代做Dissertation writing guide调试R语言程序
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Your dissertation will need to have the following components , in this order:
1. A title
2. An abstract
3. A table of contents
4. An introduction
5. A literature review
6. A statement of your research questions and, if relevant, hypotheses
7. An outline of your research methods
8. An overview of your results
9. A discussion of the implications of your results
10. A conclusion
11. A reference list
Depending on your topic, your dissertation may also contain:
12. An appendix or multiple appendices
The following sections provide brief information about each of these components.
Your dissertation title should be brief, but comprehensive: it should be a very brief summary of what your research project is about, containing as many keywords (that is, words that might
attract other researchers’ attention) as possible. Avoid vague phrasings, such as starting the title with ‘A study of . ..’ . This is redundant unless you specifically state what type of study you arepresenting. You can use a subtitle if you want, as in the third example.
Good examples:
|
AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION |
OF COOPERATION, EFFORT AND RISK |
IN TASK-ORIENTED DIALOGUE |
type of study phenomenon type of data
|
ACOUSTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH VOT |
IN THE PRODUCTION OF LIBYAN ARABIC LEARNERS OF ENGLISH |
type of study and phenomenon type of data and language
|
L1 TRANSFER IN INTERPRETING NEGATION |
FOR JAPANESE EFL LEARNERS : |
NEGATIVE YES/NO QUESTIONS |
type of study and phenomenon language type of data
A good place to look for further examples is the LinguistList PhD dissertation database. This
also provides an abstract for each dissertation: see
below. Use the search functions to find dissertation abstracts in the area of linguistics that you want to work in.
The abstract should present an overview of your dissertation, briefly covering all of the
subsequent components – that is, briefly motivating the study you have done with reference to previous literature, briefly stating what your research questions are, briefly outlining your
methods, briefly outlining your results and briefly discussing their implications.
The typical length of an abstract is 300 words, and the abstract should never be longer than one page in your dissertation. The abstract should precede the table of contents; it is,as it were,
outside of the main body of the dissertation.
What’s it for? Essentially to help a potential reader decide whether or not they want to read
your whole dissertation, or to give someone who has read your dissertation a quick reminder of the contents. Most journal articles start with an abstract that suits the same purposes; look
carefully at a few to see what language tends to be used.
A good place to look for more example abstracts is the LinguistList PhD dissertation database.
Use the search functions to find dissertation abstracts in the area of linguistics that you want to work in.
Because it needs to coverall main components of your dissertation, including the discussion of your results, it makes sense to write your abstract after you have written most or all of the rest of the dissertation – eventhough it appears first!
The table of contents should list all chapter, section and sub-section headings, with numbers and page references. A partial example, without page references:
1 Introduction. ..
2 Literature review................................................................... ...
2.1 Differences between Chinese and English.....................................................................
2.2 Effects of explicit teaching on second language acquisition.........................................
2.3 Research questions........................................................................................................
3 Methodology.........................................................................................................................
3.1 Participants....................................................................................................................
3.2 Test design....................................................................................................................
3.2.1 Grammaticality judgement task......................................................................
3.2.2 Sentence translation task.....................
3.3 Quantitative analysis.....................................................................................................
4 Results................................................................................................. .
Like the dissertation title, section and sub-section titles should be brief and maximally
informative as to the contents of the section. For chapter titles, you can stick to the generic titles used throughout this document: Literature review, Methodology, Results and soon.
It’sa good idea not to divide sub-sections into further sub-sub-sections: it’s difficult enough for a reader to know where they are in the dissertation structure in, say, section 2.3.4!
Formatting tips
To make a table of contents look good, you can write it as a big table, and then hide the table gridlines. This way you can control the alignment of, for example, page numbers very precisely:
|
1 |
Introduction......................................................................................... |
1 |
|
2 |
Literature review......... |
2 |
Even better is to have your table of contents generated automatically, like the table of contents at the start of this document. To do this in Word, you have to use ‘Styles’ (under the Home tab) to highlight section headings, and switch automatic numbering on. When you’ve done this, you can goto ‘Table of Contents’ under the References tab to insert an automatic table of contents. Look on the internet for more detailed instructions. Once you get the hang of it, you can save
yourself a lot of time in the final stages of preparing your dissertation!
The introduction is the first element of the main body of your dissertation. It’s usually two or three pages long. Its function is to acquaint the reader with your study in a relatively non-
technical way. Like the abstract, the introduction should briefly motivate the study you have done with reference to previous literature, briefly explain what your research questions are, and briefly outline your methods. The introduction should not cover your results in any detail, although you may offer your reader a glimpse by writing something like ‘It will become clear that … ’ or ‘I will argue that …’ . It is a good idea to end the introduction with a brief outline of the rest of the dissertation, summarising what each chapter covers in a sentence or two.
