Transcript Writing your Final Year Project

Writing Your Dissertation
Regional Writing Centre, UL
Lawrence Cleary and Dr. Íde O’Sullivan,
Writing Consultants,
University of Limerick
www.ul.ie/rwc
The Composing Process
 Prewriting
 Drafting
 Revising
 Editing and Proofreading
 Logical Choice and Unity
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Prewriting
 Planning
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Evaluating the rhetorical situation, or context, into which
you write
Choosing and focusing your topic
Establishing an organizing principle
 Gathering information
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Entering the Discourse on your Topic
Taking notes as a Strategy to Avoid Charges of
Plagiarism
Evaluating sources
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Planning: Assessing
the Rhetorical Situation
 The Occasion
 The Audience
 The Topic
 The Purpose
 The Writer
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The Occasion
 What has prompted you to write?
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As part of my course requirements for a B.Sc. (Hons) in
Construction Management, I have to do a dissertation in
my final year.
 What do I need to know?
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What are my obligations?
What are the procedures?
When is it due? How much time do I have?
What’s involved?
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The Occasion
 My guidelines tell me about procedures that I must
follow.
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I know that I’ll need to choose a topic pretty quickly. I
have to submit a proposal by September 24th.
I have to submit two reports on how my project is
progressing, once on October 26th and, again, on the 14th
of December.
The deadline for submission is the 28th of March, and
following this, I have to present my case orally in May.
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The Occasion
 What kind of project will I choose?
 How do I write about it?
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The Occasion
 When we consider the occasion for writing, we
think about
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What has prompted me to write?
How much writing do I have to do?
How much time do I have to do it?
How much time should I allot for planning and
organizing, and for drafting and revising?
What tone should I adopt? Formal? Informal?
Authoritative? Conciliatory? Assertive?
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Audience
 Whaddaya mean, “audience”? What, like a
song and dance?
 Whaddaya talkinabout, “audience”? I’m
writing for my professor, right?
 Mmmmmmm-maybe.
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Audience
 Your audience affects how you write.
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Terms that need not be explained for one audience, may
need to be explained to other audiences.
General audiences may not have your subject knowledge,
but they are usually thought of as intelligent, thoughtful
readers willing to be informed or persuaded.
Your classmates make good audiences. Write for them.
Let them read your report and give you feedback on the
ease with which they were able to read and understand it.
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Audience
 Who am I writing for?
 Can my peers understand what I’m saying?
 Am I fulfilling the criteria established by my
instructors?
 How much revising and polishing will be necessary
to meet the instructor’s standards?
 What format appeals to my audience?
(from [Ebest et al. 1997, 9])
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Topic
 Your topic is something that will have your
supervisor’s approval.
 Some things to think about:
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How much do you already know about this topic?
How much am I going to have to know in order to do this
project and report on it? To say something meaningful?
How much research am I going to have to do?
How much time do I have to do it?
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Topic
 Strategies for choosing topics and narrowing or
broadening the coverage you will give it.
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Taking suggestions from your supervisor
Brainstorming (individually or in groups)
Listing
Clustering or mind-mapping
Free-writing or discussing
Asking wh-questions—who, what, when, where, how
and why?
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Topic
 Topics do not stand in isolation. They exist
in a context.
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What is the relationship of your topic to your
course of study?
What are people saying about your topic in the
literature you have read?
What are the issues of concern?
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Purpose
 What is your purpose for writing?
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To express your feelings?
To inform?
To persuade?
 As you draft, revise and edit, make sure that
every contribution to your report works to
realize that purpose.
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Purpose
 If informing is the purpose of your report,
then the point of order is a triangulation of
your audience, your topic and your purpose.
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Audience analysis
Relevance
Rhetorical appeals
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The Writer
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What do I already know about this topic?
How quickly do I learn? Read? Write?
How much writing have I already done?
Have I developed an academic or authoritative
voice?
 Have I addressed this audience before?
