50 Things To Think About When Writing A Thesis

Moving away from a traditional ‘one size fits all’ approach, this thesis guide encourages readers to find their own path to submission, demonstrating that the process of writing is as unique as the individual candidate. This book shows thesis writers how to embrace the individual nature of writing, bringing their own unique identities and skillsets to their thesis. Each idea is presented as one that has multiple solutions, depending on who the readers are and what they want to achieve. The book guides the reader on identifying their own ways of working, their own particular strengths, as well as their unique voice and how to use these as tools to navigate the process of writing and surviving the thesis. It also provides practical guidance on elements such as the literature review and methodology, considerations around language and how to deal with life after submission. Offering a unique perspective on the process and experience of completing a thesis, this book will be an essential companion for students completing a thesis at Honors, Master's or PhD level.

Expert writing advice from the editor of the Boston Globe best-seller, The Writer's Home Companion Dissertation writers need strong, practical advice, as well as someone to assure them that their struggles aren't unique. Joan Bolker, midwife to more than one hundred dissertations and co-founder of the Harvard Writing Center, offers invaluable suggestions for the graduate-student writer. Using positive reinforcement, she begins by reminding thesis writers that being able to devote themselves to a project that truly interests them can be a pleasurable adventure. She encourages them to pay close attention to their writing method in order to discover their individual work strategies that promote productivity; to stop feeling fearful that they may disappoint their advisors or family members; and to tailor their theses to their own writing style and personality needs. Using field-tested strategies she assists the student through the entire thesis-writing process, offering advice on choosing a topic and an advisor, on disciplining one's self to work at least fifteen minutes each day; setting short-term deadlines, on revising and defing the thesis, and on life and publication after the dissertation. Bolker makes writing the dissertation an enjoyable challenge.

Writing a doctoral thesis can be an arduous and confusing process. This book provides a clear framework for developing a sound structure for your thesis, using a simple approach to make it watertight, defensible and clear. Bottery and Wright draw on their extensive experience of supervising and examining numerous doctorates from an internationally diverse and multicultural student body both in the UK and overseas, and include examples of how successful theses have been made watertight along with exercises to enable readers to do the same thing to their own thesis. The authors demonstrate how the key to making a thesis watertight lies in selecting the central research question and the sub-research questions that together collectively answer this main one. If these questions are well formulated the thesis can be defended successfully against criticism on structural grounds – a major part of the battle. Including chapters on the viva process, strength-testing your thesis and essential preparation for writing up your research, this is the resource for anyone looking to produce a well-structured, watertight piece of research.

Consciousness is our gateway to experience: it enables us to recognize Van Gogh’s starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven’s Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine: philosophers have for centuries declared this mental entity so mysterious as to be impenetrable to science. In The Ravenous Brain, neuroscientist Daniel Bor departs sharply from this historical view, and builds on the latest research to propose a new model for how consciousness works. Bor argues that this brain-based faculty evolved as an accelerated knowledge gathering tool. Consciousness is effectively an idea factory—that choice mental space dedicated to innovation, a key component of which is the discovery of deep structures within the contents of our awareness. This model explains our brains’ ravenous appetite for information—and in particular, its constant search for patterns. Why, for instance, after all our physical needs have been met, do we recreationally solve crossword or Sudoku puzzles? Such behavior may appear biologically wasteful, but, according to Bor, this search for structure can yield immense evolutionary benefits—it led our ancestors to discover fire and farming, pushed modern society to forge ahead in science and technology, and guides each one of us to understand and control the world around us. But the sheer innovative power of human consciousness carries with it the heavy cost of mental fragility. Bor discusses the medical implications of his theory of consciousness, and what it means for the origins and treatment of psychiatric ailments, including attention-deficit disorder, schizophrenia, manic depression, and autism. All mental illnesses, he argues, can be reformulated as disorders of consciousness—a perspective that opens up new avenues of treatment for alleviating mental suffering. A controversial view of consciousness, The Ravenous Brain links cognition to creativity in an ingenious solution to one of science’s biggest mysteries.

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Are we all at the mercy of our brain chemistry? Do you think that the amygdala and the hippocampus are fantastical sea monsters? What can an MRI scan tell us? Could you explain to dinner-party guests why we don't giggle when we tickle ourselves?30-Second Brain is here to fill your mind with the science of exactly what's happening inside your head. Using no more than two pages, 300 words and an illustration, this is the quickest way to understand the wiring and function of the most complex and intricate mechanism in the human body. Discover how the networks of 90 billion nerve cells work together to produce perception, action, cognition and emotion. Explore how your brain defines your personality, and what it gets up to while you are asleep.Illustrated with mind-bending graphics and supported by biographies of pioneers in the field of neuroscience, it's the book to get your grey matter thinking about your grey matter.

In the last 15 to 20 years, writing centers have placed greater importance on tutor training, focusing on teaching tutors best practices in fostering student writers’ engagement and writing skills. Writing Center Talk over Time explores the importance of writing center talk and demonstrates the efficacy of tutor training. The book uses corpus-driven analysis and discourse analysis to examine the changes in writing center talk over time to provide a baseline understanding of the very heart of writing center work: the talk that unfolds between tutors and student writers. It is this talk that, at its best, motivates student writers to continue to improve their writing and scaffolds their learning and that makes tutors proud of the service that they provide. The methods and analysis of this study are intended to inform other researchers so that they may conduct further research into the efficacy of writing center talk.

Fully updated and packed with new material, the second edition of Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language is the ideal guide for non-native speaker students and their supervisors working on writing a thesis or dissertation in English. Considering the purposes of thesis and dissertation of writing alongside writer/reader relationships, this book uses accessible language and practical examples to discuss issues that are crucial to successful thesis and dissertation writing. This edition offers: Insights into the experience of being a doctoral writer, issues of writer identity, and writing with authority Typical language and discourse features of theses and dissertations Advice on the structure and organisation of key sections Suggestions for online resources which support writing Extracts from completed theses and dissertations Guidance on understanding examiner expectations Advice on publishing from a PhD Suitable for students from all disciplines, Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language is essential reading for non-native speaker students looking to complete a thesis or dissertation in English.