Dotting the ‘i’s and Crossing the ‘t’s 129
By the time I have reached the end of the thesis, a sense of the integrity (or lack
of it) of the whole document has usually built up. If there is a problem, it may be
obvious. If it is not obvious, I repeat the first step—the examination of structure—
but now with knowledge of how the whole argument has developed; or has failed to
develop. There may be major gaps in the argument; there may be material present
that is not part of the argument and that should be relegated to appendices; there
may be repetitions that should be eliminated or consolidated; there may be material
that would have been better located elsewhere in the document; there may be con-
clusions emerging strongly at the end that the author should have emphasized more,
or had failed to argue for in the discussion; and so on. Before handing it back to the
author, I write a few pages on these larger problems.
Thus the author now has two sets of comments: detailed comments in the text on
points of grammar and expression; and general comments about the structure of the
argument. We discuss the latter, and the student gets to work on the second draft. As
the student produces revisions of various parts aimed at solving particular problems,
we discuss them. I usually find that a complete re-reading of the second draft will
not be necessary until after the second, more detailed, part of the finishing process
that I am about to describe.
Dotting the ‘i’s and Crossing the ‘t’s
Although the second draft is now essentially complete, you still have some weeks of
detailed, rather tedious work to do. Don’t skip it—tedious or not, it is essential. The
items that you need to check are listed below in the form of a check-list. You may
even want to photocopy this checklist and tick the boxes when you have completed
each task. If you have used your word-processing software to its fullest many of the
jobs will already have been done.
Your thesis may include text that you already regard as ‘finished’, in particu-
lar material drawn from papers that were written during your candidature. Some
students seem to think that such text doesn’t need checking, but you would be sur-
prised how much change can be required due to the need to integrate the paper into
a complex thesis. Make sure that all text is checked to the same level of detail.
Preliminary Pages
The first few pages, before the start of Chap. 1, are preliminary pages that set the
context of the thesis, and help readers to find their way into it. They will include
some or all of the following, generally in the order given below: