Thesis and Dissertation

A dissertation or thesis is the longest single piece of writing most students will produce during their degree, and the work that determines the final classification or postgraduate offer for many of them. The course treats it as a project-management problem as much as an academic one. It starts with the proposal — the small piece of writing that determines whether the project is well-shaped enough to succeed — and then turns to the supervisor relationship, which is the single most underrated variable in dissertation outcomes. The honest framing on supervisors: they are doing this on top of their actual workload, so the students who get the most useful feedback are the ones who send specific, drafted-not-conceptual questions on a predictable schedule. The course covers chapter-level drafting (write a complete bad version of each chapter before editing any of them), the practical distinction between editing and rewriting (editing fixes sentences, rewriting moves arguments — most undergraduate work needs both, in that order), version control for documents (Google Docs revision history, or git for the more ambitious, both better than Final_v7.docx), and the realistic timeline for a 10,000- to 15,000-word undergraduate dissertation: roughly 12 weeks of consistent work, broken into proposal (week 1–2), literature and methodology drafting (weeks 3–6), main analysis or argument (weeks 7–10), and editing and submission (weeks 11–12). Postgraduate theses are longer and require a different scheduling approach covered in the closing section.

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