Dissertation writing guide

Outline

Your dissertation will need to have the following components , in this order:

1.   A title

2.   An abstract

3.   A table of contents

4.   An introduction

5.   A literature review

6.   A statement of your research questions and, if relevant, hypotheses

7.   An outline of your research methods

8.   An overview of your results

9.   A discussion of the implications of your results

10. A conclusion

11. A reference list

Depending on your topic, your dissertation may also contain:

12. An appendix or multiple appendices

The following sections provide brief information about each of these components.

1.  Title

Your dissertation title should be brief, but comprehensive: it should be a very brief summary of what your research project is about, containing as many keywords (that is, words that might

attract other researchers’ attention) as possible. Avoid vague phrasings, such as starting the    title with ‘A study of . ..’ . This is redundant unless you specifically state what type of study you arepresenting. You can use a subtitle if you want, as in the third example.

Good examples:

type of study                          phenomenon                             type of data

type of study and phenomenon                                   type of data and language

type of study and phenomenon                    language                              type of data

A good place to look for further examples is the LinguistList PhD dissertation database. This

also provides an abstract for each dissertation: see

below. Use the search functions to find dissertation abstracts in the area of linguistics that you want to work in.

2.  Abstract

The abstract should present an overview of your dissertation, briefly covering all of the

subsequent components – that is, briefly motivating the study you have done with reference to previous literature, briefly stating what your research questions are, briefly outlining your

methods, briefly outlining your results and briefly discussing their implications.

The typical length of an abstract is 300 words, and the abstract should never be longer than one page in your dissertation. The abstract should precede the table of contents; it is,as it were,

outside of the main body of the dissertation.

What’s it for? Essentially to help a potential reader decide whether or not they want to read

your whole dissertation, or to give someone who has read your dissertation a quick reminder of the contents. Most journal articles start with an abstract that suits the same purposes; look

carefully at a few to see what language tends to be used.

A good place to look for more example abstracts is the LinguistList PhD dissertation database.

Use the search functions to find dissertation abstracts in the area of linguistics that you want to work in.

Because it needs to coverall main components of your dissertation, including the discussion of your results, it makes sense to write your abstract after you have written most or all of the rest of the dissertation – eventhough it appears first!

3.  Table of contents

The table of contents should list all chapter, section and sub-section headings, with numbers and page references. A partial example, without page references:

1      Introduction.                                                                                          ..                                    

2      Literature review...................................................................               ...                               

2.1   Differences between Chinese and English.....................................................................

2.2   Effects of explicit teaching on second language acquisition.........................................

2.3   Research questions........................................................................................................

3     Methodology.........................................................................................................................

3.1   Participants....................................................................................................................

3.2   Test design....................................................................................................................

3.2.1      Grammaticality judgement task......................................................................

3.2.2      Sentence translation task.....................                                                            

3.3   Quantitative analysis.....................................................................................................

4     Results.................................................................................................                            .     

Like the dissertation title, section and sub-section titles should be brief and maximally

informative as to the contents of the section. For chapter titles, you can stick to the generic titles used throughout this document: Literature review, Methodology, Results and soon.

It’sa good idea not to divide sub-sections into further sub-sub-sections: it’s difficult enough for a reader to know where they are in the dissertation structure in, say, section 2.3.4!

Formatting tips

To make a table of contents look good, you can write it as a big table, and then hide the table    gridlines. This way you can control the alignment of, for example, page numbers very precisely:

Even better is to have your table of contents generated automatically, like the table of contents at the start of this document. To do this in Word, you have to use ‘Styles’ (under the Home tab) to highlight section headings, and switch automatic numbering on. When you’ve done this, you  can goto ‘Table of Contents’ under the References tab to insert an automatic table of contents. Look on the internet for more detailed instructions. Once you get the hang of it, you can save

yourself a lot of time in the final stages of preparing your dissertation!

4.  Introduction

The introduction is the first element of the main body of your dissertation. It’s usually two or three pages long. Its function is to acquaint the reader with your study in a relatively non-

technical way. Like the abstract, the introduction should briefly motivate the study you have    done with reference to previous literature, briefly explain what your research questions are,    and briefly outline your methods. The introduction should not cover your results in any detail, although you may offer your reader a glimpse by writing something like ‘It will become clear    that … ’ or ‘I will argue that …’ . It is a good idea to end the introduction with a brief outline of    the rest of the dissertation, summarising what each chapter covers in a sentence or two.

