How to Write Your Graduate Thesis
A graduate thesis is the longest writing assignment students undertake in their academic careers. While PhD theses are typically longer than Masters theses, both are considerably longer than undergraduate papers. Writing your graduate thesis takes a lot of planning, research and preparation. Fortunately, if you are willing to put some energy into organizing your work, writing a graduate thesis is no harder than writing any other academic assignment.
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Instructions
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Select a topic. Consult with your faculty adviser if you aren't sure what topic to choose. Pick an original topic that you are interested in, and narrow the topic down to something you can do original research on.
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Gather research materials. Ask your professor whom she regards as the most respected authorities on your subject. Search for books by those authors in your college library. Search for academic journal articles using academic searches like JSTOR and Academic Search premier.
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Take notes on your research materials. Read each book from cover to cover, and note which chapters are most relevant to your research project. Copy any relevant facts and statistics into your notebook. Make a rough summary of each book in bullet point form.
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Write an outline of your thesis. At the top of your outline, write a "thesis statement" that states your position on your topic in one or two sentences. Beneath your thesis statement, write a series of numbered and lettered bullet points that flesh out the argument. Enumerate every main point in your argument with a roman numeral (I, II, III, IV), label each explanatory point or sub-point with a capitalized letter (A, B, C) and enumerate each specific piece of evidence with an Arabic numeral (1, 2, 3, 4).
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Flesh out your thesis in full paragraphs. Every main point in your outline corresponds to a several-page section in your thesis. Label these sections with underlined and italicized headlines. Dedicate one or two paragraphs to each sub-point, adding more if necessary. If a single piece of evidence is especially important to your argument, discuss it in a separate paragraph.
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Provide a citation for each factual claim in your thesis, and list all sources in a bibliography. If you are writing a humanities paper, follow MLA style -- with author and page in brackets -- or Chicago style -- footnotes -- for in-text citations. If you are writing a science or social science paper, follow APA style -- author, date, page -- for in-text citations. On your bibliography, include the publication name, article name, author name and date of publication.
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Format the thesis. Write a cover page that includes your name, the title of your thesis, your professor's name and the date. Include a page number on each page of the text, not including the cover and bibliography pages.
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