0.2 Thesis overview

What is a thesis? what should be in it?

The word “thesis” has two meanings, both of which are applicable to your writing. First, the word refers to either a Master’s Thesis or a PhD Thesis (dissertation). Additionally, the word “thesis” signals the fact that your thesis must be a work of persuasive argumentation. You first make a statement defining the focus of your research (the problem/question/issue that needed to be solved) and signal your results. Then, through evidence and reasoning, you persuade your committee of the validity of your research.

Every thesis, either Master’s or PhD, must tell a compelling and exciting story about important original research. In the process of telling that story, you must answer, clearly and precisely, the following key questions:

• What problem/question/issue does your thesis focus on?
• Why is it important ?
• How does your work fit into the intellectual context of your field ?
• What experimental design / methods did you use? Why did you choose those methods? What difficulties did you encounter along the way? How did you solve (or not) those difficulties?
• What are your research results ? How do they differ from what you had expected or from what had previously been done by others? What evidence do you have to support those results? What conclusions did you reach?
• What, specifically, is your unique contribution ?
• What are some possible applications , either practical or theoretical, of your findings? What future work does your thesis suggest?

In sum, you are writing a fascinating work of non-fiction, complete with beginning, middle, and end. Your readers should be drawn smoothly from one essential page to the next. You must tell

• what you did
• why you did it
• how you did it
• with what results, and
• why we should care (so what).

In other words, you must explain your work to your reader. If you write to the person on your committee who is least familiar with your work, that will help you decide the level of detail and explanation needed. My experience says that most graduate students need to explain more fully. Think back to when you weren’t so familiar with the subject. Leave no gaps in your argument; omit no essential step in your thinking. Include what didn’t work as well as what did work. Get comments from someone who can evaluate the technical content and from someone not so familiar with your work.

If you are incorporating published papers into your thesis, at minimum they need to be tied together and explained in an overarching Introduction and then summarized in a final chapter. Ideally, however, you will expand a published paper so that you can go into greater detail on answering the Seven Key Questions. Published papers by necessity are short; a thesis gives you the opportunity to give greater depth to your explanations and examples. It can be exciting to talk in detail about work that has been so absorbing and important to you.