How to Succeed in Postgraduate Study

Writing the Thesis

by Marie desJardins

Postgraduate students often think that the thesis happens in two distinct phases: doing the research, and writing the dissertation. This may be the case for some students, but more often, these phases overlap and interact with one another. Sometimes it's difficult to formalize an idea well enough to test and prove it until you've written it up; the results of your tests often require you to make changes that mean that you have to go back and rewrite parts of the thesis; and the process of developing and testing your ideas is almost never complete (there's always more that you could do) so that many postgraduate students end up "doing research" right up until the day or two before the thesis is turned in.

The divide-and-conquer approach works as well for writing as it does for research. A problem that many postgraduate students face is that their only goal seems to be "finish the thesis." It is essential that you break this down into manageable stages, both in terms of doing the research and when writing the thesis. Tasks that you can finish in a week, a day, or even as little as half an hour are much more realistic goals. Try to come up with a range of tasks, both in terms of duration and difficulty. That way, on days when you feel energetic and enthusiastic, you can sink your teeth into a solid problem, but on days when you're run-down and unmotivated, you can at least high-level content-oriented comments, mid-level stylistic and presentation comments, and low-level nitpicky comments on syntax and grammar. Try to keep your comments constructive ("this would read better if you defined X before introducing Y") rather than destructive ("this is nonsense").

You'll want to read a paper at least twice -- once to get the basic ideas, then a second time to mark down comments. High-level comments describing your overall impression of the paper, making suggestions for organization, presentation and alternative approaches to try, potential extensions, and relevant references are generally the most useful and the hardest to give. Low-level comments are more appropriate for a paper that is being submitted for publication than for an unpublished paper such as a proposal or description of preliminary research.