Like the abstract, you should leave writing – or at least finalising – the introduction until last.    This chapter is an introduction to your study, but more importantly it’san introduction to your dissertation. You’re in the best position to guide the reader into this when you know exactly what’s in there!

5.   Literature review

The literature review is an account of what has been published on your dissertation topic by

academic scholars. It is an overview and assessment of the field to which your study is a

contribution. A good literature review tells the reader what is known about the phenomenon   you are investigating, and what is yet to be discovered. By doing the first thing, it provides the  reader with the background knowledge needed to understand the rest of your dissertation. By doing the second thing, it makes clear why it has been useful to carryout your study. Always    keep these two functions of the literature review – instructing the reader and motivating your  study – in mind when you write it.

Of course carrying out a thorough review of relevant literature is a crucial part of the research process. An initial review will allow you to fine-tune your research questions, formulate any

hypotheses and decide on appropriate methods. Most likely, you will continue to read relevant literature throughout your project. In particular, your results may lead you in the direction of

literature that you had not considered in designing your study. Late discoveries of literature can change your whole perspective on your study, for example by making clear that what you have   been considering an unexpected result was to be expected all along – or by revealing that

someone else has carried out a study that is quite similar to yours. This can be frustrating, but is part of doing research. Note that your written literature review is not a chronological record of  your reading: it should accommodate all of your crucial sources, whether you started your

reading with them or only discovered them at the last minute.

The literature review should be more than a list of references: it should present a structured

argument based on a critical evaluation of what you have read in relation to your research

topic. ‘Critical’ means you should identify gaps, apparent contradictions, areas of controversy or uncertainty, and theoretical or methodological weaknesses in previous studies. Being critical

does not mean criticising other people’s work for the sake of it: it means arguing that certain     research questions have not yet found a satisfactory answer, either because they haven’t been addressed directly, or because there are reasons to doubt the accuracy of the answers that

have been put forward so far.

‘Structured’ means that there should be a clear logic to the order in which you discuss your

sources. A good idea is to start with the most general literature and gradually build up a more concrete picture of the study you have carried out, and why. Generally it makes sense to split  the review up into sections, each addressing a particular area of research that informs your own study: see the example table of contents above.

6.  Research questions and hypotheses

One of the literature review’s purposes is to lead the reader up to your research question(s)

and any associated hypotheses: after reading the literature review, the reader should

understand why you are asking the research question(s) you are asking. A good position for

these, then, is right at the end of the literature review, as suggested by the example table of contents above. It is a good idea to repeat them at the start of the methodology chapter, so that you can refer to them in your description of methods, without the reader having to flip

back to another chapter. In general, the more reminders, the clearer your dissertation will be.

If you have multiple research questions, it is fine to use numbers or letters to organise them,

and then refer to those in surrounding text. Make sure that the relationship between questions is clear: in particular, if some are subordinate to others, the numbering should reflect this. For    example:

The main research question addressed in this dissertation is whether there is any correlation between    implicit and explicit language knowledge on the one hand and language proficiency level on the other. Specifically:

a.    Is there any correlation between implicit and explicit language knowledge measured as TGJT and UGJT scores and proficiency measured as a TOEFL score?

b.    What is the difference between explicit language knowledge measured as a UGJT score and measured as an MKT score in terms of the correlation with proficiency?

c.    Which of implicit and explicit language knowledge is the best predictor of language proficiency?

7.   Methods

The methods chapter is an account of how you have addressed your research question or questions,or tested your hypothesis or hypotheses. It generally includes:

●   Explanation of the type of data you are using, and how you collected your material

●   Presentation of relevant details regarding your participants or data sources

●   Explanation of what you measured, counted or analysed, and how you did it

●   Explanation of the techniques you used for inferential statistics, if relevant

●   Explanation of any theoretical framework your analysis is crucially informed by

●   Justification of your method: are alternative methods available, and why is your method particularly appropriate?

Note that in defining and justifying your methodology, you will need to refer both to what you

have done in your study and to what previous studies on similar topics have done. It’s a

common misconception that the methodology chapter should not contain literature references. It should! While in the literature review you use references to previous work to motivate your

research questions, in the methodology chapter you use references to motivate your choice of methods in addressing them.

8.   Results

Your analysis results should take up at least one dedicated chapter. Your aim in this part of your

dissertation is to inform the reader of your main findings. You should try to do this as clearly and systematically as possible. Keep in mind that the reader is not as familiar with your

research as you are, so the simpler you can make things for the reader, the better. This means you should devote a good amount of time to thinking about how to layout your findings using tables or graphs, which representative data extracts or examples to focus on, and so on.

