How To Write A First-Class Dissertation in 4 WEEKS | INCLUDING EDITABLE TEMPLATE

hey everyone and welcome back to my channel if you are new here my name is Amina and in today's video we are going to be going through how you can write a first class dissertation in just a matter of a few weeks and I'm gonna say four weeks because I think that is pretty realistic to be able to write a strong first class visitation in today's video I'm going to be going through the structure of the dissertation the different chapters and the different sections that you need to include a few top tips about each of those chapters as well and also I'm going to be sharing with you a perfect blank Word document template and that you can download with the link down below and includes everything you need to give you that starting point for you to start writing your dissertation so if you want to see more videos like this then don't forget to press the Subscribe button to see more from me and yeah let's get right into it so I know that this is the time this is December now I know that citations typically tend to start around the January time Point um so the last sort of semester of University and now is the time when you are probably thinking about the title what you're going to be writing about maybe you're doing a bit of research and you're going to start writing a bit later on so it's a really good time now to know what to expect and like kind of preempt what are the things that you're going to be including in your dissertation and dissertations are worth so much if you're in your final year of University it's probably worth a good chunk sometimes even 50 something even 100 of your final year mark so it is really important that you're taking the time to not just rush it at the last minute but actually take time to make sure that all the sections I've done really really well so let's start off by going through the organization and the structure of what a dissertation looks like and for this I'm going to be sharing my screen so you can see everything over here for to see the structure and this is actually a template that I have uh developed myself and like I said the link will be down below so you're more than welcome to go and download it's got all the top tips there as well so let's go through and look at every single chapter that you need to include in your dissertation okay so let's start off with the title page so you need a title page which obviously includes your title it includes your name your year and the year it is now or even like the fact that you're a 30th student the word count and look out for any other details that you might need to include in this as well so that also could include like your student ID number um sometimes the university requires different things at the front of your title page just make sure that you're checking the requirements of your University that it matches what is actually on your title page because these are things that will lose you marks and other things little things that mean that you won't get a first okay so moving on to the next page the next page is our contents page and this is the contents page that includes all the chapters and the sub chapters of your dissertation so as you can see here we have the Declaration which I'll go through in a second the abstract the introduction materials and methods results discussion conclusion then you've got your supplementary Parts which are the list of tables list of figures lists of charts abbreviations and by the way these are things that people always forget to include but they are what is going to make your dissertation look like a PhD thesis because this is how you would present your PhD thesis and then obviously your appendix as well so including all of these things in this order just means that you have like a very concise um plan and a very concise like set of um chapters so moving on you have your declaration as well so the Declaration essentially says that this is original work I haven't plagiarized and I am this is you know I'm saying that I've done all this work myself so I've also left a bit of a comment here saying that if you have collaborated with anyone else you should really include that like this work has been done in conjunction with this person and that's also important to um declare there too then moving on you have the abstract so the abstract I have a ton of videos about the abstract so if you want to um go into more depth about that you can um and yeah abstract is like a good like 200 to 300 word summary about what you've done then the next thing is the introduction so the introduction typically includes a literature review which forms the body of your dissertation which forms like the background showing that you understand like the the literature and the feel that you're working in and it's it's one of the kind of biggest parts of your dissertation and also the most challenging I would say um then you have a research question also a hypothesis the hypothesis is actually states that you this is what you're doing so I think if I do this thing this thing's going to happen so that's what your hypothesis is then moving on you have your material and methods that this is where you'd include any experiments that you're doing your analysis your um your stats your procedure your inclusion criteria exclusion criteria all of that good stuff is included in this section then you have your results so think of it like a little story you've given your background you then say what the method is you then say what the results are and so here you would have like results depending on how many results sub results you have this would be three headings four headings five headings then you have your discussion section so this is where you would say um you'd go into more depth so your methods and your results are typically just like descriptive then your discussion is a lot more analytical and critical and your conclusion of course and then you've got your list of tables as I said list of figures list of charts and abbreviations and then finally obviously your references which I also have a link here for a video so this template I've done um quite I think quite in depth took me quite a long time actually to get all together and essentially what it includes is a hyperlink for all of these chapters in the contents page here so what you can do is once you've like included that information you've edited it you've you know changed the titles maybe the subheadings whatever you can very easily just refresh and what it does is it refreshes a contents page for you and it means that everything is aligned in terms of the page numbers and like your titles and headings and everything so like I said that's available to download down below so let's move on and talk about how you would actually organize and how you're going to actually write your dissertation so I would always recommend starting from the methods and materials section because this is the one where you usually would have the methods already set out it's probably one of the first things that you start to think about so you you can write those things down they typically don't tend to change that much once you've picked your your participants and once you've picked your like research group or once you've picked your method that tends to be quite um you know stable secure and that doesn't really change that much so you can start writing your methods of materials really as soon as possible and then I would recommend going on to writing the literature review so this is something that you kind of will do in conjunction so whilst you're doing your research and you're looking at your methods and you're trying to get some results you can also obviously read some papers and gather those papers you might have like a reading list and you've got you written down like the sources what their methods are what the limitations are what's missing from their research and