Writing Your Master′s Thesis

From A to Zen

Lynn P. Nygaard

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473965546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Are you looking to find your voice, hone your writing tactics, and cultivate communication skills with impact?

Using real-world cases, student vignettes, and reflective questions, Lynn leads you through the A to Zen of the writing process, building your confidence as well as developing your skills.

Find out how to:

• Understand yourself, your audience, and your project, so you better understand your role in communicating research
• Choose a question and plan an appropriate design
• Build a foundation of ethics and background research into your writing practice
• Find your own writing (life)style
• Work with your supervisor, so you can get the best from the relationship
• Navigate structure, arguments, and theory, for deeper critical engagement
• Contextualize your research and maximize its impact.

Going beyond the standard 'how to survive' advice, this inspiring writing guide empowers you to develop the voice, tone, and critical engagement required for you to thrive at Master's level

SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, resources and videos on study success!

1 Your Master’s Thesis and You Moving Towards Academic Zen

• a Writing as a relationship between you and the reader
• b Understanding yourself: What do you want from this?
• c Understanding your audience: What do your readers expect?
• d When a rose isn’t a rose: Variations in the genre
  • i The interdisciplinary degree
  • ii The professional degree
  • iii The industry-based study
• e What a difference a place makes: Cultural and disciplinary differences
• f Coming in from the outside: English as an additional language
• g Organization of this book

‘Zen’ and ‘academic writing’ are not normally said in the same breath – let alone experienced in the same universe. Most people would say that writing their thesis was as un-Zen-like as it is possible to get. That’s because we usually think of Zen as a state of blissful relaxation. The only person I know who was blissfully relaxed while writing his thesis had copious amounts of medicinal assistance, and he is probably still sitting in some corner of Berkeley, staring peacefully at his unfinished manuscript. That’s not what I mean by Zen. What I am talking about here is enlightenment – the kind that is based on simplicity and intuition, and direct experience with the world. And it’s not only possible to achieve this kind of Zen, it’s necessary if you want to get more out of your thesis than just the ability to say you survived it.

It’s tempting to go into survival mode when you are faced with something like a Master’s thesis: it’s going to be difficult, but you’ll never have to do again, so hunkering down and powering through it as quickly as possible looks like a good strategy. On the other hand, no matter what you intend to do afterwards, writing is likely to be a big part of it. Writing a Master’s thesis offers you the opportunity to develop skills you can carry with you wherever life takes you: how to organize and plan a project, how to think critically, how to read a large amount of material and make sense of it, and how to write something that is intentionally targeted at a specific audience in a specific context for a specific purpose.

If you want to continue in academia, and you want your career to be personally satisfying, coming to grips with writing and your relationship to it is essential. Academic life at all levels revolves around research and writing – doing it, reading it, and teaching it. Weekends and holidays are often less about having time off from writing, and more about having time to write without interruption from students or colleagues. If you don’t understand the purpose of all this writing, it is hard to feel any sense of fulfilment. And if you feel unsure of yourself, it is hard to feel any joy. But if what you are doing feels meaningful, and you know what you are doing, then spending a few hours of your holiday polishing a manuscript will not feel like torture. (And perhaps more important, if you know what you are doing, then you will only need a few hours to do it and your holiday will not be completely ruined.) The more that the writing you do feels like it is yours – where you feel in control of both the process and the product – the more satisfying it becomes. If you want a career in academia, this is the state you want to be in.

Thus in this book, I use the concept of Zen to mean the intuitive insight that comes from understanding what it is you want to do with your writing and why. This means understanding that academic writing is always a matter of asking a question grounded in an academic discussion, and supporting your answer to that question with reasons and evidence. It also means understanding that the way you frame that answer, what counts as support for it, and how much you need to explain will depend on who will be reading it and what you are trying to achieve. This does not (unfortunately) mean that every moment you spend writing will be filled with deep meaning and profound joy, but it does mean that you will be able to say, ‘I get what I’m supposed to be doing – and why’.

Knowing what you are aiming for with your writing is not the same thing as knowing what you are doing every single moment. Many scholars, even at the professor level, quite regularly feel like they have no idea what they are doing; they are afraid they don’t know nearly as much as they should know, that their accomplishments are just a matter of luck, and that they do not deserve to be where they are. Regardless of how much they have achieved, they can’t shake the feeling that they do not belong. This is what is known as ‘Impostor Syndrome’. Feeling as if you don’t know enough is almost inevitable in academia: by definition, researchers quite literally re-search – exploring the unknown, and sometimes the unknowable. What makes something original is that we push the boundaries of what has been done before, which means that at times we just have to make it up as we go along – not sure whether we have chosen the best approach or the most correct way to interpret something. To thrive in academia, or at least survive, you need to start getting used to the idea that not only do you not know everything, but you will never know everything, and you will always be wondering if there is some better way to do the things you do. Some self-doubt is healthy: it makes you think twice about what you write, and helps you develop your critical thinking abilities. But too much self-doubt will paralyse you. A basic intuitive understanding of what you are doing, combined with the ability to think through the demands of your particular situation, should give you the confidence to think, ‘I may not know enough right now, but I know what I need to do to figure it out’.

