What Should a Dissertation Include?

If you are just starting out writing your dissertation, you should first make sure you have a good plan. Here, I will lay out the main areas of a thesis with suggestions for each section. You may have to add or omit sections mentioned here depending on your particular subject. However, this should give you a good idea of where to start!

Title Page

Each university will have its own requirements for a title page. You may need to add a standard piece of text that states that all the work is original, or you may need to include a word count.

Table of Contents

It’s best to include a dynamic table of contents as this is easiest to update, should you have any last minute alterations to make. Once you have made the alterations, you can simply right click on the table of contents and select ‘update page numbers’. Your table will then be automatically updated with the new page numbers.

Abstract

This should be no longer than 200 words and should be written last. An abstract should function as a quick synopsis of your entire dissertation and should be able to stand alone.

Introduction

Your introduction should be written in the future tense and should set out what you are going to investigate in your thesis. It should provide a brief background to the topic and outline any gaps in knowledge that your work fills. It should also include a hypothesis and outline what the following chapters will contain.

Literature Review

This should provide a more in-depth review of the current literature on the topic you are researching. You should aim to give a full picture of the current debate without going too deeply into any one author’s argument. Your aim here is to evaluate the other texts you discuss, and to draw out the main lines of contention.

Methodology

Here you should set out your method of researching the subject. If you are studying a scientific subject, you will need to show how you made your experiments fair tests. You should aim here to answer the five key questions: ‘why’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ you did what you did to get your results.

Results

Here you should present the results of your tests. If necessary, you may also need to include charts or diagrams of your results. You can comment briefly on the significance of your results here but the meat of your discussion should be reserved for the following section.

Discussion

Here, you should discuss your results more fully, explaining what they mean and what their meaning is in a wider context. You should also explain any unexpected results.

Conclusions

Here you should show how your research aims have been achieved. You can also comment on the limitations of your study and make suggestions for further research.