How To Organize Your Thesis Essay Research

How To Organize Your Thesis Essay, Research Paper

How to Organize Your Thesis

Introduction

This note describes how to organize the written thesis which is the central

element of your graduate degree. To know how to organize the thesis document,

you first have to understand what graduate-level research is all about, so that

is covered too. In other words, this note should be helpful when you are just

getting started in your graduate program, as well as later when you start to

write your thesis.

What Graduate Research is All About

The distinguishing mark of graduate research is an original contribution to

knowledge. The thesis is a formal document whose sole purpose is to prove that

you have made an original contribution to knowledge. Failure to prove that you

have made such a contribution generally leads to failure.

To this end, your thesis must show two important things:

you have identified a worthwhile problem or question which has not been

previously answered,

you have solved the problem or answered the question.

Your contribution to knowledge generally lies in your solution or answer.

What the Graduate Thesis is All About

Because the purpose of the graduate thesis is to prove that you have made an

original and useful contribution to knowledge, the examiners read your thesis to

find the answers to the following questions:

what is this student’s research question.

is it a good question. (has it been answered before. is it a useful question

to work on.)

did the student convince me that the question was adequately answered.

has the student made an adequate contribution to knowledge.

A very clear statement of the question is essential to proving that you have

made an original and worthwhile contribution to knowledge. To prove the

originality and value of your contribution, you must present a thorough review

of the existing literature on the subject, and on closely related subjects.

Then, by making direct reference to your literature review, you must demonstrate

that your question (a) has not been previously answered, and (b) is worth

answering. Describing how you answered the question is usually easier to write

about, since you have been intimately involved in the details over the course of

your graduate work.

If your thesis does not provide adequate answers to the few questions listed

above, you will likely be faced with a requirement for major revisions or you

may fail your thesis defence outright. For this reason, the generic thesis

skeleton given below is designed to highlight the answers to those questions

with appropriate thesis organization and section titles. The generic thesis

skeleton can be used for any thesis. While some professors may prefer a

different organization, the essential elements in any thesis will be the same.

Some further notes follow the skeleton.

Always remember that a thesis is a formal document: every item must be in the

appropriate place, and repetition of material in different places should be

eliminated.

A Generic Thesis Skeleton

1. Introduction

This is a general introduction to what the thesis is all about — it is not just

a description of the contents of each section. Briefly summarize the question

(you will be stating the question in detail later), some of the reasons why it

is a worthwhile question, and perhaps give an overview of your main results.

This is a birds-eye view of the answers to the main questions answered in the

thesis (see above).

2. Background Information (optional)

A brief section giving background information may be necessary, especially if

your work spans two or more traditional fields. That means that your readers may

not have any experience with some of the material needed to follow your thesis,

so you need to give it to them. A different title than that given above is

usually better; e.g., “A Brief Review of Frammis Algebra.”

3. Review of the State of the Art

Here you review the state of the art relevant to your thesis. Again, a different

title is probably appropriate; e.g., “State of the Art in Zylon Algorithms.” The

idea is to present (critical analysis comes a little bit later) the major ideas

in the state of the art right up to, but not including, your own personal

brilliant ideas.

You organize this section by idea, and not by author or by publication. For

example if there have been three important main approaches to Zylon Algorithms

to date, you might organize subsections around these three approaches, if

necessary:

3.1 Iterative Approximation of Zylons

3.2 Statistical Weighting of Zylons

3.3 Graph-Theoretic Approaches to Zylon Manipulation

4. Research Question or Problem Statement

Engineering theses tend to refer to a “problem” to be solved where other

disciplines talk in terms

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