Many people find writing papers, reports, and theses difficult. There are many excellent Internet resources on research and how to write dissertations and theses.  A selection is given in the web links section of the main Dairy Science and Food Technology website. I do not intend to duplicate these good resources but to provide access to a simple yet powerful tool (the Thesis Tutor) that may be able to help with the writing element.

Those individuals who appear to have excellent writing skills and can apparently produce reports easily tend to be well organised, have good planning skills, think strategically and 'know what they are doing'. They generally commit significant amounts of time to writing and many do not publicise how much time they have spent.

Research supervisors and line managers have all read reports that are:  unstructured, tortuous to read and lack any strategic direction.  All too often, students submitting such work are given minimal feedback and simply told to rewrite and resubmit. Because some supervisors are used to reading poor quality first draft reports, they sometimes do not read the initial drafts, preferring to wait until the student has reached the point where he/she feels that they can not get their work any better before making comments. This is not uncommon as far as MSc/MPhil/PhD students are concerned in some institutions particularly with very busy supervisors!   This constant submission and resubmission of work creates problems for everyone and can leave the student with a bad experience of research and of higher education generally.

Students and others who feel uncomfortable with writing initially tend to behave in an uncritical, spontaneous manner. They  virtually ‘pour out’ unorganised thoughts and record these in their report. While this behaviour is a particular problem for undergraduates, who have less exposure to structured writing, through reading the research literature, it is also a problem for some MSc and PhD students.

This problem can be resolved  relatively easily particularly if the student has access to help through a specialised writing support unit. Part of the solution is for the student to spend more time planning what is to be written, fine-tuning that plan and ideally discussing the plan with the research supervisor before starting the writing process.

The Thesis Tutor tool provided here may prove useful in helping to structure your writing. Ideally the software should be used in conjunction with a tutor or research supervisor but it can be used as a self help tool.

The Thesis Tutor comprises two sections, a ‘whiteboard’ where you can list your ideas concerning the content of your report and a content planner arranged in table format.

You may use the whiteboard function to list the main areas or ideas that you wish to explore.  At the same time think about each of these areas and see if you can break them down to sub areas.  I have included an example from the literature review of an MSc thesis; this is available in the help section of the application. Later you can copy and paste your ideas from the whiteboard into the content planner.  When you have completed this process, you can export your plan (I have also included a completed plan from the same MSc literature review; this is also available in the help section of the application.) to a spreadsheet and start to write your review or discussion.

Before using the tool, it is essential that you have clear aims and objectives for your work and have a good awareness of how reports should be written. 

You are required to correctly reference any ideas, images, data, reference lists you have used which are not your own. This also includes data and information you have obtained from electronic sources including the internet. Failure to give credit to the work of others can result in you being accused of plagiarism which if proven could result in no marks being given for your work or suspension from your course or even expulsion from your College or university. The reference wizard can be used to help format references.  

It is important that you allow sufficient time for proofreading and editing your work. The dictionaries that come with most standard word processing software contain few scientific terms and are of limited value when it comes to scientific editing. sciPROOF, an innovative scientific editing plugin to Microsoft Word, can markedly reduce the time spent on proofreading.

There are a range of formulae that can be used to assess the readability of written text.  While these all have limitations, judicious use of several ‘readability' predictors can improve the clarity of writing of articles, theses, reports and possibly dissertations. You can check the readability of your work using the Dairy Science and Food Technology 'readability' calculator .

This application took many months to develop and is still being ‘fine-tuned’; I have had a few reports of problems using Firefox as a browser and would appreciate any feedback. The application will eventually be relocated to a dedicated thesis support site where users will have access to tutors.  In the meantime users of the Dairy Science and Food Technology website are free to use this application.  To restrict commercial use registration is required and will enable 'hassle free' use for 30 days.  After this time you will encounter a ‘nag screen’ at logon. 

I hope you find the application helpful.

Dr Michael Mullan