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Writing first draft dissertation titles

1.5.5 Write your first draft in the way that is easiest and most comfortable for you.

1.5.1 Write your first draft as rapidly as you can.

In writing the first draft of your essay, try to get as many ideas down on paper as quickly as you can. Don’t worry about spelling or punctuation at all at this stage, just ideas. If you change your mind about how to say something, don’t stop to cross it out, just write an improved version. You may have a lot of repetition in your first draft. That’s fine.

1.5.2 When writing your first draft, don’t worry about your introduction.

One of the reasons why many of us have trouble writing a first draft is that we try to write the essay beginning with the introduction. This is a difficult, and sometimes an impossible, task. How can you introduce an essay you haven’t written yet? Until you see what the body of your essay will say, it is almost impossible to write an effective introduction. You can easily fall into the trap of writing dozens of introductions, rejecting them all, and starting over each time. It’s fairly obvious that this is a non-productive waste of time. Save the introduction for your second draft. Start right out with your trial thesis statement and support it. Start writing with the second or third paragraph of the essay and go on from there. You will make much more progress writing the body of your essay than trying to guess at what will make a good introduction.

1.5.3 When writing your first draft, bracket those sections you can’t write yet and try to finish a draft of the whole essay.

When you are writing your first draft you will probably find that you don’t have all of the material you need for a finished essay. For example, you may know that you need examples of several of your points.

Writing first draft dissertation titles You may find that your

If you have them, fine. If you’re stumped, just put a note in brackets: [need example of classroom exercise for team building]. Then move on to the next point. Likewise with evidence that you haven’t found yet. Put a note in brackets to remind yourself what you need, but don’t stop to look for it as you write your draft. It is important that you make notes to yourself as to what you need to find and develop before you have a finished essay. Doing so will save you a great deal of time because you will have a shopping list to bring to class or to the library that will help define what you need to finish the essay. This will make your further research much easier. But it is equally important that you try to get down on paper what you want the whole essay to say. This is the only way to test and develop your trial thesis statement. The whole should determine the parts, not the parts the whole. You may find that your thesis needs major revision and that you really want to take a different approach than you had originally planned. That will help to clarify what details are important enough to pursue and what can be omitted.

1.5.4 Rewrite your thesis statement whenever you can make it a better guide for writing and revising your essay.

Remember that your trial thesis statement is a guide or a yardstick to help you see where your essay is going. It is a mirror that you can hold up to your essay to show what you are really saying.

Writing first draft dissertation titles you see your word count

It is not an external standard that somebody is imposing on you; it is your decision about what you want to say. But one of the greatest dangers in trying to write an essay is that you change your mind without realizing it, that you lose track of what you started to say and end up saying something else, without being aware of it. That is why your thesis statement is so important. It’s fine, it’s usually good, when you decide to change direction or emphasis if you know what you’re changing and how. But if you don’t notice, it almost always leads to problems, as when your essay starts out promising one thing and ends by delivering something else. So keep comparing your thesis with your essay. When you have finished your first draft, re-read your thesis statement and ask if that is still what you are saying. If it isn’t, revise the thesis. It is not unusual to rewrite your thesis statement a dozen times in the course of revising your essay.

1.5.5 Write your first draft in the way that is easiest and most comfortable for you.

If you are an experienced typist, you will probably type your first draft. But if it is easier for you to write in longhand, do that. In writing your first draft, you want to write as quickly and easily as you can, concentrating just on the words but not on the way of producing the words. So go with whatever comes easiest. You will be revising this work. Many writers find that after writing a draft on longhand the process of entering it into the word processor gives them a chance to easily revise and correct the errors in the original. Do whatever you’re most comfortable with. Do not try to make the first draft the final draft. Assume you will revise, and you can be much more loose and free in writing your first draft, and you can do it much more quickly.

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The dissertation that is written in a single session will not achieve good marks. Writing it will take considerably longer than a week every year students do attempt to write their entire piece of work with less than a week to go before they submit and every year the same students fail to graduate.

Before you start writing, research the topic thoroughly and prepare an essay plan for every chapter. You may find it useful to put your notes into separate wallets for each chapter. Number the pages of your notes as it is easier to sort them out if you drop them. On electronic notes and drafts, write a descriptive name and approximate date for the file as a footer so that you keep track of your documents. Do backups of notes. This may seem like common sense but everyone who has written a dissertation will tell you of the time they dropped all of their notes, or lost files.

If you feel daunted by writing a single paper of between eight and twelve thousand words, try to think of the dissertation as a series of shorter essays, which you then link together. Do not worry too much about the word count in your first draft. It is better to write too much and then edit and focus your work than to write too little. Padding and waffle are easily spotted by markers and penalties are applied for failing to meet the word count. If you have trouble maintaining focus, write the dissertation title on a slip of paper and keep it on your computer try to ask yourself ‘how does the sentence I am writing add to the dissertation?’.
Try to write in goodly sized chunks (such as about 800 1,500 words, depending on the length of the document). Doing so will help the work to flow and you will be more encouraged as you see your word count accumulate. All writers and students have days when they cannot face writing and days (or weeks) in which they put off writing anything. This is quite normal. Do remember, however, that this is a piece of work that carries with it a large percentage of your final marks (especially if it is a double module) and that you will need time to review that which you have written. Set yourself a deadline to finish the first draft at least one month before the dissertation submission date. In that final period, you need time to review your work, have it professionally edited, proofread and marked, and make amendments to it before submission. Remember too that you will need time to have the work bound and to ensure that page margins, font size, the bibliography (and similar constraints) conform to the requirements of your university. You will be surprised as to just how long the ‘finishing off’ of the dissertation will take.

Finally, remember to back up your work. This should be done to the hard drive every few minutes, before leaving your computer (to get coffee, for example), at the end of a writing session, and at the end of the day. At least once a week back up to an external source an external hard drive, the cloud, a memory stick or a disc. For long dissertations consider sending a back up to a location other than that where you computer is normally kept if you are coping with a disaster such as a burglary, you will not want the additional burden of having to re-do possibly years of work. Every day countless students as well as professional writers lose work because we have forgotten to do backups and every time we promise ourselves not to do it again.