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follow, go to your departmental library and examine the theses submitted by previous graduates of the department,
especially those who have gone on to fame and fortune. Perhaps you will be able to detect a common flavor.
Whatever ploys worked in the past for others are likely to work for you now.

Generally, a thesis should be written in the style of a review paper. Its purpose is to review the work that led to your
degree. Your original

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data (whether previously published or not) should of course be incorporated, buttressed by all necessary experimental
detail. Each of several sections might actually be designed along the lines of a research paper (Introduction, Materials
and Methods, Results, Discussion). Overall, however, the parts should fit together like those of a monographic review
paper.
Be careful about the headings. If you have one or several Results sections, these must be your results, not a mixture of
your results with those of others. If you need to present results of others, to show how they confirm or contrast with
your own, you should do this within a Discussion section. Otherwise, confusion may result, or, worse, you could be
charged with lifting data from the published literature.
Start with and work from a carefully prepared outline. In your outline and in your thesis, you will of course describe
in meticulous detail your own research results. It is also customary to review all related work. Further, there is no bar
in a thesis, as there may be in state-of-the-art review papers, to hoary tradition, so it is often desirable to go back into
the history of your subject. You might thus compile a really valuable review of the literature of your field, while at
the same time learning something about the history of science, which could turn out to be a most valuable part of your
education.

I recommend that you give special attention to the Introduction in your thesis for two reasons. First, for your own
benefit, you need to clarify what problem you attacked, how and why you selected that problem, how you attacked it,
and what you learned during the course of your studies. The rest of the thesis should then flow easily and logically
from the Introduction. Second, because first impressions are important, you do not want to lose your readers in a
cloud of obfuscation right at the outset.

When to Write the thesis

You would be wise to begin writing your thesis long before it is due. In fact, when a particular set of experiments or
some major facet of your work has been completed, you should write it up while it is still fresh in your mind. If you
save everything until the end, you may find that you have forgotten important details. Worse, you may find that you
just don't have time to do a proper writing job. If you have not done much writing

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previously, you will be amazed at what a painful and time-consuming process it is. You are likely to need a total of 3
months to write the thesis, on a relatively full-time basis. You will not have full time, however, nor can you count on
the ready availability of your thesis advisor. Allow 6 months at a minimum.

Certainly, the publishable portions of your research work should be written as papers and submitted if at all possible
before you leave the institution. It will be difficult to do this after you leave the institution, and it will get more
difficult with each passing month.

Relationship to the Outside World

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