Graduation thesis

The posts here follow the five-chapter structure most departments expect: introduction, literature review and model, methodology, results, and conclusions with implications. Each chapter gets its own post covering what it has to contain, how to write it, the mistakes a committee reliably catches, and a few sentence patterns you can put your own figures into.

There are also posts on choosing a topic that fits your field, writing an abstract, presenting tables and figures so they can be read without the surrounding paragraph, citing in APA, and preparing for the defence. Anything that involves running numbers lives in the SPSS and SmartPLS categories, so the posts here can stay on how a result becomes prose.

A taught master's dissertation raises the bar on originality and on how far the model has to justify itself, but the chapter-by-chapter advice here still applies to one.

Where to start. With no topic yet, read the post on choosing one within your field, and the post on what makes a topic small enough to finish in a single term. With a topic settled, read the five-chapter overview so you know what each chapter owes the reader, then the post on chapter one, which is the chapter a committee reads most closely and students write most quickly. The posts on APA citation and on presenting tables are worth reading before you start writing rather than during revision, because retrofitting either one costs more than doing it right the first time. Leave the post on preparing for the defence until the last two weeks.