This book aims to help you better understand the task that lies before you when you write a Master’s thesis – both the process you are going through and the product you need to deliver – and how this all fits into the larger picture of academic writing and knowledge production. Rather than seeing the Master’s thesis as something to get over with as quickly as possible, this book sees it as an essential step in your development as an independent researcher and academic writer. The focus is on what you can be learning now that will help you build an intuitive understanding of writing and research that should not only help you feel more confident as a student, but also better prepare you for the kind of writing you will do afterwards, whether you choose to continue in academia or not.

The audience for this book is anyone writing a Master’s thesis in the social sciences. It is aimed primarily at those writing within one academic discipline, but it also discusses challenges for those writing an interdisciplinary thesis, a professional thesis, or an industry-based study. The point of departure is an Anglo-Saxon style of writing, and as such this book will be particularly relevant for students in North America, Western Europe, and Australia. Since one of the main aims of this book is to explain why we do things the way we do, I also hope this book will be helpful for students coming from different disciplinary or geolinguistic contexts who are having to grapple with expectations different from what they are used to.

The remainder of this introductory chapter explores in more detail the conversational nature of academic writing and the specific genre of the Master’s thesis, the kind of variations you might experience, and the organization of the rest of this book.

a Writing as a Relationship Between you and the Reader

When you can see someone – when you can register their facial expressions, when you can learn something about the way they think just by looking at them – it is much easier to say what you want to say because you automatically (and almost unconsciously) tailor your argument to suit that person. This is very hard to do if you cannot see them, or even envision them in your head. Likewise, it is much easier to write something if you know what it will be used for. Imagine right now that you are asked to write a 200-word autobiographical statement but you are not told why. What should you put in there? Should you focus on your academic achievements? What about your professional background? Should you say something about where you live? Your hobbies? Imagine your frustration if you decide to play it safe and just mention your academic background, then your piece appears in a pamphlet emphasizing the cultural diversity of your workplace – and you didn’t mention that you speak four languages.

Writing is a form of communication. It involves more than just the writer: audience and context matter too. When you write academically, you are not simply typing up some results from your research, downloading your thoughts onto paper, or composing grammatically flawless sentences. You are communicating with a particular audience in a particular situation, which means understanding what you want to say as well as how to say it so your readers will respond the way you hope they will. Brilliance may be in the eye of the beholder – but it’s your job to make them see.

Figure 1.1 Getting to thesis Zen: Getting to thesis Zen means striking the right balance between what you want to do, what you are able to do given your research design, and what your reader (who is also your evaluator) expects from you.

Your research skills will help you find the buried treasure; but your communication skills will help others see its value. Explain badly, and all they will see is a dusty, broken old urn; explain well, and they will see history, a missing piece of our heritage, and a vital clue to understanding how people lived two thousand years ago. Looking at your screen and wondering ‘Is that introduction long enough? Do I have an appropriate number of paragraphs?’ misses the point: you have the right number of paragraphs when you have said what you need to say to the audience you want to reach, in the way you want to reach them. (See Figure 1.1.)

b Understanding Yourself: What Do You Want From This?

Reaching your audience successfully depends on how you define success, which means knowing what is important to you. Individual writers vary tremendously when it comes to what they fear, what they desire, what they feel they are good at, and what feels meaningful to them. When it comes to writing a thesis, some people just want the external approval and the degree that comes with it. Others want to feel that they have created something uniquely theirs. Some find writing painful and fear ‘getting it wrong’. Others want to play with words and ‘challenge the genre’. Think for a minute about who you are and what you want. You may even want to jot down your thoughts about the following questions:

• What brings you joy? Collaborating with others? Exploring the freedom of your own thoughts? Starting a new project? Finishing something?
• What feels meaningful to you? Saving the world? Solving an intellectual puzzle? Exploring the unknown? Fixing a practical problem?
• What do you feel you are good at? Understanding what others are saying? Seeing significance where others do not? Thinking of new ways to do something, or applying old knowledge in new ways?
• What worries you the most? The prospect of an insecure future? The possibility that you might not have anything important or original to contribute? Being wrong? Being overlooked?
• What interests you? If you were walking through a crowded place, overhearing snippets of other people’s conversations, what conversation would tempt you to stop, listen, and maybe even say something?
• What do you imagine yourself doing when you finish your thesis? Continuing on to a doctoral degree? Working in the corporate world? Providing services in the public sector?

All of these thoughts and feelings will – consciously or unconsciously – affect the choices you make as a student researcher and writer. If what makes you happy is to have things under control (including having a secure source of income), the choices you make about your research and writing should probably be pragmatic and aimed at allowing you to finish on time. But if you want to contribute an original idea to a complex academic discourse, then you will probably be willing to take more risks. Finishing on time might be less important to you than creating something you can be proud of. Because the definition of successful communication depends on your achieving what you want to achieve, knowledge about what you really want is essential.

And keep in mind that iden...