Your doctoral thesis represents the culmination of five or more years of hard work, research and learning. Doctoral students usually start their theses in their fourth year of study, and have one to two years to write it. The product of your work and research should reflect this time period. Doctoral theses are ground-breaking, innovative pieces of work; you should not write on a subject that hundreds of others have written about before you.
Instructions
1. Look at the best doctoral theses produced within the past couple of years. Examine papers published in major journals in your field to give yourself an idea of the caliber of work you should aim toward when writing your own thesis.
2. Consult with the adviser you are assigned while writing your doctoral thesis, and read his thesis. Your adviser is someone in your field who can provide valuable insights as to what subject matter you should cover.
3. Develop your thesis. A doctoral thesis must be argumentative, well thought out, and erudite. It must also be relatively unique, while not being obscure; you need to access a wealth of knowledge relating to your thesis, to establish evidence and support your argument.
4. Read as much as you can about the subject you cover in your doctoral thesis. Consulting academic and professional journals, texts and other publications, as well as online databases, provides sources to cite within your paper.
5. Draft an annotated bibliography; this allows you to have all your sources close at hand when you outline and draft your thesis. Annotated bibliographies contain short blurbs about the content of the particular source, so you can determine which of the many texts you have read are most important to your paper.
6. Create a basic outline for your paper. Write out your full thesis at the beginning, and decide how you want to organize it. Include approximately where in the thesis you want to cite your primary and secondary sources.
7. Write the first draft of your doctoral thesis. Do not worry about perfection in your first several drafts; focus on getting your ideas across and establishing the strongest possible argument and evidence for the thesis. Cite your sources in your paper.
8. Show your first draft to your adviser; she can let you know if you are headed in the right direction, and can help you hone your thesis and arguments. Consulting with your adviser regularly is vital to writing a great doctoral thesis.
9. Continue writing, researching and perfecting your thesis in the months that follow. The last year or so of doctoral study is dedicated largely to the preparation of this thesis for publication. Your thesis is an academic paper whose purpose is to be published in a recognized journal, so keep that in mind as you write it.
10. Proof-read, edit and tweak your final draft. When it comes time to submit the thesis for review, you want to feel as satisfied as you can with what you produced. The next step in the process is to defend your thesis, so begin preparing accordingly.
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