Brainstorming a Substantial PhD Thesis Outline
Most people who have written a PhD thesis will verify that creating a well-organized and highly structured outline before starting the writing process is the best thing you can do. Having a detailed outline in place makes the colossal task of writing immensely easier. For this reason alone, it is worth your time and efforts to construct a great outline.
Another reason to make an outline is that having an outline as a guide to the writing helps you to stay focused. It also brings manageability to the insanely large and complex task of writing a PhD thesis. There is a method to creating a great outline. The following steps will help you construct your outline.
How to brainstorm for your outline:
- Start writing (paper or electronically) down all the ideas that should be included in your thesis paper. It doesn’t matter if they are main ideas or small ones. Include them all right now and later you can put them in a hierarchal order.
- Make a heading for design, participants, procedure; instruments and so on.
- Include results, statistical analyses and discussion. There could also be a topic on “suggestions for future work”
- Your outline should include all the information you will be writing about, just not the actual sentences.
- The bigger and fuller your outline is, the better. If it seems sparse, like leaves on a tree in late fall, you need to plump it up a little bit. Fatten up the literature review. Go over all your notes and ensure you haven’t missed any topics in point #1 above.
- Once all your topics and ideas have been written down, sort them into a hierarchal order. Many students find it helpful to write each one on a 3x5 card and spread them out on a table so they can be sorted more efficiently. Choose the ones that deserve to be main headings and then arrange the sub-headings under them in a logical order. The remaining cards should then be sorted under the sub-headings in like manner.
- When the cards have all been placed, start typing your constructed outline on your computer in the proper order. This will make the writing process so efficient because you will just be basically filling in each section with the words.
You will be able to write very quickly when you use the outline to guide you.
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