In Writing a Watertight Thesis: A Guide to Successful Structure and Defence, Mike Bottery and Nigel Wright provide a framework by which research students will be able to structure both their thesis project and the journey required to carry a candidate to a successful endpoint. While the book offers useful and valuable advice to researchers at any stage in their PhD studies, Courteney O’Connor particularly recommends it […]
Category: thesis writing
Book Review: Taking Control of Writing Your Thesis: A Guide to Get You to the End by Kay Guccione and Jerry Wellington
In Taking Control of Writing Your Thesis: A Guide to Get You to the End, Kay Guccione and Jerry Wellington provide doctoral students nearing the end of their dissertations with a practical guide to taking charge of their thesis. Abha Rai strongly recommends the easy-to-read, conversational style of the book and its approach to real-world challenges to all doctoral students looking for writing support. This […]
Five steps to meeting the challenges of maintaining an appropriate writing voice
It’s often said that to embark upon a PhD you must be passionate about your topic. But when it comes to writing up your thesis, being passionate can seem at odds with the need to maintain an academically cool and objective writing voice. Daniel Beaudoin shares five simple steps to keep the “me” in check; including firstly by recognising that […]
Writer’s block is not a struggle with your writing but with your thinking. Write your way out of it
Most graduate writers who are struggling with their writing are actually struggling with their thinking. It isn’t a psychological block, but rather the intellectual confusions endemic to the process of communicating sophisticated research. To Rachael Cayley, these confusions are real and can have deleterious consequences for writing, but when we treat these problems as conceptual problems in our thinking we […]
Writing a PhD in your second language: seven reasons you’re doing great and five ways to do even better
For those PhD students for whom English is not their first language, writing a thesis can be a daunting task and a source of some anxiety too. Katherine Firth has worked with many of these students and as well as offering reasons why they should feel reassured, also provides a short list of simple pointers to help improve their skills. Identify […]