the critical discussion and kind of put those together into a literature review so you're writing your methods and whilst you're doing that you're writing your literature review or your reading papers at least to get yourself started then once you have done your methods and you've started to actually apply that and you're starting to do your research or your experiments you then will have have some results pop up so this is where you start to develop those results so as soon as you get some results put them into charts put them into graphs put them into tables start to compile them if it's a survey start to make it look nice think about how you want to present it so that's all going on in the background so you're you're reading your papers for your literature review and then of course you're writing your literary you're starting to think about the different chapters and at the same time you're thinking about your methods and you're starting to develop your results as to whatever's coming in then um you want to make sure that you've now finished your lecture review and that everything that reflects in the results is reflected in the literature of you if you are not talking about it in your results or you're not really discussing it then it shouldn't really go in your literature review and vice versa so just making sure that everything matches then once you've done those three main sections you then want to think about the conclusion so how are you concluding This research what is it that you've found what are the takeaway messages what are the limitations like what has happened and your research the conclusion is the next thing then the last thing of the main chapters is the abstract so the abstract is the like the absolute final thing that you do that is essentially a summary of everything so the abstract talks about what your research aims are what the hypothesis is what the missing Gap in literature is and then the methods what approach you're taking to um overcome that Gap then your results and then the conclusion and the future implications and directions so that is your abstract um and that is the last thing you do because that is something that is determined by everything else so you can't write the abstract first without having the results without having the discussion and the conclusion then you want to of course obviously format if you use this template everything's basically there for you so all you need to do is add in your references now adding in your references is something that you should be doing throughout and this will save you a ton of time if you were to ask me how can I write my dissertation really quickly I would say sort out your references before you even start writing so what I'd recommend is when you download this template I would recommend downloading the mendeley plugin the word plugin so you can use it side by side so as you are writing your literature review and as you're writing your results and getting all your data in you can also input your references at the same time so it's very very easy I have a whole video about this and I've also talked about a little bit in the guide as well that accompanies this template and I think it's the easiest way possible if you delete a reference it deletes automatically if you have to change your references from Harvard to apa or something else it does it automatically it lists it all for you in alphabetical order to get a first the thing that you need to understand is that the the the top for the top level for first the key uh characteristic of a first uh it was just in a dissertation for final year is that it is publishable that's like the top so if you ask yourself is this work publishable there's a few things that mean that's publishable firstly it needs to be accurate it needs to be clear and concise and written academically and with the correct structure but the most important thing is also the fact that the references have to be written really well you can't publish a paper without references being strong so if you can guarantee that your references are written well using something like mendeley or any others endnote there's a few other ones as well but I would recommend medley because it's free it's easy to use it it seamlessly gets um added Into Your Word document so you can use it at the same time those are little things that will mean that you are aiming towards a first and so keeping your references clean and up to date and updated is something I'd highly recommend thinking about before you even started writing anything so we've spoken about the organization and the structure of your dissertation we've spoken about the order that you want to write things in I've spoken about referencing um the last thing I wanted to mention is that to be able to get a first your dissertation has to be very heavily critiqued especially in the discussion and not in the results and now this is this is something I've spoken about again in the guide but I really want you to remember that the results section is purely you stating what the results are I am wearing a black jumper that's it that's a result there's no critique there's no she's wearing black because it's uh winter and she wants to be a little bit dark because she's in a bad mood because she's feeling low because she likes the color no I'm just wearing black that is my result in the discussion that is where you can say she's wearing black because right so if you have a result um you're doing an experiment the temperature increased in the result all you need to say is the temperature has increased by five degrees look at figure one in the discussion as you can see in figure one the temperature has increased by 5 degrees which could be a result of the fact that it is winter now right and that is a critique and then you want to expand on that and say also Jonas at Al have also similarly reported that the temperature increased by five degrees when they looked at it in mice right and so you're adding extra layers to it and that is what happens in your discussion in the results it's purely purely descriptive and evaluative so you're just evaluating describing you're not going into any detail as to why you think happened why you think that happened at all so that's something that you want to really think about when writing your dissertation um it can be an afterthought so I'd recommend just like getting started get started in your research and then take a look again go back and look again at your results section and your discussion and make sure that you are being redistinct in the the way that you write those two sections I am going to do more detailed videos on each of those chapters this video is very much just kind of going through the overall structure and making sure you have like a start point from where you can start from but I am going to be doing videos in all through January a full series on each of those sections for the dissertation so if you do want to make sure that you catch those then please subscribe to my channel and I'll make it into a nice little playlist for you um but otherwise I hope that you found this video helpful for giving you a start Point um as to where you can even begin when it comes to writing the dissertation um because I do feel like just that initial like having the title page having something on paper is it is sometimes the most difficult part and I'm providing you with a template that I have designed myself um so that hopefully will give you that first like step up and then you can obviously go from there do your research add them in and yeah that's a participation done hopefully in a few weeks um yeah let me know if you have any other tips and if you want to see any other templates from me as well um and I'll see you guys in my next video okay bye

Channel: Dr Amina Yonis

Views: 46,697

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Id: 9_KWIGHxWKg

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022