Use the resources available to you

• COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR SUPERVISOR - s/he is there to support you in your resarch; discuss your research with them, send them drafts for comment
  • Your supervisor is there to support you. But s/he is also there to support other students, and has his/her own work to do - please do not leave everything to the last minute and expect your supervisor to be able to devote large chunks of time to your work.
  • This is particularly true of waiting until August to send anything to your supervisor. Academics go on holiday, as well, and often during the summer!
  • Discuss with your supervisor how to work with them. Does s/he want to see bits of writing as you do them, or does s/he prefer to wait for whole chapters?
• There are links at the side of this page; use them, and compile your own list
• The Graduate Studies handbook has a great deal of information about how to set out the dissertation/project
• The Little book of academic writing is very useful - you can find it through the link at the right - helpful resources
• Talk to other students - no one else understands what you are doing as well as another MA student!
• Learn how to use Word effectively - creating styles, tables of contents, etc., will save you time.
• Learn to use EndNote or EndNote web; or learn to use the citation manager embedded in the newest version of Word
• Configure Google Scholar to show you what is available to you as a student at Warwick (this saves you time looking for articles to which you do not have electronic access)
• Keep clear lists of what you have read, what you need to read (the second list is always longer than the first!), what leads you need to follow
• Spend time getting to know the WIE webpages - there is a lot of useful information there for you but you need to be proactive to find what you need

