Writing up does not only happen at the end (by Ian Sanders)
You cannot leave the writing up of your thesis or dissertation to the end. Writing up is something which begins pretty much as soon as you have completed your proposal and continues as you work on your research. You should be updating your literature review section as you encounter more related work. As you do experiments, you should be recording what you done and updating your methodology and even your results chapters. By the time, you have completed your experiment whatever that is and have collected and analysed all of your data, you should almost be in a position where all that you need to do is to write your introduction and conclusion and polish your final document.
It is also useful to have a research journal in which you can record thoughts, ideas, notes about things you have read, notes about what you have been doing as you do your experiments or make your measurements, reflections on what the results could mean, etc. for later consideration for inclusion in your final document.
The abstract of your thesis or dissertation (by Ian Sanders)
In the abstract of your document you should
But do not use a list! And do not write something that reads like a list.
The introduction chapter in your thesis or dissertation (by Ian Sanders)
There are two important aspects in writing a good introduction chapter. Level and scope - who are you writing the chapter for and what should you be telling them in that chapter.
The introduction to your thesis or dissertation is the one chapter in the final document which needs to be accessible to a broad audience. It should be readable by and understandable to any reasonably intelligent and educated person. Think of your target audience as someone who is not an expert in your field -- maybe Honours students or other postgraduate students who are not in your field or even in your discipline. My "target audience" was my late father who was a qualified surveyor. I figured that if he could read my introduction and make some sense of what I had done for my research then I was doing a decent job of selling my work in my introduction chapter.
The introduction chapter should cover enough about your research so that anyone reading it will be able to understand what the problem you were interested in was; how you reduced that to a focussed research question or research aim; what that question or aim was; how you set about answering the question or achieving the aim; what you actually did; what results you achieved; what is the significance of your results; and how this work furthers knowledge in the area (more important for a PhD than for a Masters degree). Obviously in doing this you have to worry about the level and you must realise that you cannot include everything and that you should not get into technical details.
Writing a good introduction is difficult. Expect it to take time and be prepared to rewrite and to do a lot of "polishing".
See the attached file ISandersPhDIntroduction.pdf below for an example of a PhD Thesis Introduction.
The structure of a research report, dissertation or thesis (by Ian Sanders, Vashti Galpin and Philip Machanick)
Note: These comments were originally aimed at Honours level research reports but apply equally well to dissertations and theses.
The details presented here give a skeleton for you to work from in your document. These are guidelines only -- they will not apply and probably cannot be forced to apply for all research reports. Part of your task as a student is to decide how to use these guidelines in preparing your document. You should discuss your ideas for the structure of your document with your supervisor.
Your document should not have a flat structure. By this, we mean that each chapter should be broken up into appropriate sections and subsections -- this adds to the readability of the document. One way to see if you have a reasonable structure is to look at your table of contents -- does the level of each section or subsection make sense in the overall document structure?
You want your document to convey to your readers what you did, why you did it, how you did it and why it was important. In order to do this well you must
Below is a suggested chapter structure for a research report. For each chapter, details of what should appear in the chapter are given. (Note that in a research proposal and in a research report, dissertation or thesis the first three chapters are very similar in structure -- this is because the same type of scene-setting is required for the later material in both documents.
Note that there are possible variations on the suggested structures. For example, in the research report, future work could be discussed in a separate chapter before the conclusion. For some types of research, it may make sense to combine the results and discussion chapters in a research report. It is up to you to make reasonable decisions, and your supervisor will be able to advise you on this.
Research Report structure
Abstract
The function of an abstract is to allow a reader to determine whether a document is relevant, and hence the major points of the document should be covered including scope and conclusions. It should be short, informative, specific, self-contained and written for a general audience. It should not include abbreviations or citations. Your document should not refer to the abstract.
Acknowledgments
Although you will have done the majority of the work on your own, you will have had help from your supervisors, your classmates and your friends and family. This is where you get the chance to express your gratitude to them.
Also you may have received some sort of financial assistance. This should also be acknowledged here.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction
This chapter should introduce the problem at a level that could be understood by any intelligent outsider (anybody with a degree in any area is a good target to aim at). It should include sections which define the problem, discuss the importance of the problem, give some idea of how you tackled the problem and could even give some idea of the results you achieved and the significance of these results. In this chapter, you must also give a good idea of the overall structure of your document.
Chapter 2. Background and Related Work
In this chapter you should elaborate on (or give details of) the problem and discuss why it is an important problem to tackle. You should then discuss related literature in the area.
The aim here is to give your reader a detailed picture of what has been done in the past and how it relates to what you did. You should discuss the background to the problem, alternative and related approaches and why they are significant to your problem (what they are, what you learn from them and how they can be used to solve your problem).
Chapter 3. Research Method
This chapter will make the problem more explicit and outline an approach to solving it. Here you should spell out in detail exactly what problem you were trying to solve and how you set about tackling this. The first part of this can be accomplished by formulating a clear and precise hypothesis which can be tested. It could also be accomplished by coming up with a clear and precise research question which can be answered. Your research hypotheses or question should be motivated -- it should be made clear why you have chosen that specific hypothesis or question.
The second part of this is accomplished by designing an experiment to attempt to verify your hypothesis or answer your research question. Here you must give details of what you did, why you did it and how it will answer your research question or lead to acceptance or rejection of your hypothesis. Exactly what appears here depends on what type of research you are doing.
Chapter 4. Results
Here you should discuss the raw results which arise as a consequence of what you did to answer your research question or accept/reject your hypothesis. This could be graphs or tables of measurements, proofs, lemmas, an algorithm you developed, etc. (again this depends on the type of research that you are doing). You can highlight the main findings but should delay discussion of the results to the next chapter.
Chapter 5. Discussion
In this chapter you should discuss in detail the significance of your major results -- how they answer your research question or lead you to accept/reject your hypothesis, whether there are any surprises or they are in line with what you expected, etc. In the case that your results are different to your expectations, you should explain why these differences occur.
Chapter 6. Conclusion
In this chapter you again revisit your major results and the discussion of them, you should discuss the contribution of your research to the research area in general and suggest what additional work could be done in the general area or specific extensions/improvements to your result. You should finish off with an overall conclusion to sum up what you accomplished.
References
A list of the works you cited in the prescribed format.
Appendices
Only if absolutely necessary, but no program listings.
The Golden Thread (by Ian Sanders courtesy Ruth de Villiers)
Your dissertation or thesis should be tied together by a clear and consistent theme (the golden thread). This should link your problem statement (what you are interested in tackling); to your literature review (what has already been done in that field/area); to your research question[s] (what in particular you wish to find out about); to your methodology (how you plan to answer your question[s]; to your results and discussion; and to your conclusions.
Leading your reader (by Ian Sanders)
It is your job/task as the author of the thesis to lead your reader through your document. You need to maintain the storyline throughout the document. This means that each chapter of your thesis should have an introductory section and a concluding section.
In the introductory section you should
In the concluding section you
Nobody will read your whole thesis in one sitting so doing this – besides showing that you have a good picture of your own research – will remind them of what they have already read and thus make it easier for them to digest your work.