Advice for thesis preparation

My thesis seemed like a monumental undertaking at the time of writing.  I started, scrapped and restarted three times, over two years before I gained enough momentum to get that all done.  I was still waiting for a lot of stuff to come together, mind you.  It was not exactly easy

If your grad department lets you compile a publication-based thesis, you're lucky.  For everyone else, I hope the following antedote would help all aspiring writers to get this done and get on with real life (quickly, hopefully)!

Don't panic. Often, you don't know what is missing in your research until after your start writing.  When you have one of those moments (and you will have many), take the time to put the missing pieces together.  You will become more confident with your work and, if not, you will at least know what to do to for improvement.

Use LaTeX.  LaTeX handles all the formatting for you, so you don't have to worry about your figures jumping all over the place.  For references and equations, its BibTeX and math mode will save you a lot of time and mouse clicks than their WYSIWYG alternatives.  Besides, it doesn't cost you a dime to pick up the legal version.  The lack of proofing tools might be a problem, but LaTeX front-ends like Texniccenter usually come with a spell checker.  It's not going to be easy learn, but you will be glad you LaTeX'd your thesis.

Get to the point.  You want your readers to know exactly what your problem is, what you did, and what your findings are.  So your introduction and conclusions/recommendations chapters should be short and direct.  I am talking about less than 10 pages each.  Literature review contains everything under your universe, and no one cares if you can't organize it.  Chapters on your research should contain just enough detail to guide your readers along, but not so much as to detract them.  All other interesting but not directly relevant information can be placed in the appendices.

Think hard about the scope.  When you are very confident about your research direction, invest the time to write down your thesis scope.  These few paragraphs will be a reminder of what you should be doing for the rest of your degree.  If you are on the right track, your scope would only need minor adjustments at most.

Use B/W figures whenever possible.  Unless it's a thesis on Visual Arts, chances are, your thesis will be printed or photocopied on B/W at some point, very likely by your committee.  B/W figures are much easier to read and reproduce.  In addition, it also forces you to look for ways to present the data effectively.  After all, admit it, you used color because you just wanted to copy and paste what your favorite charting program spat out.

Simple language.  If you know already what you want to write, then jot it down right away instead of toiling over a better way to write it.  It might not sound very elegant, but it got the point across, and (most of the time) that was all that matters.  If you still don't like how you wrote it, you will come back to it, which brings me to the next point ...

Proofread your thesis backwards.  A neat little trick I learned from my high school English teacher.  Start from the last page, and work your way back to the first.  This forces you to go through everything, and you will catch a lot of typos and grammatical errors.  You will also have the opportunity to rigorously examine your writing.

Save acknowledgement for last.  Having the acknowledgement page written out first gives you a false sense of accomplishment.  You will slack off, or wasting time embellishing this page.  When the going gets tough, the temptation will be there to write it.  Without this page to distract you, you will find yourself more focused, more motivated (maybe) to devote your energy on other parts of the thesis.