A different approach for outlining a dissertation

Category: Education

Writing a dissertation is a daunting task because not only you are trying to put entire or most of the data you have collected in the past 3–4 years but also you are trying to make it understandable to an unknown audience who can be from your field or an another field. I am not presenting you a ready-to-use template for a prize-winning, perfect dissertation. Taking into consideration a normal, regular graduate student life, writing a dissertation is basically cooking something up similar to this. That list looks simple, right? However, expanding those 7 items is not easy if you have no clue how to get started with writing and how to arrange your collected material. Because by the time your results start making sense to you, your dissertation submission date is few months away. Well, the only thing you should keep in mind is that you are supposed to write a sensible story. And believe me, you don’t have to read all classic books or follow your favorite Sci-Fi writer to write a sensible story. You might as well go through as many blogs as possible or in worst case may as well copy a ready-to-use dissertation outline; however, you will still face a problem of how much material and which references should go where in your dissertation because the amount of data you have collected in those 3–4 years is vast. So here is the simple rule—the major key to solve a complex problem is to break it down into small pieces, and then rearrange and inter-link those pieces to create a flow. Use any type of tool that you are comfortable with, pen/pencil and paper, board and marker, excel sheet (best option), or a word document, to make an editable detailed outline of your dissertation. It is a similar process that I had explained in an earlier post on Deciding your research subject thinking outside the box by staying within the limits of a box. Divide and rearrange First, create the most basic outline of your dissertation, which includes a list of all major sections you want to incorporate, something similar to that abovementioned comic strip. Start dividing each section into subsections that immediately come to your mind. For example, Introduction background why you chose this topic introduce terms such as proteins, mechanisms, or general facts, which you think people should first understand before getting into the actual topic and results literature review what has already been done until present what is unknown state you question or hypotheses relate the reviewed literature with your hypotheses to state the importance of your study explain why this question(s) is interesting to you Make sure that every time you create subsections, arrange and interlink them in the way you want your audience to understand your story. Now, consider each subsection as a major section and write down, as reminder notes, all major and minor topics that you want to address—similar to making a simple grocery shopping list of all the items so that you remember what you exactly want to buy when you reach the supermarket. This process has another advantage; you can sort out in-text citations right away and make a note next to the relevant topic (for this purpose, creating an excel sheet is the best option because this list can expand or shrink at any rate). Repeat this process for all subsections. Fill in the gaps Once you have created a detailed outline of your dissertation, go through it as many times as possible, consult your supervisor, and make sure you are not missing out any details. Now all you have to do is to expand those points into sentences and paragraphs, and the first draft of your dissertation is ready. Further edits and re-edits will give you the final draft. The reason behind making a comprehensive dissertation outline is to save confusion and possible frustration. In most cases, graduate students are left with less to very little time to write, finalize, and hand in their dissertations to the reviewing committee. With such detailed outline, all you are left with is expanding each subtopic by using all the listed major and minor points. Finally, running an in-built reference manager tool in Word for in-text citations must always be the last task. Good luck with your writing!