How To Finish Your Master's Thesis Successfully: 8 Great Tips

The thesis truly marks a transition from student to scholar but of course this is very stressful. When you embark on this big project you have to ask yourself what your future is going to entail.

1. When you are writing your dissertation you must define any technical terms you use either by a previously published definition or a reference. Each new term that you include should be used in only one way throughout your dissertation. The easiest way for you to avoid a long series of definitions within your text is to state early on that the terminology used throughout your dissertation follows the definition set out by, and at this point you should enter into the citation. Your introductory chapter can provide informal definitions of any terms which might later be defined in a more precise fashion.
2. Do not use words like bad or good. These were for more to moral judgments but in terms of your dissertation you want to use words such as incorrect or correct because you are referring to factual correctness or errors and not qualitative judgments.
3. You want to avoid terms such as true. The reason for this is similar to the reason that you want to avoid words like good or bad. It brings off a judge mental moral ideology one which is not appropriate for a dissertation.
4. You want to avoid words such as ideal solutions, because this means that you are making a judgment and that your morality knows what solution is ideal for everyone even though they might have different morality.
5. You want to avoid words such as perfect because nothing really is and you want to avoid vague and colloquial phrases.
6. It is best that you avoid first-person when writing a formal dissertation such that you should replace phrases such as I will describe with self-referencing such as section 1 describes.
7. When you are writing your dissertation make sure that you write in present tense.
8. The dissertation needs to use proper grammar and logic. It should focus on the results that were obtained and less on the circumstances in which the results were obtained. You want to reference existing work and make sure that you can differentiate between knowledge and data. The term knowledge implies that any facts you have been analyzed already from other experiments in order to produce useful information but facts themselves which are results of an experiment are referred to as data.