130 11 Before You Submit
Title Page
- Check that it contains title, author, place, month and year, and the degree for
which the thesis is submitted, and any university-specific requirements. - Check that the title of the thesis accords with your aim. If you decide to be clever,
two risks may arise here: (a) You may be tempted to use an eye-catching title that
could disorient the examiners. This might make you feel pleased with yourself,
but it is better to make sure that your thesis passes! (b) The work is difficult to
locate for future researchers because the title contains obscure, or perhaps very
common, terms that result in unproductive searches for a reference. - Check if you are officially still using the title that you nominated to the university
at the start of your project. Almost certainly the thrust of the project will have
changed over the course of your candidacy, and you should change your title ac-
cordingly.
Abstract
- Needs to be present, and should contain summaries of the three main compo-
nents of the project, as outlined in Chap. 2, an individual paragraph to each: (a)
why you did the work and what you were trying to achieve; (b) what methods
you used and what results you obtained; and (c) what you concluded from it.
Table of Contents
- Have you listed all chapter headings and headings of main sections within chap-
ters? (Many authors also list sub-section headings. I suggest that you don’t; they
clutter up the table of contents and rob it of the power to demonstrate the struc-
ture of your thesis). - Have you listed all endmatter (References, Appendices, and so on)?
- Check the styles for table-of-contents entries, and change them if necessary to
make a neater, more informative Table of Contents. It’s a good idea to look over
several completed theses to see how other students have done this. Then you can
select for yourself what works well and avoid what works badly. - Optionally, the Table of Contents includes lists of figures and tables; these are
not essential, but are valuable in a thesis with a lot of technical material.
Preface and Acknowledgments
- A preface should give any information about the preparation of the thesis that
you feel to be necessary, for example how you came to embark on the project.
Prefaces are seldom necessary for theses. If you do have one, any acknowledg-
ments should appear as part of it.