Since her last instalment in November, Ellie is on her final push to the end of the thesis road. Read about what she’s been getting up to below.
By Ellie King
Since I last published a blog, it feels like my thesis has come on leaps and bounds and that I am, dare I say it, very nearly there. Since December, I’ve been slowly getting my thesis ready for publication.
Tidying up
First of all, I’ve undertaken a hard edit on all my main chapters, significantly cutting down and tightening my main arguments up. This has been a difficult but rewarding process, and as I read through my work, I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t good enough for things to read right, I had to really concentrate to slice off words and neaten everything up. But it’s paid off, because I’m now way under the word count and everything is really clear as to what I’m saying. Chapters are now coming back from supervisors with minimal edits, which can only be a good sign.
In the process of trimming the thesis back to significantly under the word count (80,000!), one thing it has allowed me to do during editing is ensure that each argument I’m making has sufficient logic and detail for an examiner to understand. When you’re buried in your work, it might be easy for you to understand what you’re saying with fewer words, but this might not be the case for an examiner who is seeing your work for the first time. Thus, whenever I’m sending my chapters off for editing, I’m asking my supervisors to check whether the arguments I’m making are logically sound. If they’re not, I have roughly 5,000 words to play with for this very purpose, and thus extra detail can be added in where needed.
A big, long list of tasks
With everything in good shape, I’m now moving on to the big, long list of tasks you need to fulfil to get my thesis ready for submission. This is all the boring laborious stuff you leave to the end and whilst doing it means you’re very near to the end, it can feel like an endless, painful, slog.
Formatting
All through the writing process, I have kept each chapter held in three separate documents: one with the prose, one with tables, and one with figures. Now I’m coming to the end of the editing process, I am starting to pull these into one document and format everything correctly. Whilst you can use programmes like LaTex, I simply couldn’t get my head round this, so I stuck to creating one document per chapter, which I will then stitch together at the end.
The Doctoral College has guidance on formatting requirements for your documents, but the main task included inserting the figures and tables into the text. Sometimes this was complicated and involved inserting landscape pages into the document, and often involved me holding my fingers crossed and praying that Word wouldn’t fall over every time I inserted a new table. But generally, I made it through, and beyond remembering to change the page numbers so the document comes together as one in the end, everything is good to go.
Consistency and Chapters
Alongside adding tables and figures, my next task was ensuring all my tables and figures followed the same consistency and captioning. A lot of my tables were very similar, and so I needed to make sure that the language I used in each was the same, and that the captions followed a similar pattern.
Referencing and Bibliographies
Finally, I had to make sure the referencing was consistent. In the text, as I was using Harvard style referencing, this was ensuring the order of references was chronological (you can also choose alphabetical, but for me ordering by publication date made more sense). Whilst you can use reference management systems like EndNote to produce your references and bibliography, I like to go analogue, and so I also needed to write my reference and bibliography list, conforming to a consistent standard. Finally, I also had to check that every reference in the text was in the reference list, and that everything in the reference list was cited in the text. I know this is a laborious task, but it’s one you need to do.
Lists, Lists, Lists
Finally, and I haven’t quite got to this yet, but I’ll need to write my contents list, list of tables, figures, and all the other stuff required for your submission. As I was formatting chapters, I made a contents list for each and ensured the numbering system I used was consistent. This will make bringing the contents page (including page numbers) together a little easier. Again, check the Doctoral College guidance for full information of what you need to include.
Take your time
What I’ve learned most this last month is that beyond the writing of the thesis, there is a long list of things you need to do ready for submission. Make sure you leave plenty of time to complete them, because mistakes in this area will come up as minor corrections in your viva, even though they are easily fixed. And remember, despite the pain and boredom of these tasks, completing them means you’re almost done, and deserve a bit of a pat on the back.
How are you getting on with your thesis? Let us know by emailing doctoralcollege@warwick.ac.uk or on X @DC_Warwick.
Other blogs: Take a look at Ellie’s November writing up diaries here, or take a look at Pierre’s experiences of submission here.
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