How to Write a Better Thesis

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Chapter 11

Before You Submit

You have just typed the last full stop of your conclusions. Finished at last?
Wrong—you still have many weeks of work to do. You have two major tasks
ahead: you must revise your first draft in response to the criticisms of supervi-
sors and friends and, when you have done that, you must check the details of the
whole work.
What you have actually finished is your first draft: a collection of chapters writ-
ten according to the structure you devised. Now you will need to really focus on
‘structural editing’. At this point, it may appear to you (and your supervisors) that
each chapter is coherent, but you now have to consider whether the whole thesis
hangs together. You will also need to check whether your argument really gets you
from the aim to the conclusions; whether your aim itself has drifted during the
course of the research; whether there is extraneous material that you should transfer
to appendices; and whether important insights have emerged to which you gave
little or no prominence in your original structure, but which are now demanding
more attention. When you have put all these things right, you will have completed
the structural editing.
As you work through the second draft, you will also need to work on editing
details. There are many aspects to check: spelling, punctuation, captions to figures
and tables, references, and consistency in everything including nomenclature, for-
mat, reference style, and writing style. Although these things are not always intel-
lectually demanding you have to do them properly, and they take time. And they are
important. What may seem to you to be minor errors in your text can send the reader
strong subconscious messages that, basically, you don’t care and that the work is
slipshod. This is not a message that you want the reader to receive.

From First to Second Draft

Some graduate students, when they have typed that last full stop in their conclu-
sion chapter, print out a clean copy of the entire thesis and give the whole thing to
their supervisor to read. Although this gives students a strong sense of completion,

D. Evans et al., How to Write a Better Thesis, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04286-2_11,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014