Research: Thesis Guide
General Guidelines for the Biology Thesis Writer
The first and most critical step in writing a senior thesis is to think about the people who will be reading and evaluating your thesis. Your challenge is to present your work at the level that any scientist can understand: to strike a balance between over-explaining and under-explaining. You don't want to report on each and every experiment, each detail of each procedure. On the other hand, you don't want your readers to grapple with a conundrum a non-specialist has no hope of unraveling. Your job is to distinguish what is important to explain and what should be self-evident to an educated scientist.
Your thesis should have a cogent introduction to the field of study. Your hypothesis, materials and methods should be presented with clearly documented data and results. Your figures, charts and diagrams should be properly labeled, with sources acknowledged. The visual elements in your thesis should be a mirror of the written elements: each should be able to stand on its own to tell your story. The conclusions are the most important aspect of your study: they summarize the significance of your work. They present your findings in the perspective of the larger pictures to be explored, further questions to be asked, and directions for further study.
How long should the senior thesis be? It should be as long as is appropriate for the subject: If it is too short, it will be impossible for the reader to see the importance and meaning of the work; the reader will not be able to discern if the student really understands the material, if the student sees the larger picture, or if the student really understands what story the experiments are telling. If it is too long, the reader will be bogged down in a miasma of "core dumps," and will face the same problems in evaluating the work. In fact, the typical honors biology thesis is 30-50 pages, with figures, footnotes and diagrams, although this number is not a hard and fast rule.
Miscellaneous Writing Tips
- The writing of the thesis should be your own work. Thus, you should not borrow large chunks of text from published or submitted papers unless you wrote it yourself
- The active voice is generally preferable to the passive voice.
- "I" versus "We"? Use "I" if you are referring to work done by yourself. Use "We" if you are referring to work done with others.
- Figures and tables should appear close to where they are discussed in the text.
- Acknowledgements should appear after the title page. Detailed acknowledegments are particularly important if you are reporting on collaborative work. You should set out in brief what parts of the work were done by yourself alone, what parts of the work were done in collaboration with others, and what parts were contributed by other members of the group.
- Use the author-year method of in-text citation, e.g. Watson and Crick (1953) proposed that DNA formed a double-helix, or, The nucleotide bases are on the inside of the double helix and the phosphates on the outside (Watson and Crick, 1953).
updated 11/21/07