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Essays and Dissertations

July 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the basics of academic planning and writing skills

Oxford University Press have just brought out a series of short beginners’ manuals on communication skills. Their emphasis is on compact, no-nonsense advice directly related to issues of everyday life. Chris Mounsey’s Essays and Dissertations tackles the essentials of academic writing in a systematic manner. He begins with understanding and interpreting essay questions, then moves on to the research you might have to do to answer them.

Essays and Dissertations This involves selecting books, finding quotes, and developing the outline of your own arguments. This is followed by the central point of almost all successful writing – planning. Next comes editing and writing drafts, then how to present your results, using a word processor.

Having covered these basics, he then moves up a notch to cover the more advanced skills of time management, Internet research, and alternative strategies for writing essays. This leads into the special problems posed by dissertations, then exams.

The book ends with a series of writing checklists, guidance on common mistakes, how to deal with footnotes and bibliography, and suggestions for further reading.

The chapters are short; almost every page has hints, tips, and quotes in call-out boxes, there are checklists and suggestions for further reading. The strength of this approach is that it avoids the encyclopedic volume of advice which in some writing guides can be quite frightening.

This book provides students at all levels with easy-to-follow guidance on how to structure an essay and how to select and research the most appropriate subject to write on. You will need more guidance when it comes to writing a long dissertation, but this book will certainly help you to reach that point.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Chris Mounsey, Essays and Dissertations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp.128, ISBN: 0198605056


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Excellent Dissertations!

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

advanced study and research skills as simple notes

Once you’ve got your first degree, it’s often assumed that you will know exactly what to do in any post-graduate research work. That’s not usually true, and books like Excellent Dissertations! are helping to rectify the deficiency. Peter Levin’s approach is to break everything down into the simplest possible units. The most important characteristic of this book is that it is short and gets straight to the point. He offers useful checklists of what examiners are looking for in the successful dissertation.

Excellent Dissertations!These are likely to be the same, no matter what your subject – clear methodology, firm structure, and attention to detail. In my experience, most people writing long projects and dissertations find all these quite hard to produce. That’s why this sort of advice is useful. He helps you to make the distinction between a project and a dissertation, between the research and the writing up of results. He shows you how to explore the existing literature on your subject – which is different than writing a literature review – often another popular writing task in HE, This is dealt with separately in some detail in a chapter of its own.

There’s advice on how to compile a list of sources accurately, and he gives you useful tips such as starting to create your bibliography right from the start.

writing a literature review when you aren’t yet on top of your material is one of the most mind-numbing, brain-deadening, sleep-inducing activities known to students

There’s a separate chapter on methodology, which can be anything from a technique, a procedure, a hypothesis, to a philosophic argument. And if you are stuck for ideas, he shows you how to choose a subject or topic for the dissertation – with examples.

He looks at the management of the project in terms of your time – how to plan, what do first, how to keep going when things get rough.

At the end of the book – and I think this is the right place for it – there is advice on planning your project outline, editing your drafts, and conforming to the academic styles of referencing and producing bibliographies.

My only criticism of this guide is that it needs lists of further reading, web references, and an index. Maybe these can be added if there’s a second edition.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Peter Levin, Excellent Dissertations!, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005, pp.122, ISBN: 0335218229


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How to fail your dissertation

September 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

clear guidelines for guaranteed disaster

Failing your dissertation is admittedly not an easy task, but if you try really hard you can fail by ignoring all the good advice you have been given. If in doubt, you should adopt the suggestions which follow. They can be summarised as three main principles:

  • obscure the idea
  • mangle the sentences
  • ‘slovenize’ the diction
Obscure the idea

Make sure your topic is wide and vague. Then wander around the main idea without ever stating it precisely. If by mistake you do manage to choose a well-defined, suitably limited topic, do not despair. You can always take detours and amble away from the topic for a while.

Do not develop your ideas. Simply re-state them in safe, spongy generalisations. Don’t bother finding evidence to support what you say. Always point out this kind of repetition with the phrase ‘As previously …’. Better still, repeat word for word at least two of your statements.

Disorganise your discussion. For example, if you are using chronological order to present your material, keep your reader alert by making repeated jumps from the past into the present and back again.

Begin a new paragraph every sentence or two.

By generous use of white space make the reader aware he is looking at a page devoid of sustained thought.

Like this.

