36 3 Mechanics of Writing
thesis. Your university probably has some guidelines on how to acknowledge this
work; you may, for example, be required to include in your thesis a list of such
papers and to identify the pages or chapters where the papers are incorporated. The
main difficulty that arises is when the papers were co-authored. If you wrote papers
with your supervisor, then it is generally felt to be legitimate to use them if the
presentation was principally your work—a paper written by your supervisor around
your results should not be used (though you can use the results). If you wrote papers
with a fellow research student, it may be that only one of you can report it; check
your institutional guidelines. If you do strongly feel the need to use material from
another work, you have two choices. You can explicitly quote it—but not exces-
sively, because the bulk of the text should be your own—or you can paraphrase it.
For the latter, the simple exercise of reading the work you wish to paraphrase, mak-
ing brief notes, then writing from these notes (preferably some days later) can avoid
any risk of plagiarism. In such cases you should still make clear that your writing
is based on the work of someone else, and give abundant citations; use of someone
else’s ideas or thoughts without due credit is another form of plagiarism.
In a related question, how much should you ask—or even pay for—someone to
edit your own writing? The short answer is ‘nothing’: ideally, each word in your
thesis should be your own, and yours alone. However, it is accepted practice at
university learning support units to provide assistance during a consultation ses-
sion with you for a single chapter. In such sessions, they will ask you to reflect on
what you have written, ask you if you can self-identify tangled prose and faulty
grammar, and suggest to you some strategies and materials to improve. University
learning consultants are asked to not edit your work, rewrite material, or fix up poor
structure.
Summary of Chapter 3: Mechanics of Writing
Learn how your word processor supports authoring of long documents:
- Writing and word-processing habits learnt on short documents such as essays are
not effective for thesis writing. - Use the right word processor for your academic community.
- Use referencing tools for maintenance of chapter numbers, citations, and so on.
Be aware of the distinction between presentation and content. Develop a style
template based on the most common style of your field. - Use tools to check spelling and grammar, but check manually as well.
- Use appropriate drawing and graphing tools, which may not be the ones you are
familiar with from other tasks. Make sure the results look professional.
Document management:
- Develop a systematic method for determining what constitutes the ‘master’ copy
of your document. - Back-up your work frequently and in a variety of ways.