How-to-Write-a-Better-Thesis

Dissemination Plans
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• Primary research problem.
• Advanced hypothesis and background.
• Pilot study.
• Outcomes of the central study.
• Further directions based on the central study.
• Spin-offs for other areas.
Notice that you could write the material in the first point almost at the beginning of
a PhD, and material in the second and third points long before the thesis is finished.
Writing this material early will help to shape your thinking.
This is not to say that the structure above will be the same in every discipline—it
most certainly won’t be. In a technical discipline, it might be that the challenges
are an increasingly detailed examination of a single problem; or the outcomes of a
series of experiments that offer different forms of evidence about a single hypothesis;
or a series of linked pieces of work that together establish a broader result. The
point here is that you should be able to formulate some sort of dissemination plan,
to be refined as your work progresses, opportunities present themselves, obstacles
are encountered, and so on. This planning should closely involve your supervisor;
not only will she or he have a broader perspective (think of Dave’s naïve behaviour
noted earlier), but will be able to introduce you to opportunities you were not
aware of, including not just publishing venues but funding for student exchanges
and internships.
In your dissemination plan, the first challenge is probably a seminar presentation
or short paper that could be written within the first 9 to 12 months of your candidacy.
Most departments will require you to hold your first research seminar within
this period. Some students develop a couple of variations of a standard presentation
about their work—one version for other people in their discipline, another for a
more general academic audience. Then, if they get invited to present at short notice,
they have something ready. I think the discipline of maintaining such a seminar is a
good one that every student should consider.
After your first publication, consider writing another paper every 6 months or so,
and integrate the feedback from responses to these papers into your thinking about
your project. As you read this you may be thinking, ‘but I have a project to do, and
very limited time to do it in. I don’t have time to waste on writing papers’. Not so:
I guarantee that every hour spent on writing papers will make your thesis easier to
write, and the act of trying to get a perspective on your own work instead of being
continually immersed in it will greatly improve the quality of your thesis.
In the papers that are written early in your PhD, you should focus on only one
problem (or theme) at a time, and avoid taking on the ‘big picture’; leave that for
the last paper you write on your thesis topic. In general, you should prepare such
papers with your supervisor as co-author, so discuss your ideas for a paper with her
or him, and develop a plan. This will probably consist of developing a list of section
headings together, with you writing a draft to the agreed structure. Your supervisor
should then criticize the draft as any co-author would, but in addition you can expect
to get some guidance about paper writing.