải là người duy nhất.
Yet, this is a pity! Your thesis summary deserves to be written with a certain care for several good reasons. An effective summary is the best way to impress your readers. It will be the first thing to be read and – as hard as it is to admit – the first impression is what really counts. You should therefore think of the summary as a distilled and concentrated essence of your thesis: a tool to underline the strengths of your research and make yourself recognizable as a competent scholar.
Tuy nhiên, đây là một điều đáng tiếc! Bản tóm tắt luận văn của bạn xứng đáng được viết với một sự cẩn thận nhất định vì một số lý do chính đáng. Một bản tóm tắt hiệu quả là cách tốt nhất để gây ấn tượng với độc giả của bạn. Nó sẽ là thứ đầu tiên được đọc và - thật khó để thừa nhận - ấn tượng đầu tiên mới là thứ thực sự quan trọng. Do đó, bạn nên nghĩ bản tóm tắt như một bản chất chắt lọc và tập trung của luận văn của bạn: một công cụ để nhấn mạnh những điểm mạnh trong nghiên cứu của bạn và khiến bạn được công nhận là một học giả có năng lực.
Especially if your thesis is written in another language, setting down an accurate, compelling summary in English can be the first step to internationally disseminate your work. In this regard, keep also in mind that an English summary of your thesis may be required for a job application or a PhD-position.
Đặc biệt nếu luận văn của bạn được viết bằng một ngôn ngữ khác, việc thiết lập một bản tóm tắt chính xác, hấp dẫn bằng tiếng Anh có thể là bước đầu tiên để phổ biến công trình của bạn ra quốc tế. Về vấn đề này, hãy nhớ rằng một bản tóm tắt luận văn bằng tiếng Anh của bạn có thể được yêu cầu cho một đơn xin việc hoặc một vị trí tiến sĩ.
Having said that, how to proceed? Here you are some useful steps to write an effective summary.
Đã nói rằng, làm thế nào để tiến hành? Dưới đây là một số bước hữu ích để viết một bản tóm tắt hiệu quả.
The thesis statement. is the most important part. This is a sentence usually placed at the beginning of the summary and it is aimed at clarifying the main research questions of your work.
The thesis statement must be clear and concise. MA theses, but also PhD dissertations, usually concern very narrow topics. So, avoid being vague and explain the central idea of your research as specific as possible.
Let’s do some practical examples. A sentence like: “the aim of the present study is to show how English skills can be improved in several ways” is certainly too vague.
Instead, a statement like: “the aim of the present research is to show how the use of Ludwig can improve English writing skills, by providing reliable texts to get inspiration", defines a narrower field of research. In addition, as the last example demonstrates, a good thesis statement can be enforced with further arguments.
For example, one could state that: "taking inspiration from a database of 300 million English sentences can indeed help a student to perfect their phrasing, by seeing words in the context of real sentences. A mere automatic correction tool, instead, carries the risk of worsening the student performance, for example by favouring the memorization of wrong phrases and expressions."
Each thesis is usually divided into diverse chapters, such as an introduction, a section dedicated to explaining the terminology, a chapter for the methodology, the discussion of the data, the results of the research etc.
A good summary must give a clear idea of how you have organized your research step by step. So be very clear and use sentences like “in the first chapter of my thesis I treated”, “while in the second…”, “the analysis of the data has shown that” etc. And, of course, do not hesitate to use Ludwig if you need examples to take inspiration from.
Keep in mind, you may have made the discovery of the century… but if you are not able to explain how you achieved such a result, you will be considered a charlatan.
In this regard, it is good practice to read a number of thesis summaries and to analyse how they are written. Nowadays all the most prestigious universities offer free access to their online repositories, where one can find great inspirational models. See, for example, this website by Cambridge University.
Now, let's analyse the structure of one of them:
The Italian giallo film was a type of thriller that was produced in huge numbers between the early 1960s and the late 1980s. This thesis contributes to recent scholarly attempts to situate the giallo within its socio-cultural historical context but resists the critical tendency to read these films as passive and transparent reflections of social attitudes in post-war Italy. Rather, I attend concretely to the form of these films and, specifically, to their critically neglected sound designs. I argue that the giallo’s voice tracks were conditioned by the commercial imperatives of Italy’s post-war popular film industry and that these commercial imperatives were in turn shaped by wider social, economic and political phenomena. By theorising the voice as a mediator between the giallo text and its industrial and social contexts, I show that these films both registered and reified social change.
Chapter 1 demonstrates that the anonymous narrator of Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) adopts a range of sonorous modes throughout the film. Each of these sonorous modes invokes a specific set of intertexts which are vital to tracing both the giallo’s cultural origins and the increasingly globalised socio- cultural landscape from which it emerged. This chapter then shows that Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) uses the model of the cinematic voice-over to explore the subjective experience of urban space in post-war Italy. The film suggests that by 1970 the ability to vocally ‘narrate’ and thus control space had become a fundamental assumption of the modern, cosmopolitan subject. Chapter 2 analyses Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972) and Sergio Martino’s Torso (1973). Both films draw on longstanding Italian cultural stereotypes to pitch the silence of the rural against the vocality of the urban. The films use silence and the voice as ‘cartographic’ tools to delineate the profound socio-economic divisions between Italy’s rural South and its more urban North, but they also illustrate the giallo’s underlying affinities with its silent cinema ancestors and so challenge the assumed temporal borders between cinematic eras. Chapter 3 argues that Argento’s Tenebrae (1982) and Fulci’s The New York Ripper (1982) variously mimic the vocal aesthetics of television. These films lay bare both the increasing dominance of the Italian cultural landscape by imported commercial television in the 1980s and the neoliberal economic project that underpinned that trend. Ultimately, they question the stability of the nation itself, precisely because the voice — now fractured across a global mediascape — is unable to signal national specificity.
The sentences in bold highlight how the author carefully organized the structure of the text. He started with a well elaborate thesis statement. As you can see, the object of the research is well defined and narrow: the study focuses on Italian thrillers, produced during a specific historical period between the early 1960s and the late 1980s. Moreover, the investigation depeens a specific aspect: the use of sounds in this movie genre. Then, the scholar explains in detail how he organized his work step by step, by summarizing the content of each chapter.
Ultimately, we can say that to write a theis summary is a less daunting task than one might imagine at first sight!
There is a huge difference between writing a summary for the theses database of your university and to write a summary for a more ambitious purpose. As mentioned above, a summary of your thesis may be required for a job application or to get a PhD position. So, if you are facing this kind of situation, you must “use” your summary in a smart way. Are there any points of contact between your thesis and the position you hope to get? If yes which ones? Is it the topic? Or, perhaps, in order to undertake your research, you have used a tool/method/program that could be pertinent with this position?
So, tailor your summary in order to highlight what you need to stand out from the crowd and… good luck!
Source: Ludwig.guru