How to Get Motivated for Thesis Writing
By Amanda Groesbeck
Writing is one of the most challenging tasks any person will undertake. It requires thoughtfulness, logic, strong organizational skills, a facility with the language, and a sharp focus. Of course, nowadays there is an essay writing service which helps to each student in every writing problem. Fortunately, if you want to do it by yourself, these are all things that can be introduced into one’s writing without too much difficulty. With that in mind, the following paper will list three things – preparatory research, a clear focus, and thinking “meta-cognitively” – that will each help you overcome the difficulties associated with the thesis writing process.
Do the Research First
Preparation is the foundation for success – be it in school or in the workplace. Simply put, you need to do plenty of reading before you even start your thesis; after all, if you take the time to read extensively on your subject, you will have a pretty good idea – after a few months, at any rate – of what areas of a subject have been dealt with at length by the scholarly material and what areas have not been dealt with sufficiently. Armed with this information, you can find topic areas that are interesting at the same time as you uncover questions that no one else has thought to answer. With professors constantly on the look-out for graduate papers that are fresh and insightful, taking the road less-traveled is a terrific way of making your thesis stand out from everybody else’s.
Have a Clear Focus from the Start
When you write a thesis, you are basically trying to explicate something for your readers. Needless to say, if your thesis is clearly-defined and narrow, the task of explaining anything becomes much easier. Not least of all, you have the luxury of leaving out items that fall outside the specific focus of your thesis sentence. As one can well-imagine, over the course of researching a thesis, being able to leave redundant or superfluous things out of your note-taking is critical to making the entire writing process easier and even more enjoyable. Beyond that, if your thesis is narrowly-focused, it allows you to explore in greater depth particular concepts or phenomena that are relevant to your topic – and that is critical because depth and detail are two of the things that separate upper-level theses or dissertations from poor or mediocre ones. With the preceding in mind, here are some exercises that can be undertaken to help a writer narrow and/or clarify his or her focus.
Write About What Interests You
As much as anything else, you need to write about something that actually engages your interest; if the subject holds out no intrigue for you, then your research will be half-hearted, your writing will not be engaging and, most significantly of all, you won’t (likely) take the time to come up with a thoughtful thesis that really strikes at the heart of a topic or addresses important questions. A good question to ask yourself right at the start of the thesis writing process is this one: “Why am I bothering to take the time to earn a graduate degree in this field?” In a related vein, you’ll do well to also ask yourself this question: “What big questions attracted me to this field in the first place? What are the things I want to learn about?” Investing your research with personal meaning is the first step towards writing about the things that matter to you.
Prioritize Your Questions
Every bit as important as writing about things that matter, you need to make an effort to prioritize the questions you want answered. The reason for this is simple: if you prioritize questions and lines of inquiry, you will be sure to address the most important things in the greatest detail at the same time as the most pressing items up for debate become the core of your thesis. All in all, prioritization is a major part of making your research and writing experiences smooth and untroubled.
When You Write, Ask Yourself: “Why Am I Taking the Time to Write This Stuff Down?”
When are asked about it, many graduate students who encountered difficulties writing their theses have said that the biggest problem they faced was the fact that they forgot about carefully assessing the validity and importance of everything they were writing down. To put it another way, a lot of first-time thesis writers get so caught up in writing about one thing or another that they start going on tangents which distract them from their basic thesis sentence while leading them down dimly-lit pathways that muddy the focus of their paper, frustrate their readers, and suggest that they do not have a strong grasp on the subject matter. Given how destructive all of this can be to a final grade, every student who is trying to craft a smart and well-polished thesis owes it to him or herself to write each sentence with this simple question in mind: “Why am I taking my time writing about this item?” Put another way, “What am I trying to accomplish by including this sentence or this paragraph or this section in the paper?”
If you approach a part of your thesis critically and cannot answer questions like the two posed above, then there is a good chance that the section in question is redundant or a waste of time. Asking questions all the time is crucial to good thesis writing and is all part of thinking “meta-cognitively”; in other words, you need to think about your own thinking and writing if you want your thinking and writing to be at their best.
To close, if you can follow these simple instructions, you can make the thesis writing process a fun and successful endeavor that will help you achieve your ultimate scholastic goals.