So, you have written your thesis, have gone through all your sources and are absolutely sure about their relevance and made sure you carefully followed the traditional structure for the papers of this type. However, it doesn’t mean that your job is done – on the contrary, it only just begins, as you have just as important a stage in front of you. Revision, sometimes, takes almost as much time as writing per se, and how well you manage to do it defines to a great extent how the thesis committee is going to accept your work.
So what does revision include? What should you do to ensure your success? Let’s find out.
? Give your thesis time to cool off
Immediately after you’ve finished writing you get a sort of tunnel vision: you tend to miss mistakes and are too tired of your writing, in general, to judge it with the clear head. You have to take a complete break from your thesis for a few days before you get back to it, and reread it in its entirety, slowly and carefully. You will immediately notice many small things you’ve been missing all this time. A good trick here is to change the way your thesis looks: either print it or change the font and its size – this also helps you see the text in a new light.
? Get revising or proofreading service
Many high-quality writing websites like DoMyThesis.net will be happy to provide revision and proofreading services to you: you can both say “Write a thesis for me” or “proofread a thesis for me” when you visit them. Professional proofreading is a good idea because people doing this kind of work for a living know what to look out for and won’t miss things that amateur proofreaders a have the hard time noticing. If you don’t want to spend money, you can always ask a friend to do it for you, but a thesis is a huge assignment, and it may be hard to find somebody ready to dedicate so much time to such a boring task.
? Revise the structure of your thesis
Do all parts of it flow naturally one into another? Are they logically connected between themselves? Is your argumentation coherent and cohesive? Ask yourself these questions before you proceed any further, and if you find the answer to be in negative, take measures to rectify this.
? Don’t use language and sentence structures unacceptable in scientific writing
Slang, contractions, emotionally charged words – all these things have no place in serious scientific texts. When you reread your thesis, make sure you need all of them out before you proceed to any further stages of your revision.
? Avoid using overly complex words and sentence structures
Yes, a thesis is a scientific work, and you should use the language of science when writing it. But this doesn’t mean that you should artificially make your writing overly complex and obtuse. Good scientific writing is always beautiful in its simplicity, as its primary goal is to impart information, not to obfuscate it. If you can replace a long word with a shorter one without losing the overall meaning, do it. If you can break a long and complicated sentence into several smaller and easy-to-understand ones, do it. Eliminate all attempts to sound clever and intellectual where the use of your word choice isn’t necessary.
? Make sure you don’t introduce more than one significant point per paragraph
In order to keep your writing structured and easy to read make sure you maintain a one point per paragraph limit. All your paragraphs should be written in more or less the same fashion: introduction and connection with what came before – the main point – summing up and tying it to the next paragraph. Follow it, and you will never have to think about how to connect different segments of your paper, as they will naturally flow one into another.
Of course, there are many other aspects to revision, but this article is too short to mention them all. We hope that even these tips will give you some idea of what you should do to achieve an optimal result.