AR 2903- THESIS ORIENTATION

CHAPTER -7
Writing About Research
• Writing Style
• Writing the Thesis
• Parts of a Thesis
• Journal Articles
• Steps Towards Publication
• Writing a Review
JUMANA P 17SA124
KRINA C 17SA126
MAITRI P 17SA131
MOHAMMED T 17SA134
MURTAZA D 17SA136
RUMANA P 17SA156
WRITING STYLE

A research report should communicate information as accurately and concisely as possible. The less energy your
readers waste on decoding your language, the more they'll have left for your brilliant ideas. Remember that your prime
purpose is to explain something, not to prove you are smarter than your readers. Your aim is to be read, understood,
and remembered. Good writing is characterized by correct and simple sentence structure, effective and lucid word
choices, use of topic sentences, avoidance of jargon, and elegant simplicity of expression.

❖ Use precise words and expressions avoid ambiguity and vagueness:

• Depth contours will be plotted with a sounding device. (Why not a pen or pencil?)
• Manageable (in what respect?)
• Affect (reduce? Increase?)
• Large (how large?)
• Severe (how severe? Severe in what way?)

When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair. If you use an
abstract term (like "large"), follow it with concrete examples or terms (such as “20–24 meters," or "more than 200
square hectares"). And make logical connections between sentences. Don't assume that the reader can fill in all the
missing ideas.
❖ Avoid pretentious or verbose terminology writers should strike out every third word on principle. Some variation of this
practice can be helpful to you. When you have a choice between two words or phrases, use the simplest, the most
straightforward and familiar.

• Check your language

• Identify your reader
• Have fun with your writing
• Don’t over complicate your plot
• Don’t over punctuate
Instead of: Use:
At this point in time Now
Utilize Use
Demonstrate Show
Has been shown to be Is
In view of the fact that Because
Accomplished Done
In the majority of cases Usually
Despite the fact that Although
Implement Carry out
Viable Practical (or workable)
Approximately About
❖ Avoid overspecialized language limit use of jargon. Whenever you can, use words that are familiar to a lot of people.
It is tempting to make excuses for fogging up your writing with long sentences and big words (“my topic is very
complex ...”), but you are writing for a broader audience than you might at first think. You are writing for all those who
might want or need to know about some aspect of your work, not just for the dozen or so who are doing exactly your
kind of work. If special terminology is readily understandable to this broader audience, use it. If not, use more
standardized terminology or carefully define the terms you are using.

❖ Use the active voice avoid all forms of the verb "to be"—is, was, are, were, and so on. For example, "nutrients are
moved to the crown by the sapstream" becomes "the sapstream moves nutrients to the crown." "Shown in figure 6 is
...“ becomes “figure 6 shows. ...“
For various reasons, students making their first attempts at technical writing believe it impolite or otherwise
inappropriate to use first-person pronouns. Instead of a concise and straightforward "I compared ...,“ we get "A
comparison was made between. ..." Worse is reference to the author" or "the present writer," as if avoidance of a
personal pronoun can divert any blame for the work to some ghostlike entity other than the student. Such usage is
pretentious, verbose, and imprecise.

❖ Be positive avoid an apologetic tone, especially in recounting your results. In the numerous instances where you
Describe something that didn't go as planned, write it in a straightforward, unapologetic manner. Say what you did and
what you found, not what you didn't do or find. If you had planned to sample 10 trees in each stand, but were able to
sample only 3 in some of them, don't apologize. You can say, for example, “because of the low level of bark beetle
infestation in several stands, the number of trees sampled over the 25 stands varied from 3 to 10 (table 4).”
❖ Use verb tenses appropriately pay attention to past, present, and future tenses. Use these tenses to distinguish
clearly (both in your own mind and for the readers) between facts and generalizations. When recounting factual
information from published literature (in the introduction), or from your own work (in methods and results), use the
past tense. For example, "average length of fish caught from 1975 to 1979 decreased by 25% (smith 1980).” When you
recount any generalization, from the past literature or from your own work, use the present tense. For example,
“overuse of reservoirs for recreational fishing harms the fish population.“ Other indicators of generalizations-especially
ones about which you aren't terribly confident—are words such as "may," "suggest," and "could.”
WRITING THE THESIS
Steps in writing are:
(1) Organization
(2) Writing the first draft
(3) Revising.

(1) Organization

• Start with organizing the material with an outline.