Generally, results chapters do not contain lengthy discussion of the implications of the research findings: this should go in aseparate, subsequent chapter.  However, they should be more than just series of tables or graphs, or unconnected analyses of data, or lists of bullet points: there

should be enough text to remind the reader what you investigated and why, and to make it clear that there is a logical progression in your description of what you found.

If you are doing inferential statistics, find out the customary way of reporting the tests you run, and mix up descriptive and inferential statistics in your discussion: describing a pattern in your   data and confirming right away whether it is statistically significant or not is much better than    describing the pattern and then leaving the reader guessing for another page or two as to its

significance.

9.  Discussion

After describing the results of your measurements, counts or other types of analysis, you need to explain what answers they provide to your research questions; whether they confirm your   hypotheses; and what the wider implications of your findings are. This is generally done in a

dedicated chapter, although for some qualitative studies ‘results’ and ‘discussion’ cannot easily be separated.

It’sa good idea to start a separate discussion chapter with a return to your research questions,  and a brief summary of the findings you have discussed in detail in the preceding chapter. After

this, work your way through your research questions and findings systematically, and address questions such as:

●   Are the answers you have found to your research questions expected or unexpected?

●   Do the answers confirm or disconfirm findings in other literature?

●   Do the answers strengthen or challenge any theoretical ideas put forward in related literature?

●   If your findings are unexpected, or they disconfirm findings in other literature, can you offer an account of why they are the way they are (assuming for the sake of argument  that your methods have been sound)?

●   If your findings challenge existing theoretical ideas, can you offer suggestions as to how they can be accommodated in relevant theoretical frameworks?

Ideally, your discussion chapter revisits all major sources you have cited in your literature

review; this is to show the reader that your findings contribute to the body of work you have

taken as a starting point for your study. As a general rule of thumb, it’sa bad idea to devote a substantial part of your literature review to work that you then leave aside entirely in your

discussion: this generally means that the work is not relevant enough to your own study to

deserve so much attention in the literature review – or that it’s too relevant for you to ignore it in your interpretation of your results.

On the other hand, it is not necessarily a bad idea to introduce references in your discussion

that do not feature in your literature review, in particular in accounting for unexpected findings or in exploring the wider implications of your findings. However, if in interpreting your results

you come across literature references that substantially change your perspective on your study, it is worth consider whether you can accommodate them in your literature review, to return to  in your discussion.

10.Conclusion

After discussing the significance and implications of your findings in detail, it makes sense to close the dissertation with a brief summary of the main points you want the reader to

remember. This can be done in a final section of the discussion chapter (making this a

‘discussion and conclusion’ chapter), or in a separate chapter. The latter will be short, mirroring the introduction.

It’sa good idea to accompany the reiteration of your main findings with a brief evaluation of your study, and any suggestions for future research. Questions to consider here include:

●   Do your findings or their interpretation generate any new hypotheses that could be tested in a follow-up study?

●   Does your dissertation open up any other avenues for further investigation?

●   Does your study have any obvious limitations?

●   If you had the opportunity to do your study again, is there anything you would do differently?

Addressing these questions constructively – that is, by doing more than just pointing out that

you didn’t have a lot of time and you would have liked to have had more participants or data –   demonstrates critical engagement with the process of doing research. If your interpretation of    your findings suggests to you that aspects of your research design have been flawed, but there   is no time to rectify things and do the study again, then discussing the flaws explicitly at the end of your dissertation is much better than simply hoping the reader will not think of them.

11.References

Your dissertation should contain a complete list of references. Every source that you cite in

your dissertation should be listed in the references. No source that you do not cite should be   listed: what is required is a list of references, not a bibliography. All in-text citations and items listed as references must be formatted using Harvard conventions. The Skills@Library website contains very clear guidance on what this entails, so there is no excuse for not following the     rules in this area. Also make sure that you understand what the University understands by

‘ plagiarism’, and that you have time to proof-read your dissertation for referencing errors.

12.Appendices

Finally, depending on your research topic and design, it may be useful – or even necessary – to give the reader access to some of the materials you have used in or created for the purpose of  your research project. If these take up more than a paragraph or two, it makes sense not to

include them in the main text, but present them instead as an appendix or multiple appendices to your dissertation, following the reference list. Some common examples:

●   if the research involves participants who were asked to fill in a consent form – a copy of the blank form

●   if the research is based around a survey – a copy of the survey as distributed to the respondents