Mangle the sentences

Fill all the areas of your sentences with dead wood. Incidentally, ‘the area of’ will deaden almost any sentence, particularly when displayed prominently at the beginning.

Use sentence fragments and run-on or comma-spliced sentences. Do not use a main subject and a main verb, because the reader will get the complete thought too easily. Just toss in part of the idea at a time, as in this ‘sentence’.

To create variety, throw in an occasional run-on sentence, thus the reader will have to read slowly and carefully to get the idea, if there is one.

Your sentence order invert for statement of the least important subject matter. That will force the reader to be attentive to understand even the simplest points you make.

You, in the introduction, body and conclusion of your dissertation, to show that you can contrive ornate, graceful sentences, should use convoluted sentence structure.

Frequent separation of subjects from verbs by insertion of involved phrases and clauses, frequently giving rise to errors of concord, show that you know what can be done to a sentence.

‘Slovenize’ the language

Add the popular ‘-wise’ and ‘-ize’ endings to words. Say ‘Timewise, this procedure is faster’, rather than simply, ‘This procedure is faster’. Choose ‘circularize’ and ‘utilize’ in preference to ‘circulate’ and ‘use’. Practice will smartenize your style.

Use vague words instead of precise ones. From the start, establish vagueness of tone by saying ‘The thing is …’. Keep the reader guessing throughout a reading of your work.

Employ lengthy Latinate locutions wherever possible. Shun the simplicity of style that comes from apt use of short, old, familiar words, especially those of Anglo-Saxon origin. Show that you can get the maximum (L) not merely the most (A-S) from every word choice you make.

Inject some humour into your writing by using the wrong word occasionally. Write ‘then’ when you mean ‘than’ or ‘to’ when you mean ‘too’. Every reader likes a laugh.

Find a ‘tried and true’ phrase to clinch a point. It will have a comfortingly folksy sound for your reader. Best of all, since you want to end in a conversational, friendly way, sprinkle your conclusion with clichés. ‘Put a little icing on the cake’ as the saying goes.

Last word

Well, too ensconce this whole business in a nutshell you, above all, an erudite discourse on nothing in the field of your topic should write. Thereby gaining the reader’s credence in what you say.

Suggestion-wise, one last thing: file-ize this list for handy reference for the next time you have to write anything.

(Adapted from Emerson Society Quarterly, 1963)

© Roy Johnson 2004


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Preparing Dissertations and Theses

May 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

postgraduate writing skills from start to finish

Many students reach postgraduate studies and have a difficult time producing their dissertations and theses – for two reasons. First, they’ve probably never written such a long piece of work before and second, because they’ve probably never seen one and therefore don’t know what it’s supposed to look like. Bill Allison and Phil Race start off this brief guide to postgraduate writing skills with the first issue which most students are likely to confront – how to choose a research topic.

Preparing Dissertations and Theses This needs to be done with some care, because you can be saddled with your choice for anything up to three years or more. It’s not unknown for some people to become bored by their own subject. Fortunately, the preliminary work of looking at the literature and searching the databases of research, is a lot easier these days since most of this information will be available on line.

Next they explain what’s required in a research project – the ability to identify a problem, analyse it, read the literature, develop a research method, select the data, do the work, draw conclusions, and write up the results following the academic conventions of your subject.

The rest of the book is devoted largely to producing the written product which will be the material outcome of the research. This involves understanding the structure of dissertations and theses – knowing the correct order of their parts. This covers items which students often find difficult, such as how to reduce a thesis which might be anything up to 80-100,000 words long into a succinct 400 word abstract.

The other things which may people find difficult are quotations, referencing systems, and bibliographies. These are all worth understanding as soon as possible, because research which is perfectly successful can easily be referred back for ‘further revisions’ if the referencing is irregular or the bibliography doesn’t follow the specified standard.

Next they cover the process of doing the research itself – the actual work of the project and how to keep track of what you are doing. They stress the importance of writing up your work, organising your files, keeping records, and backing up what you produce – which should be easy now that the price of disk space and storage has fallen.

The last part of the book deals with the really small details of the physical object you will create – the page layout and margins, abbreviations, tables, the size of fonts, line spacing, and everything down to the way the finished pages will be bound.

So that covers just about everything. It’s up to you now to do the necessary work – and then you can collect your degree.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Brian Allison and Phil Race, The Student’s Guide to Preparing Dissertations and Theses, London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2004, pp.100, ISBN: 0415334861


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