 What are my weaknesses? What are my strengths?
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The Writer
 Knowing who I am, how much time will it
take ME to write my dissertation? Am I a
ditherer? A procrastinator?
 Having assessed and prioritised my
weaknesses, what should I work on first?
 Knowing my strengths, how can I turn this
strength to my advantage?
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Rhetorical Appeals
 Logos—persuade by appeals to reason
 Ethos—persuade by establishing your
own credibility
 Pathos—persuade by appealing to your
audiences emotional attachment to your
topic
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Appeals for Credibility
 Use credible sources of information
 Be authoritative
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Do not use personal, self-reflexive pronouns
Do not refer to your own mental processes (“I feel…”; “I
think…”; “I be loving it…”)
Do not use conversational markers (“…, you know?” or
“Okay, so.”)
Avoid quoting—paraphrase and summarize instead
Avoid vagueness; don’t hedge.
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Appeals for Credibility
 Persuasive elements in a report like this are largely
restricted to the presentation of sound evidence,
explicitly stated.
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If you need to justify conclusions, use observable
evidence obtained through sound scientific principles
such as observation and reason.
Methods of analysis and those used for obtaining data
should be repeatable (verifiable) and should be valued in
your discipline.
Conditions under which data is obtained should be free
of environmental variables (reliable).
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Drafting your Report
 Try to visualize your report. Work toward that vision.
 Begin to structure it—establish your section headings;
give them titles. These do not have to be permanent.
 Examine the logical order of ideas reflected in those
titles.
 Do not get hung up on details; elements of the draft are
subject to change in the revision stage.
 Start to write the sections that you are ready to write.
Don’t try to write the Introduction because it comes
first.
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Drafting
 Continue to reassess your rhetorical situation.
 Does what you have written so far contribute
to the achievement of your purpose?
 Experiment with organization and methods
of development.
 Don’t get bogged-down in details; focus on
the big issues: organization and logical flow.
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Drafting
SAVE OFTEN, AND
FOR JAYSUS’ SAKE
WILL YOU EVER
BACK UP YOUR
DOCUMENT!!!
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Drafting
 How should it look? Do you have a vision?
 What should the dissertation look like?
“What goes into the Main Chapters is up to you.
Some students find it helpful to think of the
project in terms of Why they did it, What they did,
How they did It and Why they did it the way they
did it and then to write about those things.
Naturally these are not the titles of the chapters,
but the general idea of what they contain” (Power
2000, sec. 2).
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1. Preliminaries
Title page
Abstract
Contents
Can you
Picture
this?
2. Main text
Section / Chapter 1. Introduction / Objectives
Section / Chapter 2, 3, 4, etc. Why you did it,
What you did, How you did it, Why you did it
the way that you did it
Section Chapter 5 or 6. Conclusion /
Recommendations
3. End matter
References
Appendices
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Revising
 Is your report logically organized?
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A good way to check the logical flow of your ideas is to
outline your report AFTER you’ve completed your draft.
 How did you introduce your topic? By giving it
definition? Describing its development? Explaining
what it is?
 Does each section contribute to your reader’s
understanding of your topic? Does your report
service your purpose, aims, and objectives?
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Revising
 Outline each section. How does each paragraph
contribute to our understanding of the topic of that
section?
 Take a close look at paragraphs: Does each
paragraph have a central idea? Does it have unity?
Is it coherent and well developed?
 Is there a correspondence between the title of your
report, your section headings and sub-headings and
the central ideas in your paragraphs?
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Revising
 Do the methods used to illuminate your topic lead to logical
discovery?
 No truths are self-evident.
 Claims have to be defended with evidence.
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Processes have to be described and explained;
Design features and research methods have to be justified;
The justification for generalizations and conclusions need to be
made explicit;
The criteria used to qualify our results also needs to be explicitly put
forward and evaluated for objectivity;
Underlying assumptions need to be evaluated for their objectivity.
