40 4 Making a Strong Start
Without realizing it, you have not only started your research but you have started
writing your thesis, and could even begin to reshape some of those earlier pieces
your supervisor asked you to write into thesis-style chapters. When research and
writing proceed simultaneously, there are three potential benefits. I have already
considered the first: arguing out your ideas in writing helps you to think more con-
structively about them and helps you to identify the processes that enabled you
to reach these insights. All of this should lead to better research questions or hy-
potheses, and better design of your research program. The second benefit is that,
if you start to write at an early stage, you will be well into your writing before you
have seriously commenced your own analysis or experiments. Therefore, you don’t
have the formidable task of ‘getting started’ on your writing when you have all but
finished your research, because you will have started much earlier, and have been
getting valuable feedback on your ideas and writing throughout your candidature.
The third benefit is that it helps you to give shape to your project, including the
thesis that reports on it, at an early stage. To explain this, I now outline how you
might proceed.
Creating a Structure
Earlier I described a standard structure for a thesis. Perhaps surprisingly, you could
devise this structure at a very early stage of the work. To do this, first write a draft
of your introductory chapter—the problem statement, the aim and scope, and the
steps you think you might take to achieve the aim. You may not feel too confident
about writing this introduction, because you suspect that it will have to be modified
later, as you get into your work. In this you are almost certainly correct, but that
should not prevent you from writing a draft or sketch introduction. What you are
trying to do is get started. This sketch might be flowing text, or might even just be a
series of bullet points that capture the content you think is important. A good source
of inspiration at this stage is to find ten or so theses in your broad area and have a
careful look at their contents pages. Some will be good, others poor; analyzing them
will help to shape the structure of your own work.
These first steps may be part of the processes at your university. For example,
in many institutions PhD students are first admitted to probationary candidature.
At the end of an initial period, of say 9 or 12 months, they are asked to prepare a
confirmation or progress report, which is used by the university to review whether
the candidate has a viable project and appears to be on the right track for a PhD.
(The period might be greater for degrees where students spend their first year or
more undertaking preparatory coursework.) As noted above, such research planning
processes can be seen as the first stages of preparing the final thesis.
These processes are designed to help avoid issues such as students failing to
form a clear hypothesis. Burdensome as these processes can seem, they encourage
students to define and design their work from an early stage, and I know of many
cases where they have helped a student to get a clearer understanding of what they