Like the abstract, you should leave writing – or at least finalising – the introduction until last. This chapter is an introduction to your study, but more importantly it’san introduction to your dissertation. You’re in the best position to guide the reader into this when you know exactly what’s in there!
The literature review is an account of what has been published on your dissertation topic by
academic scholars. It is an overview and assessment of the field to which your study is a
contribution. A good literature review tells the reader what is known about the phenomenon you are investigating, and what is yet to be discovered. By doing the first thing, it provides the reader with the background knowledge needed to understand the rest of your dissertation. By doing the second thing, it makes clear why it has been useful to carryout your study. Always keep these two functions of the literature review – instructing the reader and motivating your study – in mind when you write it.
Of course carrying out a thorough review of relevant literature is a crucial part of the research process. An initial review will allow you to fine-tune your research questions, formulate any
hypotheses and decide on appropriate methods. Most likely, you will continue to read relevant literature throughout your project. In particular, your results may lead you in the direction of
literature that you had not considered in designing your study. Late discoveries of literature can change your whole perspective on your study, for example by making clear that what you have been considering an unexpected result was to be expected all along – or by revealing that
someone else has carried out a study that is quite similar to yours. This can be frustrating, but is part of doing research. Note that your written literature review is not a chronological record of your reading: it should accommodate all of your crucial sources, whether you started your
reading with them or only discovered them at the last minute.
The literature review should be more than a list of references: it should present a structured
argument based on a critical evaluation of what you have read in relation to your research
topic. ‘Critical’ means you should identify gaps, apparent contradictions, areas of controversy or uncertainty, and theoretical or methodological weaknesses in previous studies. Being critical
does not mean criticising other people’s work for the sake of it: it means arguing that certain research questions have not yet found a satisfactory answer, either because they haven’t been addressed directly, or because there are reasons to doubt the accuracy of the answers that
have been put forward so far.
‘Structured’ means that there should be a clear logic to the order in which you discuss your
sources. A good idea is to start with the most general literature and gradually build up a more concrete picture of the study you have carried out, and why. Generally it makes sense to split the review up into sections, each addressing a particular area of research that informs your own study: see the example table of contents above.
6. Research questions and hypotheses
One of the literature review’s purposes is to lead the reader up to your research question(s)
and any associated hypotheses: after reading the literature review, the reader should
understand why you are asking the research question(s) you are asking. A good position for
these, then, is right at the end of the literature review, as suggested by the example table of contents above. It is a good idea to repeat them at the start of the methodology chapter, so that you can refer to them in your description of methods, without the reader having to flip
back to another chapter. In general, the more reminders, the clearer your dissertation will be.
If you have multiple research questions, it is fine to use numbers or letters to organise them,
and then refer to those in surrounding text. Make sure that the relationship between questions is clear: in particular, if some are subordinate to others, the numbering should reflect this. For example:
The main research question addressed in this dissertation is whether there is any correlation between implicit and explicit language knowledge on the one hand and language proficiency level on the other. Specifically:
a. Is there any correlation between implicit and explicit language knowledge measured as TGJT and UGJT scores and proficiency measured as a TOEFL score?
b. What is the difference between explicit language knowledge measured as a UGJT score and measured as an MKT score in terms of the correlation with proficiency?
c. Which of implicit and explicit language knowledge is the best predictor of language proficiency?
The methods chapter is an account of how you have addressed your research question or questions,or tested your hypothesis or hypotheses. It generally includes:
● Explanation of the type of data you are using, and how you collected your material
● Presentation of relevant details regarding your participants or data sources
● Explanation of what you measured, counted or analysed, and how you did it
● Explanation of the techniques you used for inferential statistics, if relevant
● Explanation of any theoretical framework your analysis is crucially informed by
● Justification of your method: are alternative methods available, and why is your method particularly appropriate?
Note that in defining and justifying your methodology, you will need to refer both to what you
have done in your study and to what previous studies on similar topics have done. It’s a
common misconception that the methodology chapter should not contain literature references. It should! While in the literature review you use references to previous work to motivate your
research questions, in the methodology chapter you use references to motivate your choice of methods in addressing them.
Your analysis results should take up at least one dedicated chapter. Your aim in this part of your
dissertation is to inform. the reader of your main findings. You should try to do this as clearly and systematically as possible. Keep in mind that the reader is not as familiar with your
research as you are, so the simpler you can make things for the reader, the better. This means you should devote a good amount of time to thinking about how to layout your findings using tables or graphs, which representative data extracts or examples to focus on, and so on.
