Thesis Content

• Audience: remember that the people who will read your thesis---including your examiners---may not have a first-hand experience of your field of study. You should therefore write clearly for an educated but non-specialist audience. If you do not help them in their reading, they may be unsympathetic towards you.

• Information needed: you need to give sufficient information so that the reader could repeat what you have done. Make sure that the samples you describe, data you present and/or use etc are cross-referenced to each other and to location. Spell out the procedures you have followed (or that have been followed) in generating the data. And so on. If appropriate, this information can go in appendices.

• Analytical work: make it clear, when presenting analytical work or other data in your thesis, what you did yourself and what has been done by someone else, appropriately referenced. You should include information on the methods used, including an idea of accuracy and precision.

• Photographs and figures: Each photograph (including photomicrographs) should include a scale and its caption a grid reference. Photograph and figure captions should be informative, with salient features pointed out. However, do not simply duplicate what is in the text.

• Honours map: Honours theses based on a particular area should specify the relevant 1:250,000 sheet in their abstract.

• Software copy of thesis: A complete copy of your honours thesis, including all maps, figures and appendices, is required to be deposited on the departmental server. This should be in a platform-independent form, such as Adobe's pdf. This need not be done by the thesis hand-in deadline.

Also some notes regarding honours thesis writing, in addition to the requirements outlined in the “Information for Honours Students” you were given at the beginning of the year:

• Paragraphs should be indented appropriately: after a heading (subheading etc), the first paragraph is not indented, but succeeding paragraphs must be.

• Underlining: typographically speaking, underlining tells the typesetter to set the underlined text as italics. As you can make italics in your word-processing package, use italics and do not underline.

• Datum and data: The former is the singular; the latter the plural e.g. these data.

• Headings hierarchy: Adopt a headings hierarchy in terms of font, font size, and font style, and be consistent in using it.

Roger Powell and Kevin Walsh