Writing an Excellent Dissertation - Suggestions from a Professional

In some ways helping a student write an excellent dissertation is easy to do. In at least one other way it is not so easy. A professional can tell you the importance of the selection of the topic and the attention you need to apply to researching the topic, taking notes and creating an outline or plan. But when it comes to the actual writing of the dissertation, this is where a professional may need to think quite hard about the advice they provide.

This is because the writing style, the choice of words, the flow of language and the theme you wish to promote maybe are more difficult to teach. You can certainly teach the dissertation student how to take notes from research material and how to create a brilliant outline. But when it comes to the actual writing of the dissertation, what can the professional do to help the student with the style of the writing? Well there are some things including the following.

• It's important that you create drafts, plural.
• Read widely to find an academic style which really appeals to you.
• Understand what is meant by line editing.
• Double-check your list of references for quality, quantity and citation.

One of the best ways to improve the quality of your dissertation and in fact to write an excellent one is to write it a number of times. Some people will write a first draft and then work through correcting it and editing it in order to come up with a quality piece of writing. A professional might suggest that you need to rewrite not twice but possibly three or even more times. One of the best ways to find your writing style is to do it over and over.

If you've read widely from academic writers you will find some of them have a writing style which really appeals. Why is that so? If you know that you could well adopt that style of writing.

If you want to get to the quality end of dissertation writing then you need to understand line editing. Here you are not looking at the entire dissertation or a part of it or even a paragraph of it, you are re-reading your work a line at a time. That's an excellent way to develop an excellent dissertation.

Then at the end of your dissertation will be a list of books and other resources you have studied to create your dissertation. Is this list of sufficient quality and quantity? If not then do something about that and be doubly sure that your citation of references is correct.