The outline, like a map, tells how you will arrive at your destination, the completed thesis.
• Think yourself as a storyteller
▪ Maintain a simple storyline as you are writing for different types of readers.
▪ The introduction and discussion should be easily acknowledged by any literate reader
which alone tells your story effectively to 90% of the people.
▪ Methods and results can be fairly detailed and complex since they will be read primarily
by those in the specific research area or closely related areas.
• Start the introduction with some general background.
• Out of this background develop the problem and questions that you will address.
• From this problem area, define a set of very specific objectives.
• Your methods and results relate directly back to your objectives.
• Results section include summaries of your findings.
• In your discussion, interpret your findings, going from specific results to generalizations
about the value of the work and its relationship to the overall problem area defined in
the introduction.
(2) Writing the first draft
• Once you begin writing, continue writing.
Keep going until you come to a logical stopping place, then go a little beyond.
• Start the next section if you can't think of the right word or have temporarily forgotten the source of a reference as it
will activate your subconscious to start working on it, and the transition between sections will read more smoothly.
• Once you've written a crude first draft, go over it to fill in details and smooth out the wording.

(3) Revising
• After you have edited and revised your first draft, give it to someone else, such as your advisor, for comments and
criticism.
• It is your work and you must make the decisions.
• With your advisor and committee members, be sure to work out conflicting points of view in an amiable and earnest
way before the final thesis defense.
• Expect your thesis to go through at least three to four complete revisions before it can go to your committee.
• Any good writing was rewritten and revised several times before it reached its final form.
• Writing your thesis will teach you the necessity for repeated review and revision of your work.
 PARTS OF THE THESIS
The basic parts of thesis are:
• Title page and abstract
• Vitae
• Acknowledgments
• Table of contents
• Terminology and symbols
• Introduction
• Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Conclusions
• Literature cited
• Appendices

Title page and abstract:

• The format for the title page is standard for most institutions. The abstract presents a brief summary of the thesis. It should
be no longer than one paragraph, and should include brief, clear statements of the need for the work, the research
objectives, the approach to be used, and the anticipated results and their significance. Although it is often written last, the
abstract is usually the first part of your report to be read. If it is not interesting, it will be the only part read.
Vitae:
• A vitae is the equivalent of a resume, and is used to list your educational and professional qualifications. If at all possible,
don’t include one. It will be out of date within months.
Acknowledgements:
• Its central elements are simple courtesy and professionalism. They should be direct and sincere.
Table of contents:
• The table of contents and lists of tables and figures should be self explanatory. Use a lot of headings and subheadings
throughout the thesis, and put these in the table of contents.
Terminology and symbols:
• Thesis and journal articles in some areas often start with a nomenclature section or a list of symbols. In most thesis, simple
definitions when new words first appear in the text are usually sufficient.
Introduction:
• Introduction to the thesis includes problem statement, objectives and literature review. Introduction shoule be a stand
alone and all the main points should be included.
Methods:
• The methodology or methods section explains what you did and how you did it, allowing readers to evaluate the reliability
and validity of your research. It should include:
• The type of research you did
• How you collected and/or selected your data
• How you analyzed your data
• Any tools or materials you used in the research
• Your rationale for choosing these method
Results:
• Results are simply what you found(the facts) without any interpretation.
Discussion:
• The discussion tells what the work means, how your results can be interpreted in light of your stated objectives. It presents
principles, relationships and generalizations arising from your work.
Conclusions:
• The conclusion needs to wrap up the research. It needs to clearly state the answers to the research questions and lay out
in clear, undisputed terms the contribution that you are making.
Literature cited:
• The Literature Cited section is found at the end of your paper and contains the complete reference for each of the in-text
citations used in your paper. Generally, a citation includes the author(s), date, title and source of your publication. Most
commonly, references are presented in an alphabetized list.
Appendices:
• An appendix for a research paper or presentation is a place where you can display the raw data that you have collected
during the preparation and research. It can be any information that is relevant useful to understand the points in your
paper and support the results or facts. It can include Drawings, maps, diagrams, images, illustrations, graphs,
questionnaires, etc.
JOURNAL ARTICLES

• Journal articles are shorter than books and written about very specific topics.

• The primary aim of a journal article is to present something new and to show its validity by describing in some
detail the testing process used to validate it.

• While writing the articles Imaginative processes and modifications should be omitted and only the final version of
the problem statement or hypothesis should be involved, along with the evidence supporting or refuting it.

