Writing a Thesis: How to Interact with your Supervisor

Three-Month Thesis has a thoughtful post about how many thesis drafts you need. I would disagree with a few things on that page.

1. The number of drafts depends very strongly on the student. I would argue that you need as many drafts as it takes to finish the thesis.

2. In principle, the quality of the thesis is improved after each draft, although I am not sure that it will look like the graph above from his Web site. Using the writing/editing funnel approach in Eloquent Science (chapter 7), revisions on the largest scale should be performed first (those related to organization), whereas revisions on the smallest scale should be performed later (those related to grammar, punctuation, spelling). Depending again on the student (some may be better at organization than spelling), the quality may not be increasing in the way presented.

3. I think it’s OK to keep doing research while you write. Sometimes you need additional experiments or to create extra plots to make your argument more convincing. Limiting your ability to improve your argument by saying no to additional research is wrong. [That said, I agree that it may be too attractive to keep doing more work rather than writing up what you’ve done to date.]

Nevertheless, I want to highlight three important points that Three Month Thesis raises:

• Discuss the thesis structure with your supervisor before you start.

• Plan chapters before you sit down to write, so you know what you’re going to include before you start.

• Give chapters to your supervisor one at a time, rather than drafts of the entire thesis.

These three points I do agree with, and they provide some guidance for working with your supervisor. The last point is particularly important as it is easy for a supervisor to identify problems in your writing from one chapter that can be fixed before the next chapter is written, thereby saving everyone time.

Remember that only you, your supervisor, and your externals are going to read your thesis. It should be adequate to demonstrate that you know your field, can describe your research clearly, and have made a novel contribution to your science. Being too much of a perfectionist with this document is generally not useful. Save that level of effort for the peer-reviewed publications.