Writing it all up

• Lead the reader through your work - think of it as leaving a bread crumb trail for the reader (or, if you are more classically minded, consider yourself Ariadne, and the reader, Theseus. You don't want to leave him in there with the Minotaur and no way to get out, do you?).
  • Use subheadings where you can - this lets the reader know what's going on, where she is in your dissertation, what you're talking about now, and why
  • Seriously consider reporting data THEN discussing it - look at journal articles, many of them have a data analysis section THEN a discussion section. This keeps things clear for the reader
  • Beware of universals - "all", "every" - these words are traps, and unless you can prove them, will cause you problems. "All of the respondents" is fine, because you can prove that they all did/said whatever it is you are claiming. "All teachers know..." is not fine - you can't prove that statement.
  • Be clear about what you are reporting. If you have asked people's opinions, or their reports of action - you are not reporting on those actions, you are reporting people's perceptions of those actions. As an example, if I ask 100 people how often they go to the supermarket and find that 50 of them say they go every day, I should not report: 50% of people shop every day, but rather, 50% of people REPORT shopping every day. The difference between the two is the difference between accuracy and inaccuracy, between reliable data and unreliable interpretation. Be clear.
  • Be very careful, as well, of statements as of fact; ensure these are supported from the literature wherever possible. Something may be obvious to you - "Assesment for Learning is useful" - but it may not be obvious to the reader. And in academic work, you need to show that such statements have the weight of the field behind them.
    • "The literature" in general means peer reviewed journals; books are also acceptable (particularly for methodology) but peer reviewed journals are better. Try to avoid supporting claims from other sources, such as websites, newspapers, etc. These can be used VERY SPARINGLY, but they will not lend weight to your arguments.
    • Timing counts. If you are using literature that is older than you are, seriously consider why you are using it. Is it seminal? Was it the first, greatest study of X? Fine - but back it up with more recent citations. Most of the literature you're citing should be from this century - if it is not, there's a real problem brewing. If you can only find older works, try putting their titles into Google Scholar, and clicking on the "cited by" that appears below. (If you are only citing works that are older than I am, go back to the drawing board!).
    • If you are using a peer reviewed article or research report, these get cited in themselves. Even if you have downloaded them from the web, they are not "web resources" - they are journal articles and/or research reports. Do Parents Know They Matter is a research report - even if you find it by clicking through and downloading it from the web.
    • Use the original source if at all possible. Yes, you can cite Jones as cited in Smith - but it's much better to go off and spend the time to find the original Jones article or book. If you must use one author as cited by another look up how to do this in Harvard and it it properly
  • Avoid journalistic language. Avoid the language of "feeling" - you are not trying to say what you felt, but what you *found*. See recommendation on this below...
  • Look at the Study Skills Toolkit - see the link to the right.
  • Correlation is not causation - be very careful about any claims of causation.
  • If you don't understand precisely what a term means, don't use it. If you've had to look it up, include a definition of the term in your writing.
• Put things in the right section
  • Literature goes in the literature review - or in the methodology section
    • Don't introduce new literature after these sections
    • If you need new literature to explain your findings, go back and re-write the literature review, adding the new literature there
    • The literature review is for a review OF THE LITERATURE. If you want or need it to be more than this (in my own doctoral work, the literature review was bound up with the conceptual analysis), then you must say so and be clear that this is what you are doing. For most MA work, the literature review should stand on its own, without interference from what you plan to do, or your own experience. Those belong in other sections.
  • The methodology section is there to justify your choices of methodology and tools
    • This means that you justify - from the academic literature - why you have done what you have done. Show that interviews were the right choice for this project; prove (from the literature) that quantitative methods are legitimate for educational research....
  • Recommendations go at the END of your work - not in the middle of your data analysis (no matter how tempting it is to put them there). Write a note to yourself, put a comment down the side of the writing you're doing at the moment, or whatever you need to remind yourself to come back to them
  • Be clear why you have included something. Don't add every bit of knowledge you have about the subject - there will inevitably be things that you can't include. It is far more important to have a clear narrative than it is to work in every little bit of reading you've done.
• Be specific
  • Give numbers, dates, times
  • In relation to reported research, consider giving sample sizes, when the research took place, what measures were used, what was found. This lends far more weight to your argument than saying, "Smith found..."
    • Show the reader why you are giving weight to specific studies - and why they should do so, as well
  • In relation to your own work, be clear - give details of numbers of respondents; don't say, "many X said Y", rather, report that, "45% of X respondents said..."
• PROOFREAD
  • For coherence - this needs to make sense to someone who is not nearly as involved in the subject as you are.
  • For grammar - there is an old example, "Let's eat, Grandma!" does NOT mean the same thing as, "Let's eat Grandma!"
    • Make sure you have used apostrophes correctly
    • Find out the difference between practice and practise, between advice and advise, between principal and principle (your principal can have principles...)
    • Ensure you have used punctuation correctly; find out the difference between ; and :, and know when to use each of them
    • Spell things out the first time you use them: AfA could mean assessment for learning or acheivement for all; let the reader know which one you mean
  • For consistency - if you say Not X in the introduction, make sure that you don't say X in the conclusion, unless you've shown why and how you have changed your mind
  • For citations (use the Harvard system AT ALL TIMES)
  • The spell checker is not always right. Illicit is a perfectly acceptable word - but if you mistype elicit badly enough, and you don't check your spell checker's suggestions, you may find that you are writing about having ilicit data, rather than having elicited data.... Look at this page for more information on such errors.
  • For complete sentences. "And so it is" is not a complete sentence.
  • For tense. Please keep to one tense, at least per section. If your methodology section begins with saying what you WILL do, then don't change to talking about what you HAVE done.
  • For the correct use of capital letters. Don't use capital letters to emphasise points. Don't use them for School, Staff, Teaching and Learning - unless you are quoting "The School Improvement Plan" or something like. When used as ordinary nouns in a sentence, "teaching and learning in schools will be improved if staff do this", there is no need to capitalise these words.
  • For accuracy. If you are using two sources, one from 2001 and one from 2004, it doesn't make sense to say that Jones (2001) validates the work of Smith (2004) - time is, in general, linear, and Jones could not possibly have known about Smith's work. Yes, it's a small point, but again, it's a simple one to deal with...
  • Use the right form. If there is a form for esubmission, please use it!
  • Yes - many of these are very, very pedantic points. Academic writing requires clarity that comes, at least in part, from such pedanticness. Your work will lose impact if any of these are neglected.
• Tone
  • Take your lead from the tone of all those academic articles you've been reading.
  • Avoid using exclamation marks unless reporting interviews
  • Avoid using "you" as a means of direct address
  • Avoid slang - children are children; they can be "kids" if you are quoting a respondent who used the word, otherwise they are children, young people, students, pupils....
  • Avoid a journalistic tone. Yes, this can mean that your work comes across as dry - even arid. However, that is much better than coming across as lightweight and journalistic!
  • Avoid the lanugage of feeling. "Feel" should be reserved for physical feelings, "I can feel my foot". Look at this link for more help with language.
  • Strive for simplicity in expression. Don't use convoluted sentence structure, if it can be avoided. Remember that the point of writing is communication with the reader.

Myths of writing a dissertation

• Timeline
  • It is a myth that dissertations are written in order, with the introduction writing first, then the lit review and so on. This is not the case. It may be partially the case, but you will need to revisit both after your data analysis. This isn't because you didn't do them properly in the first place - it's because you know more now, than you did then!
  • Because of this myth that we all share, dissertations are often written in the present tense. The past tense is perfectly acceptable. Either will do - what will NOT do is a mix of the two. Be consistent. Consistency is all.
• Voice
  • Time was, all academic writing was in the third person; "The author...". This is still highly acceptable - check with your supervisor. However, it is not strictly necessary and it's certainly permissable to say, "I". If you've conducted action research, it's almost a necessity.

Remember always the Central Research Question

At no time should your reader ever wonder, "What is this all about, then?", or, "Why is this here?"

Anyone reading your dissertation should be clear why you have undertaken this study, where and with whom, and what you hope to gain from it.

Be clear at the outset about what you hope to learn, and be clear at the end of the work about what you have learned.

Another way to answer that last, is to think, "How is the world different, now that I have done this research?"