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52 | Chapter 4: The ALM Thesis Chapter 4 The ALM Thesis After the data have been collected and analyzed, the investigator is at last ready to write the thesis. William James has some excellent advice: “Draft in haste; revise at leisure” (1890). Prepare a broad first effort as quickly and efficiently as possible, with the understanding that successful writing inevitably requires multiple revisions. Style of the Thesis Any successful thesis will appear in a consistent and recognizable style. The reasons are obvious. Interested readers will be able to examine it efficiently and will be stimulated to learn more about the subject. Also, they will be able to find the resources, allowing them to think for themselves about these materials. Content and Organization At the end of the research process, the investigator is usually confronted with a wealth of information. The most difficult and often the most satisfying part of the process is about to begin or to begin anew: the organization of these materials. Many writers want to use almost all these materials in the first draft of the thesis, and many thesis directors agree that this approach is reasonable. Including as much as possible in the first draft allows the writer to organize all the material in some preliminary way. Further, these data are less likely to be lost if they are included in a draft. Each piece of research material, of course, should be documented completely when it first appears. Beginning researchers should realize that they probably will not use all the information they have accumulated. As draft succeeds draft, materials will be deleted, rearranged, or added—a normal part of any writing process. It is useful, however, to keep copies of earlier drafts, for they then can be compared and information in them retrieved easily. You might consider keeping drafts as separate documents or files so that you can subsequently “cut and paste” from one draft to another. Throughout the process—from the moment you begin to consider a research problem to the time of the first draft of a thesis—some rough organizational scheme guides both the research and the writing. As the work continues, this scheme inevitably becomes more coherent, more logical, more orderly. The data, interesting in isolation, only become fully significant when their arrangement reveals something about the hypothesis that prompted the research initially. Henry David Thoreau’s wry comment distinguishing between the two is worth recording: “Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth” (1842). A research advisor of a most ambitious thesis project remarked: “The main weakness of the piece is that it lacks a general framework.” This framework, he emphasized, would have facilitated comparisons among various data and perspectives. Many writers feel that the preparation of an outline is of great help. Often they prepare an outline before they begin to write, and they use it as a way of keeping track of their use of research data. In fact, your thesis director may first wish to see an outline of the entire thesis, as you envision it, before you begin to submit whole chapters. An outline can be used in another way. After a first draft, many writers make an outline based strictly on the thesis itself. This outline is often a sentence outline—a one-sentence summary of each paragraph. It helps the writer recognize a paragraph that is too long, too full of information, or out of place. If it is difficult or impossible to summarize a paragraph in one sentence, divide the material into two or more paragraphs. In addition, the sentence outline helps the writer gain a quick overview of the entire thesis. Material that appears in several A Guide to the ALM Thesis
Chapter 4: The ALM Thesis | 53 places is easily identified and consolidated. Work to strengthen your argument and to sharpen your introduction and conclusion. The organization of a thesis, as revealed through the outline, is always subject to revision. Mechanics of Writing Once the first drafts have been completed, the writer can turn to the mechanical details of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and to the more subtle questions of prose style. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, the MLA’s Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing by Claire Kehrwald Cook, and the APA publications are useful here. These and other basic guides to writing style are listed in the appendix at the back of this Guide. Students should carefully review the rules governing the use of basic marks of punctuation, the more specialized elements such as hyphens, italics, parentheses, brackets, and ellipses, and the mechanics of long and short quotations from poetry, prose, and drama. As with the research proposal, good English is essential in the final thesis. Errors in language, spelling, or usage quickly destroy a reader’s confidence. The writer is urged to check these elements of style meticulously at all times. Theses have been rejected in the past in part because their authors clearly had not achieved an appropriate standard of grammatical and spelling accuracy. It is as much your responsibility to write carefully as to research accurately. Non-native English speakers should be especially careful in crafting their written work, and consider having their drafts reviewed by a native speaker if they feel the need for some assistance. Most word processors now have spell-checks and grammar-checks that can aid writers in achieving correctness in their work. Candidates are also cautioned to use nondiscriminatory, nonsexist language in their writing (Appendix 4, “Nonsexist Language”). Periodicals in the field can be efficient guides for content, organization, and style. The ALM candidate is encouraged to consult these journals in the preparation of the final thesis and to discuss these matters with the thesis director. The tone or style in a professional publication, however, which derives from certain assumptions about the reader, is not necessarily appropriate for the ALM thesis. A student intending to submit the thesis for publication in a professional journal may, with the permission of the research advisor and thesis director, prepare the thesis in a particular journal style. In this case, on an extra page preceding all front matter including the title page, the following should be stated and presented as shown here: The style and format of this thesis follow the standards in Title of Journal, to which this work is being submitted for publication. In no event may a thesis be presented for the ALM degree that has already been published or submitted toward any degree, either at Harvard or elsewhere, in substantially the same form and content. Citations, Notes, and Bibliography As stated in the previous chapter, there are three different and distinct methods for citations, notes, and bibliography that may be used in the ALM thesis, depending on the candidate’s field. All candidates must use one or the other in writing both the research proposal and the final thesis. In Chapter 3 we referred to them as the American Psychological Association (APA) method, the Modern Language Association (MLA) method, and the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) method. Candidates in the biological and behavioral sciences use the APA method. Those in all fields of the humanities should use the MLA method. Candidates in the fields of A Guide to the ALM Thesis
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