Treating the Zombie thesis
Dr Inger Mewburn
@thesiswhisperer
Director of Research Training
5 strategies for going from ‘shitty first draft’ to ‘supervisor ready text’
Attend to structure
Give paragraphs purpose
Define your terms
Strengthen weak themes
More thingification (or less)
Attend to structure,
all the way down...
The macro level structure is usually determined by your discipline and/or topic. Meso level structures exist at paragraph to paragraph level, determining how information and ideas flow. Finally there are micro orderings within a paragraph, how sentences ‘lean’ on each other.
Problem: inappropriate structure
Diagnosis:
Read about the common structures in different disciplines
Compare these with your outline: does your macro structure conform to expectations?
If not, do you have a good reason? Write down your reason and test it out on a critical friend.
Treatment:
Download at least 5 theses in your field, print out the table of contents for each one and compare them to yours. Use these as a model for a thesis map.
Problem: purposeless paragraphs
Diagnosis:
Is there a sentence which summarises the key idea of each paragraph?�If you look at these on their own
Is there a research story emerging?�
Treatment:
Prepare a reverse outline and start revising
Problem: lack of definition work
Diagnosis:
Search for all instances of the word ‘this’* or ‘it’
Ask yourself: am I avoiding explaining something or really making my point?�
Treatment:
Replace ‘this’ or ‘it’ with what ‘this’ actually is
*with thanks to Katherine Firth of Research Voodoo
Themes and Rhemes
The theme of a sentence is before the verb, the rheme is the rest, as this example from Kamler and Thomson’s ‘Helping doctoral students write”:
Careful revision of each thesis chapter increases the likelihood of a good result��The likelihood of a good result increases with careful revision of each thesis chapter
Notice how the theme determines the emphasis of the sentence.
Problem: weak themes
(From Kamler and Thomson’s book ‘Helping doctoral students write’)
Diagnosis:
Make a two column table with ‘theme’ on the left and ‘rheme’ on the right.
Split each sentence around the verb and put the start of the sentence in the left and the rest on the right.
Do the themes emphasize what is most important - i.e. your findings, opinions and ideas?
Treatment:
Rewrite sentences to strengthen the themes
Thingification
“Nominalisation is the process by which verbs in a text are changed into nouns (things)” (Kamler and Thomson, 2014). Nominalisation is one of the key differences between writing and speaking:
Speech: “If you write your thesis quickly you will end up doing a lot of revising work, which will take hours”
�Writing: “Writing your thesis quickly will result in text which needs many hours of revision”
If you want your text to sound more scholarly, increase nominalisation. If you want to make your text more lively, reduce it.
Problem: poorly managed thingification
Diagnosis: Circle all the verbs in a page of your text
Repeat the process on a sample text - do you have significantly more or less?
Use Wordle to explore your word frequencies - do any nominalisations turn up?
Treatments:
Run some of your text through the ‘writer’s diet’ test
Experiment with ‘thingifying’ and ‘unthingifying’ your verbs.
Good luck! Here’s more resources