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Editing and Proofreading
 Once the report is cogent, it must be made to be
coherent.
 Work methodically, checking one feature at a time.
 Do not exclude formatting issues.
 Editing and proofreading is more than just grammar
and punctuation; it is also about voice, rhythm,
tone, style and clarity.
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Editing and Proofreading
 Check for ambiguity
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Squinting, misplaced or dangling modifiers.
Check sentence structure and modulation.
Check for comma splices, run-ons, stringy sentences
and fragments.
 Check for how sentences introduce new information:
is it in the beginning of the sentence or at the end?
 Check that you use sentence types that are appropriate
for your discipline.
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Editing and Proofreading
 Check word order and usage. Are you using
an indefinite article when a definite article is
more precise.
 Check for agreement: Subject / verb;
pronoun or noun substitute / antecedent or
concatenation.
 Check for bias (gender, race, religious, creed,
persuasion, etc).
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Editing and Proofreading
 Check for obstacles to clarity:
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Poorly chosen words
Vague references
Clichés and trite language
Jargon
Inappropriate connotations
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Editing and Proofreading
 Check for clarity:
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Effective subordination and emphasis
Sentence variety
Parallel structures
Choppy writing
Explicit logical links
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Editing and Proofreading
 Check formatting issues (appropriacy and
consistency):
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Margins
Font (size and style)
Section heading numbers
Paragraph style (block, semi-block, indented)
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Editing and Proofreading
Adobe Acrobat 7.0
Document
 Check for plagiarism
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Check the form of your in-text citations and of your full
references in your References page.
Check the content of your citations. Is everything that
should be there there?
Check that paraphrases are not too close to the original.
Check that all figures, tables and graphs are captioned
and cited (below figures and graphs; above tables)
Check that any borrowed ideas, words or methods of
organizing information are referenced and clearly
marked.
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Logical Choices and Unity of Purpose
 Every choice serves to defend a claim,
answer a question, or confirm a hypothesis
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Word, phrase, sentence-structure
Does the choice satisfy audience expectations
 Does it speak to your authorial credibility
 Does it further your argument, analysis,
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Writing is a Social Activity
 Lexical-grammatical
choices affect the
culture of register,
which in turn affects
the culture of genre.
 Illustration: (Martin &
Rose, 2003, p. 254 cited
in BALEAP 2007).
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Arguments & Logic
 A good argument will have, at the very least:
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a thesis that declares the writer's position on
the problem at hand;
an acknowledgment of the opposition that nods
to, or quibbles with other points of view;
a set of clearly defined premises that illustrate
the argument's line of reasoning;
evidence that validates the argument's
premises;
a conclusion that convinces the reader that the
argument has been soundly and persuasively
made.
(Dartmouth Writing Program 2005)
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Literature Review & Logic
 The Lit. Review that you wrote for your proposal
will not necessarily be the same review that you
submit as part of your dissertation.
 Think in terms of your argument and the support
that you provided for claims:
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Include a review of all the literature that you read to learn
about your topic and the particular aspect of your topic
that you focus on.
Include a review of the literature on the methodologies
that you used.
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Methodologies & Logic
 When you know what you need to know in
order to answer a question, then it is logical
to choose methods of inquiry that will supply
the reliable verifiable data that you need in
order to answer the question.
 Don’t forget to qualify your data—what does
it tell you and what is it unable to tell you?
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Methodologies & Credibility
 All data has to be analyzed. You need a
methodology for analyses as well.
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Quantitative data: can it be generalized?
Qualitative data: what criteria will be used to establish its
value?
 Do not overstate your results. An honest, quality
analysis will speak volumes about your credibility,
regardless of the quality of the data.
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Unity and Coherence
 If information included in your dissertation
does not contribute to an understanding of
the value of your conclusions and
recommendations, then it only serves to
befuddle the logic of your piece.
 A unified text is a more coherent text.
