Writing A Solid Phd Thesis: Phrases To Avoid
Writing a PhD thesis will not actually be comparable with any kind of academic paper you have written up to this moment. The truth is that this will be the most important paper you have written and that you will want to make the absolute best of it. This means that you will have to be very careful about each detail related to your PhD thesis paper: from the fonts you use to the materials you use and from how well you plan out everything to how well you manage to express your ideas in words.
Of course, given the fact that a PhD thesis will be a paper of a large complexity, there will be many things to take into consideration. The norms imposed by the academic writing style you have to use are just a small part of the things you will have to bear in mind. The structure, the reliability of your materials and the language you will use will make a difference as well.
Regarding the language, please bear in mind the fact that this is a very formal paper and that your language will have to be carefully chosen. There are certain words and phrases you should avoid using at all costs and of which you should be self-conscious:
- Adjectives that praise or downgrade something very much: “bad”, “good”, “great”, “awful” and so on.
- Adverbs tend to be used much too often because they may give you the feeling that the paper is more formal this way. However, try to avoid using them too much as well.
- Words and phrases that are related to the present time: “at the moment”, “today”, “tomorrow”, “soon”, “far in time from now”, and so on. Keep in mind that this is written piece that will remain in the archives of your university for a long time from now on and that the readers who lay their eyes on your paper 20 years from now will not be able to actually relate to these words and phrases.
- “kind of”, “sort of”, “like”, “something like” and all the words that are much too colloquial. Try to find formal replacements for them (for example, instead of “like”, use “such as” or “for instance”).
- “You will see”, “You will be proved with…” and similar constructions that involve the second person personal pronoun. Same as with the first person pronoun (both singular and plural), the second person one should be avoided as much as possible and it should be replaced with something that will be correct in the third person form.
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