How-to-Write-a-Better-Thesis

34 3 Mechanics of Writing
might give a sample of a completed questionnaire (in this case the main text would
describe how the researcher constructed and administered the questionnaire, and
would summarize the results obtained).
How do you decide what you should include in the main text, and what you
should relegate to appendices? In most universities PhD candidates are given a word
limit of 100,000 words, exclusive of appendices. Students often find that they have
exceeded this limit, and a typical reaction is, ‘Well, I’ll have to put something in an
appendix then’. Although this sounds a bit arbitrary, it does make sense. The university
is saying that if your argument takes more than a hundred thousand words, it is
too diffuse, and probably you have included material that you should put into appendices.
But what should go? The test is simple: any material that would distract the
reader from the development of the argument in the main text should not be there,
no matter how interesting it is, or how essential that the reader have access to it. An
obvious example is the inclusion of detailed references to enable the reader to follow
up material quoted from other works. It is essential that references be included in the
report or thesis, but quoting the detail of them in the middle of the main text would
be quite distracting. A list of references at the end of the report is a type of appendix.
However, this is a test for excluding material from the main text, not for including
it in an appendix. It might be that you should exclude it from your thesis altogether.
We need another test to decide what to include in appendices. Robert gave me a
draft chapter of his thesis to read, and it was obvious to me that, although he had put
some of the material in an appendix, much of what he had left in the main text failed
the first test: it interrupted the flow of his argument. I sent him off to apply this test
for himself. In his revised version, with the superfluous material relegated to an
appendix, the argument in the text flowed nicely. But to my astonishment I found
that one of the appendices itself had an appendix—the original appendix was now
tacked on as an appendix to material that was itself now relegated to an appendix.
He had written it, and couldn’t let it go. Finally, perhaps to humour me, he omitted
it altogether. Don’t include material in appendices unless you are fairly sure that it
is necessary to support your argument. If it is a thesis, try to imagine yourself in the
examiner’s place and ask, ‘Would I want to follow this up?’ This is not a strong test,
but it is worth applying.
As appendices are there to support material in the main text, you should insert a
reference to them at the appropriate point. It is pointless to include appendices that
you don’t refer to in the text. (You may think that this is too obvious to mention, but
I have often seen stand-alone appendices.) Give the appendix an appropriate title—
not just ‘Appendix 3’, but ‘Appendix 3: Derivation of the logistic equation’—and
briefly explain its purpose.
Plagiarism and Research Integrity
Over the last couple of decades, one of the changes to academic culture has been the
development of national and international codes of ethics. Correspondingly, most
universities have adopted guidelines for the conduct of research, and funding bodies