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Writing Strategies
 Map your paper
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What sections or subsections are completed (keeping in
mind you still have to revise),
Pick one or two of the holes in your paper that you would
feel comfortable filling,
Assess the reasons for any anxiety you have over the
unfinished parts that cause you anxiety
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Do you need to read more?
Do you need to rethink your paper?
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Writing Strategies
 Outline your paper
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Devise headings and subheadings for
uncompleted sections
This helps you see the logical progression (or lack of
it) of your ideas
 It identifies the main ideas
 It helps detect omissions
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Writing Strategies
 Write about why you are having difficulty making
advances in your paper
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It gets the fingers tapping and the cerebral juices flowing
An awareness of fears and anxieties helps you to develop
strategies to overcome those emotional roadblocks
You may discover that the reason that you are having
difficulty is that there is some chink in the logic of your
argument that you must either fill or that requires a major
rethinking of the line of reasoning.
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Writing Strategies
 Don’t allow yourself to freeze up. When you
are feeling overwhelmed…
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Satisfy yourself with small advances until you
feel more confident and unstuck
Seek help. Talk to friends. Talk about how you
feel, but talk about your ideas as well.
Eat lots of ice cream and candy
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Works Cited
 Cleary, Lawrence (2007) “Comparison of Report and Essay Introductions
for Clause Structure” [unpublished].
 Dartmouth Writing Program (2006) “Logic and Argument” [Online],
available: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/ student/toc.shtml
[accessed 08 Jan. 2008].
 Ebest, S., R., Brusaw, T., Oliu, W., and Alred, G. (1997) Writing From A
to Z, Mt. View, CA: Mayfield Publishing.
 Forde, J. (2007) Comparative Dissertation: Timberframe vs. Masonry
Hoursebuilding, B.Sc. (Hons) Construction Management, College of
Engineering, Institute of Technology, Tralee. [Dissertation], unpublished.
 Glucksman Library (2007) “Cite It Right: Guide to Harvard Referencing
Style”, 2nd edition; University of Limerick’s Referencing Series [Online],
http://www.ul.ie/~library/ pdf/citeitright.pdf [accessed 08 Jan. 2008].
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Works Cited
 Institute of Technology, Tralee (2007) “A Guide to Dissertation
Preparation for Degree Students” (unpublished).
 McGrath, R. (2007) “Is the Education process for Buildability being
promoted in our Institutes of Education”, B.Sc. (Hons) Construction
Management, College of Engineering, Institute of Technology, Tralee.
[Dissertation], unpublished.
 McMurrey, D. A. (n.d.) Online Technical Writing: Online Textbook, Austin
Community College / Brooklyn College [Online], available:
http://www.io.com/~hcexres/ textbook/acctoc.html#introduction [accessed
26 Oct. 2007].
 New York Public Library (2007) Lewis Wickes Hine: The Construction of
the Empire State Building, 1930-1931. [photographs online], available:
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/hinex/empire
/empire.html [accessed 08 Jan. 2008].
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Works Cited
 O’Donnell, I. (2007) “The benefits of mobile computing on a utilities
project”, B.Sc. (Hons) Construction Management, Institute of Technology,
Tralee. [Dissertation], unpublished.
 “Outline of FYP Procedures” (2004) The Department of Computer
Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick [Online],
available: http://www.csis.ul.ie/ StudentResources/FYP/fyp_student.htm
[accessed 26 Oct 2007].
 Power, N. (2000) “Final Year Project, B.Sc. Computer Systems:
Guidelines and Suggestions for the Project Report”, The Department of
Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick
[Online], available: http://www.csis.ul.ie/StudentResources/
FYP/fypwriteup.htm [accessed 26 Oct. 2007].
 University of Hertfordshire (2008) “Describing & Analysing Language:
Handouts”, University of Hertfordshire, School of Combined Studies, BA
(Hons) in English Language for Commercial Communication [online],
available: http://www.uefap.com/courses/baecc/dal/handouts.htm
[accessed 08 Jan. 2008].
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