Writing a Dissertation

The book I read to research this post was Writing a Dissertation for Dummies by Carrie Winstanley which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Incidentally if you are reading this I did a post on this site on Writing an essay which might be relevant. If you are doing an arts or humanties based course at university there is a good chance that you will be called upon to write a dissertation maybe in your 3rd or final year & it will count towards your final result on the course. You will be given a dissertation supervisor & this person may or may not specialize in your subject. This shouldn't matter very much because the basic principles of doing a dissertation are the same regardless of subject. One thing it says in this book is a common mistake students make is thinking they know best & not following the supervisors advice but that person has almost certainly a good understanding of what will get you good marks. At the beginning of it you need to write an abstract which is a statement of what the dissertation is about. Your introduction should run for about a couple of pages. Many students make the mistake of thinking a dissertation is the same as an essay but longer. In fact a dissertation has more structure & keeping everything integrated is difficult. Also you may need to rewrite parts of it several times before you get it right. You may need to send out questionnaires & obviously you won't be able to do this on a grand scale a common mistake is they get skewed results & don't adequately explain it. When doing research particularly on the internet you need to check your facts at several sources as some of it can be inaccurate. Finally another mistake a lot of students make is not listing their bibliography alphabetically & they can lose marks on this which are easy to gain. You also might need to include a citation to say where you got some ideas from again easy marks.