Tips on preparing a masters thesis

Flamed Diving

So, its about that time of year (or a little premature), so where can I find a site or thread with hints/tips on how to prepare, or more importantly, organise your thesis from start to finish?

Ostrom

Patrick Dunleavy's authoring a phd gives outlines for formatting which are applicable. He talks about constructing and presenting arguments, chapter formatting, order - general to all academic theses. Very well written and a good place to start. Depends on the topic also, whats your area? If you can stomach a sociologist, Howard Becker has written some great books on writing style

Flamed Diving

I am doing an MA in Economics. So it will be a mathsy/statsy paper, but also with social science style sections.

Roro4Brit

From my exp, it all depends on who you get as a supervisor. I know schools have general guidelines for content, structure etc....but the wordcount, format, and structure of my MSc thesis ended up being quite different from some of my colleagues. Nobodys was really the same...so I'd suggest as soon as you get your supervisor, grill him/her on what they are expecting...

For a general intro and advice there is this book by Rowena Murray, its on google books and its simply written...

http://books.google.com/books?id=H2htzdy-z_wC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false

But its generic so maybe source one specific to your field.

Good luck with it!

Time Magazine

For an economics thesis, it's pretty simple.

1. Introduction. Two or three pages. An extended abstract. What you're doing, why it's interesting, why you're adding to the literature, outline of main results, a paragraph that will summarise your conclusion
2. Literature Review. Outline how the literature has gotten to where it is today. Critique and praise in appropriate measure. Take about five recent papers and critique the shit out of them. Thump home why your paper is better. As a rule-of-thumb, name-drop about twenty papers and give a couple paragraphs/half a page each to about five.
3. Economic Theory. Here's my model, here's what it does. Here's the technical distinction between it and Diving et al (2008)
4. Data Description. Where you got it. Summary stats. Distributions. Outliers. Comparison with population at large, if applicable.
5. Econometrics. Be tedious. The grader knows what a Durbin-Watson is, but doesn't know that you know it. Explain what the test it, why you're using it, what this implies for your results. Three rules: test, test, test.
6. Conclusion. Restate what you did. Restate why it's different. Restate why this is new. Restate why this is interesting. Outline the shortcomings, but conclude that you've added something useful.
7. Appendix. Your do-file, the results of the 100 auxiliary regressions you ran, etc.

I found some good tips here. For style, use short sentences. Beyond that, just accept that John Cochrane, as much of a prick he is, is usually right. My thesis (back in the day, *tear*) read exactly seven times better after re-writing the entire thing paragraph by paragraph, following his advice. One killer piece of advice is:

The Chicago Prick wrote:

It is usually the case that most good writers find that everything before the “that” should be deleted from a sentence. Read that sentence again starting at “Everything”: it’s true, isn’t it? “It should be noted that” is particularly obnoxious. Just say what you want to say. “It is easy to show that” means that it isn’t. Search for “that” in the document to get rid of these.

There are 13 pages in that document and only about two things I disagree with. Use it while writing up instead of having to revise everything with only a week to go.