Generally, results chapters do not contain lengthy discussion of the implications of the research findings: this should go in aseparate, subsequent chapter. However, they should be more than just series of tables or graphs, or unconnected analyses of data, or lists of bullet points: there
should be enough text to remind the reader what you investigated and why, and to make it clear that there is a logical progression in your description of what you found.
If you are doing inferential statistics, find out the customary way of reporting the tests you run, and mix up descriptive and inferential statistics in your discussion: describing a pattern in your data and confirming right away whether it is statistically significant or not is much better than describing the pattern and then leaving the reader guessing for another page or two as to its
significance.
After describing the results of your measurements, counts or other types of analysis, you need to explain what answers they provide to your research questions; whether they confirm your hypotheses; and what the wider implications of your findings are. This is generally done in a
dedicated chapter, although for some qualitative studies ‘results’ and ‘discussion’ cannot easily be separated.
It’sa good idea to start a separate discussion chapter with a return to your research questions, and a brief summary of the findings you have discussed in detail in the preceding chapter. After
this, work your way through your research questions and findings systematically, and address questions such as:
● Are the answers you have found to your research questions expected or unexpected?
● Do the answers confirm or disconfirm findings in other literature?
● Do the answers strengthen or challenge any theoretical ideas put forward in related literature?
● If your findings are unexpected, or they disconfirm findings in other literature, can you offer an account of why they are the way they are (assuming for the sake of argument that your methods have been sound)?
● If your findings challenge existing theoretical ideas, can you offer suggestions as to how they can be accommodated in relevant theoretical frameworks?
Ideally, your discussion chapter revisits all major sources you have cited in your literature
review; this is to show the reader that your findings contribute to the body of work you have
taken as a starting point for your study. As a general rule of thumb, it’sa bad idea to devote a substantial part of your literature review to work that you then leave aside entirely in your
discussion: this generally means that the work is not relevant enough to your own study to
deserve so much attention in the literature review – or that it’s too relevant for you to ignore it in your interpretation of your results.
On the other hand, it is not necessarily a bad idea to introduce references in your discussion
that do not feature in your literature review, in particular in accounting for unexpected findings or in exploring the wider implications of your findings. However, if in interpreting your results
you come across literature references that substantially change your perspective on your study, it is worth consider whether you can accommodate them in your literature review, to return to in your discussion.
After discussing the significance and implications of your findings in detail, it makes sense to close the dissertation with a brief summary of the main points you want the reader to
remember. This can be done in a final section of the discussion chapter (making this a
‘discussion and conclusion’ chapter), or in a separate chapter. The latter will be short, mirroring the introduction.
It’sa good idea to accompany the reiteration of your main findings with a brief evaluation of your study, and any suggestions for future research. Questions to consider here include:
● Do your findings or their interpretation generate any new hypotheses that could be tested in a follow-up study?
● Does your dissertation open up any other avenues for further investigation?
● Does your study have any obvious limitations?
● If you had the opportunity to do your study again, is there anything you would do differently?
Addressing these questions constructively – that is, by doing more than just pointing out that
you didn’t have a lot of time and you would have liked to have had more participants or data – demonstrates critical engagement with the process of doing research. If your interpretation of your findings suggests to you that aspects of your research design have been flawed, but there is no time to rectify things and do the study again, then discussing the flaws explicitly at the end of your dissertation is much better than simply hoping the reader will not think of them.
Your dissertation should contain a complete list of references. Every source that you cite in
your dissertation should be listed in the references. No source that you do not cite should be listed: what is required is a list of references, not a bibliography. All in-text citations and items listed as references must be formatted using Harvard conventions. The Skills@Library website contains very clear guidance on what this entails, so there is no excuse for not following the rules in this area. Also make sure that you understand what the University understands by
‘ plagiarism’, and that you have time to proof-read your dissertation for referencing errors.
Finally, depending on your research topic and design, it may be useful – or even necessary – to give the reader access to some of the materials you have used in or created for the purpose of your research project. If these take up more than a paragraph or two, it makes sense not to
include them in the main text, but present them instead as an appendix or multiple appendices to your dissertation, following the reference list. Some common examples:
● if the research involves participants who were asked to fill in a consent form – a copy of the blank form.
● if the research is based around a survey – a copy of the survey as distributed to the respondents
● if the research is based on your own transcription of data – a complete data transcript.
● if the research is based on transcribed data, whether your own or not – alist of transcription conventions
Note that the appended material is there for completeness and transparency as to how you carried out your research. Usually, the reader is referred to the material once or twice in the main text. If you need to refer the reader to appended material more often, or consulting the
material is crucial for the reader’s understanding of your discussion, it makes sense to
incorporate its crucial parts in your main text: the reader should not have flip back and forth between dissertation chapters and appendices to follow what are talking about.