Month: February 2010

Thesis Writing Guides

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Student often thinks that writing a thesis is complicated.  They seem to think of thesis writing as some special talent given only to those favored by heaven and they believe they are not one of those. Fortunately, that is not necessarily true.  The good news is thesis writing can be learned, just like how your baby brothers and sisters learned to walk or remember how you learned to bike.  All you have to do is follow some simple steps and guides in thesis writing.

First you should choose a topic that is not broad and interesting to you.  You need t seek the help of a thesis advisor.  Your thesis advisor will know if the scope of your project is too broad or too narrow.  Once the topic is selected, large task can be broken into many small ones.

Second, once the topic is broken down into smaller sections. Consider each section as its own separate project.  Treat each section as a regular research paper.  As a graduate student, you already wrote many papers.  In this way, it will be much easier to change the paper so that they all work together as a cohesive unit.

Third but not the least is managing your time effectively.  Thesis deadline is already given ahead of time to make sure that the project is finished on time so it is necessary to create a schedule.  Allocate each section a certain amount of time and make sure to complete the section within the given period.  Before starting the next section, make sure to have time between projected completion and the actual due date to fix errors.  If you have finished each section according to the schedule, there should be no worry finishing your thesis and nothing can be complicated.

Writing the First Draft

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After having carefully selected and limited your topic, and determined your purpose, audience, language, tone and point of view, your next step is the writing of a first or preliminary draft.

Write this draft rather quickly, without pausing or stopping over details so as not to allow anything to interrupt your thought flow.  Put down everything you know about your topic and write as quickly as you can even if you are not sure of what to say.  Do not try to write and edit at the same time.  The important thing is that you first get all your thoughts down on paper. During draft writing, forget about the spelling grammar and other issues instead focus on any idea that may later be incorporated with the final draft. It is a mental process that takes place before put it on writing.

Writing of the draft is the second stage in the process of writing.  This tentative or first draft will by no means be a final one.  First draft will be the basis of your writing.  It is important to write a draft before writing the final copy of your writing because this will allow you do editing and revising as well as catching any mistakes you might not have caught if only writing a one copy.

Selecting Point of View

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Point of view is the position from which a writer looks at his subject.  While pertaining specifically to description, point of view is nonetheless necessary in all writing in order to stay within a context that will insure unity in the paragraph or essay. A spectator sport, for example, could be written from your point of view as a rabid fan; but it could also be written from the viewpoint of a game official, a reporter, or a player’s girlfriend.  You may want to tell us about a trip you took during the holidays or that lovely beach outing you had last summer.  Decide if you want to tell us about it in the present or in the past tense, in the first person or in the second.

Your works as a writer is to establish a point of view early on and to remain in that point of view without unnecessary shifting of tense, number, or person.  Any shift will result in jolting your readers or at the very least, will distract or confuse them.  It is important to have a point of view in your writing to establish order and unity of thoughts.

Know your Writing Purpose and Audience

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The writing purpose of the writer should communicate thoughts and feelings with conviction and enthusiasm and provides the overall design that is to govern what the writer has set out to do.

For example, you want to write about pollution.  Why do you want to write about it?  Do you want to inform the reader of some important but little known facts concerning pollution?  Do you want to describe what the city looks like under the smog?  Maybe you want to communicate or share some strong feelings about the dangers posed by excessive pollution.  Knowing why you want to write about a subject will help you to focus and will lead you to organize the data to suit that purpose.

When you sit down to write, ask yourself: who am I addressing?  Who do I want to reach?  It is good to remember that all writing must be directed to a specific audience, for instance, your teacher, a hobby club, a magazine or newspaper editor, or a group of students like yourself  Addressing a specific group of readers will give your writing an immediacy that will catch and hold their interest.

Topic Restricting

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If you have a topic, be sure to learn how to restrict your topic.  Your topic should be specific.  If you have broad topic, you will have to cut it down to manageable proportions. Always limit your topic into specific one.

For example your topic is all about traffic.  It is a huge problem and you will not want to deal with the problem entirely.  Instead, choose the part of the problem that you can write about with some confidence.  All topics can be viewed from different angles and this one, too, can be subdivided into several minor aspects, any one of which can become a topic for a paragraph.  Like for example: (1) describe what streets looks like at peak hours; (2) show how a traffic jam forms at an intersections; (3) focus on possible causes of the problem on the street in front of your school and;  (4) narrate an incident caused by driver behavior; and so on.

If you have topic about television shows, you can cut it into several topics such as noontime shows, noontime shows on Channel 5 or Sunday noontime shows on channel 2.

Journal Writing as Topic Generating Device

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Let us define what is journal; it is a written record of your thoughts over an indefinite period of time.  To keep journal, you must write as often as you can, paragraph a day, at the very least, schedule journal writing at about the same time everyday, preferably just before getting into bed, so that it becomes a habit and finally, keep all entries in a notebook rather than on loose sheets in order to avoid losing them.

Don’t waste your time by recording your daily activities as if you were writing a diary.  The diary is a record of your daily events while journal is a record of your response to life experiences and events. Journal is use to record thought and ideas such as think of some interesting point brought up in History or Theology or other classes; comment on your other subjects in school; describe your professors and your friends.

Journal writing is a technique is can be used as topic generating devices because it can be used to generate ideas for your paragraphs and later on, for longer compositions.  It can be helpful at any point during the writing process, whether you are writing a paragraph or essay.