How to Write a Better Thesis

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Chapter 4

Making a Strong Start

In the first months of a typical PhD (or, to a lesser extent, the first weeks of a minor
thesis), you need to get into the habit of thinking and working like a research stu-
dent. Your supervisor may set you some reading and introduce you to what your
predecessors have done and to the complexities of your chosen field. In a techni-
cal discipline, you might choose one of these papers and identify how you could
attempt to produce similar results; in a history project, say, you might start explor-
ing what primary sources are available. To consolidate this reading, and to ensure
that you understand it with sufficient depth, you may be asked to write a review
showing how the field has been developing and what the current challenges and
problems are.
That is, your first piece of research will probably be an initial review of existing
work in the area, or perhaps an assessment of the state of the art in some technical
domain, or an exploration to identify the dozen or so key papers and researchers
that will initially influence your work. You may be tempted to write this as a ‘brain
dump’, a compendium of abstracts of all the papers you have read, but such an ap-
proach requires little intellectual effort and misses the point. For example, finding
some relevant papers may only take a few minutes with a web search engine, and
does nothing to develop your critical understanding of the field.
A more constructive approach is to write a chronology of how the topic has
developed, or, better still, an encyclopedic review, using as a structure one that
had been used previously by an eminent worker in the field. Writing such a review
involves gathering papers under headings and discussing similar results together in
a ‘compare and contrast’ style. This initial step will become an ongoing process in
your research: discovery and critical analysis of related work is part of the typical
weekly routine of successful students.
As this initial reviewing work develops you should be able to define your topic
more carefully, and put some limits around it. You will gradually find out what
the real unanswered questions are, either through your reading and analysis or, in
an empirical discipline, perhaps through experimental work that evaluates current
approaches. You may be able to reformulate these as propositions or hypotheses.
And you might be able to begin to devise methods for answering your questions or
testing your hypotheses.

D. Evans et al., How to Write a Better Thesis, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04286-2_4,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014