It’s important that your dissertation topic is relevant, as relevance demonstrates that your study is useful.
If the topic is not relevant, it has no value. But for whom must it actually be relevant?
Continue reading: Relevance of your dissertation topic
An abstract is a brief yet thorough summary of your research. Its purpose is to provide readers with a clear overview of what you have investigated and your corresponding conclusions.
Continue reading: Example of a dissertation abstract
“Should I put punctuation after quotation marks?” The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no. Three rules are described below. If you are using the APA style, make sure you always follow rule 2.
Continue reading: Punctuation in citations
English has two types of articles: definite (the) and indefinite (a/an). You can improve the articles that appear in your dissertation by:
Continue reading: Definite and indefinite articles (the/a/an)
When you are writing a dissertation, thesis or research paper, many words and phrases that are acceptable in conversations or informal writing are considered inappropriate in academic writing.
You should try to avoid expressions that are too informal, unsophisticated, vague, exaggerated, or subjective, as well as those that are generally unnecessary or incorrect.
Bear in mind, however, that these guidelines do not apply to text you are directly quoting from your sources (including interviews).
Continue reading: Taboo words in academic writing
Hyphens have many functions, but their main role is to link words (or parts of words). They most commonly appear with compound adjectives, phrasal verbs being used as nouns, and after some prefixes.
Continue reading: Hyphens (-)
There are three main options for capitalizing chapter and section headings within your dissertation: capitalizing all significant words, capitalizing only the first word, and a combination of the two.
Continue reading: Capitalization in titles and headings
Concise writing presents ideas clearly and does not use more words than are truly necessary. Conciseness is an important characteristic of academic writing, especially given how complex the subject matter frequently is.
Two of the biggest enemies of concise writing are inflated phrases and redundancies. It’s easy to think that using more complicated-sounding phrases will give your text a more academic feel, but mostly it just makes it harder to follow.
Using the below strategies will make your writing not only tighter, but also more effective.
Continue reading: How to write more concisely
During your writing, you will sometimes encounter passages where you end up repeating yourself quite frequently. Presenting a lot of information in the same way is often the result of not being armed with synonyms or alternative ways to phrase things.
This frequently happens in the introduction section, where you are expected to present the structure (or outline) of your dissertation. Indeed, there are not that many different ways to state what is included in Chapter 2, or are there?
Continue reading: Tips for writing an overview of your dissertation
The theoretical framework defines the key concepts in your research, proposes relations between them, and discusses relevant theories based on a literature review.
A strong theoretical framework gives your research direction, allowing you to convincingly interpret, explain and generalize from your findings.
Continue reading: Sample theoretical framework of a dissertation