Writing your thesis
Writing your thesis
This writing guide is intended to help final year and Masters students writing dissertations, and research students writing doctoral theses. There are five sections plus a bibliography:
- Elements of style. This section looks at three techniques for retaining the reader’s interest: writing clearly and accurately, choosing words carefully and using terms consistently.
- Conventions. The conventions covered in this section are punctuation, voice, spelling, and the use of abbreviations, acronyms and numbers.
- Structure. An outline structure is described covering: preliminary information, text and end matters.
- Presentation. Aspects of presentation are considered as follows: binding, fonts, page numbers, paper & margins, quotations, sections & subsections, spacing and tables & figures.
- Making references. This section looks at the reasons for making references, three referencing styles (Harvard, APA and MLA), and how to check references. It also introduces RefWorks software.
- Bibliography. The bibliography includes not only documents cited in the text, but also books for further reading.
To access the sections, through the links below, you will need to use the Adobe Reader software. This software is available free of charge by clicking on the below image. If you would like the information in an alternative format, please contact us by e-mail.
Further Information
There are links in the PDF documents as follows:
Section 3: Structure
Research student handbook
Index to Theses database
Library's web page for Alerting Services
Section 4: Presentation
Research student handbook
Local binding services
Section 5: Making references
Library's web page on Citing References
Library's introductory web page for RefWorks