• As in a thesis, the test part of the research process is described in detail in the methods and results section. The
really important part of the article is, as in the thesis is the discussion, where the meaning of the work is
presented and generalizations are made.

• Once you are done with thesis writing the next logical set is to covert the thesis into an article for publication in
the communication process(during the publication process the thesis can be prepared by/ with a particular journal
style).
AUTHORSHIP

• Authorship of a publication is simply the person who does most of the research and writes the paper, so the person
automatically becomes its sole or senior (first-listed) author. However, authorship sometimes becomes more
complicated, because there are a lot of things involved in producing a graduate research thesis, and many additional
steps are necessary before the thesis becomes a journal article.

• Some of the steps are:

1. Having the idea or deciding on the topic of investigation
2. Financing the project or providing the facilities for doing it
3. Planning the work and designing the experiments
4. Doing the tests
5. Interpreting results
6. Writing the thesis
7. Writing the paper for publication.

• Some believe that the senior author is the person who did the majority of the work or the one who provided the
funding. Others believe that senior authorship goes to the person who had the idea in the first place.

• Perhaps the most common rule is that the senior author is the person who designed the project, and the junior
(second-listed) author is the one who did the work or wrote the paper, but still considering the efforts in writing the
thesis some think that senior authorship should go to the writer, regardless of who did the work and who wrote the
thesis.
• Authorship does not generally go to people who were only involved in collecting data or doing the analyses. The task
of number crushing could be done by any qualified technician and they don't require any understanding of the
research process as a whole.

• Although number crunching itself does not justify authorship, participation in the selection of the design or analytical
technique to solve the problem is worthy of consideration for authorship.

• Interpretation of data is also an important part of the research process, so someone who helps in the interpretation
of data might also be considered for co-authorship. While publishing the thesis his or her name should be mention as
co-author.

• Most importantly, if the data of others are used, an acknowledgment is justified.

STEPS TOWARD PUBLICATION

The first decision you need to make when you decide to publish your thesis is which journal you should submit it to. It is
helpful to make this choice when you begin writing the thesis, as your choice will affect your writing style.

First, choose a journal that deals with your general subject area-for example, one that you have WRITEN frequently in your
literature review. Second, pick a good journal, a fairly prestigious one. Just because it is your first paper, don't think that
you should put it in some little-known journal with limited distribution. you need to do some research to find which
journals could be home to you work.

Publishing in an Open Access journal almost always incurs an Article Processing Charge (APC) so and which are very
expensive .Identify a number of potential journals and check the author's guidelines to see if your article fits the journals
requirements. The journal will probably have a number of categories (research, general review, technical note, etc). Look at
past papers in the journal, would your article sit comfortably with them.

General guideline of journals are:-

• Article types
• Structure
• Permissions
• Language & text
• Data & Symbols
• Visual Material
• References
Don't assume that your article will be accepted by whichever journal you submit to so put journals in your order of
preference. Make sure you submit under the correct category, the article is the correct length (number of words,
figures), headings are in the correct format and references are in the correct style. Write your abstract specifically for the
journal to which you are submitting.

Probability of
acceptance of a
manuscript

quality
(GUASSIAN GOLDEN RULE)

If your article is rejected don't be disheartened, it doesn't mean your article isn't worth publishing, journals have a
limited capacity and it probably isn't the right journal for your article. Persevere, reformat and prepare your article for
the next journal on your list and submit.
WRITING A REVIEW
• At some time in your career, you might get an opportunity to review or critique the work of others. Your advisors,
contacts made in professional meetings, journalists or others might ask for your review.
• Reviewing is a favour you exchange with your colleagues and it allows you to obtain up-to-date information on your
research topic.

• Firstly, read the article carefully, making notes of both specific and general nature. Keep in mind the two aspects of the
paper, content and style. This technique identifies strong and weak points in a paper.

• For content, as questions such as: Was definitions provided were appropriate? Were the objectives clear? Did the work
seem relative and useful? For style, ask: Is the paper well return? Clear? Concise?

• For writing a review, use a separate paper or a review sheet. Starting a review with a positive nature is very important,
say something nice, but true, about the paper.

• Make some specific and detailed statements on the good points. Also point out the weak points and suggest how it can
be improved.

• Good reviews are never harsh, personal or sarcastic. Don’t hesitate to say how you would have liked to have seen the
paper written.

• More of the notes should be self-explanatory. Return the review and the manuscript to the author or journal. And until
the proposed research is presented publicly, your content should be considered confidential.