Month: January 2016

Can you be healthy and joyous while you write your thesis?

You may not believe me or agree with me, but getting stressed or worked up is the easiest thing to do. So when you decide to get into a cave, binge onto food or feel depressed, you have undoubtedly chosen the easy way out. PhD is a job of high pressure and pressure that you … Continue reading “Can you be healthy and joyous while you write your thesis?”

You may not believe me or agree with me, but getting stressed or worked up is the easiest thing to do. So when you decide to get into a cave, binge onto food or feel depressed, you have undoubtedly chosen the easy way out. PhD is a job of high pressure and pressure that you got to endure for a long time. PhD candidates got to take good care of themselves under this time. If you are careful about your physical as well as mental wellbeing during this journey you would certainly improve the productivity you get from your work. A PhD is a marathon and not a 100 metres sprint. Don’t forget that. Here are some simple but useful tips that may help you maintain your sanity in this time.

Posture: Most of the students who are soon working on laptops these days have a hunched posture and hence your PhD could gift you a lasting memory in the form of a bad back. Invest in a keyboard and laptop stand and never slouch into the bed while working. Remember that your back has to be erect and you should be not sitting in a strenuous posture for a long time, else you would be giving yourself some ailments that would stay with you for the rest of your life.

Fitness: Fitness isn’t a goal but it is a way of life. PhD scholars often get so busy with their work that they feel that devoting an hour to fitness each day is injustice to their PhD. They may feel guilty for doing the same. But what if I say that the other is true? If you really feel an hour a day is too much for you, try to get into some intensity fitness workout so that your body remains strong enough for the brunt you are giving it.

Food: another area we scholars neglect the most is our food intake.  If you are on you own and not one of those fortunate one who has a family or friend to take care of your food intake then you need to find ways to ensure that what you are putting in your body as source of energy is actually the healthy alternative. Drink plenty of healthy fluids and stay off from the processed and instant food options

 

 

Does using styles in Microsoft help in research?

Writing a thesis is nothing less than taxing. But the after task of doing a thesis, where   you have to make it look neat and consistent is also essential. It is an exhausting task at its own level. The respite that writers   have here, thanks to Microsoft word, is the option of “styles”. It makes … Continue reading “Does using styles in Microsoft help in research?”

Writing a thesis is nothing less than taxing. But the after task of doing a thesis, where   you have to make it look neat and consistent is also essential. It is an exhausting task at its own level. The respite that writers   have here, thanks to Microsoft word, is the option of “styles”. It makes formatting much easier and faster.

What is style? It isn’t anything but a set of formatting instructions and options, such as size, colour, paragraph, and spacing. Using it saves time and manual effort of formatting for each and every document.

When we talk of theses and other lengthy manuscripts, styles have a great contributory role to perform here:

  1. Brings uniformity in headings and subheadings: Use of styles in thesis formatting is a sign of consistency. Each and every heading level need not be formatted by memorising it. If your preference changes for the look of the heading, it can be done by the click of a button and not individual manual effort.
  2. Speeds up the formatting task: When you are formatting your thesis, all that you are required to do is to create the specific style with all details in place according to the requirement. There isn’t a need to format each part individually. It quickens up the pace of your work and makes it much simpler than you thought.
  3. Quick and easy steering: The navigation pane that MS word has, is a blessing, as it takes you to any section in a jiffy, however long the document be without actually scrolling up and down. By just pressing CTRL+F, you can easily open the navigation pane.
  4. Multilevel flawless numbering: Linking of numbers can be generated automatically, even in the case when you insert new sections or chapters in between the manuscript.  Styles in MS word would do it automatically for you.
  5. Reflex table of content: This couldn’t get better and would become the most important reason to use Styles. It is a task, to say the least, to manually list up sections and keep going forward and backward to tally page numbers, section wise to mention in the table of contents. This isn’t the end, as any modification in size, figure, content or formatting would change   the number sequence thoroughly. But when you use styles, it does it for you automatically and updates the same for you in a way that is unbelievable.

So if you have a theses or a lengthy manuscript to format and sequence up, do not depend on anything but styles in MS word and see your task simplifying manifol

Is use of abbreviations good or bad for research?

When we talk of academic research, particularly in the genre of sciences, abbreviations are staple and indispensable.  They surely help to bring down the wordiness of complex sentences but there major use is down to bring down the word count of the manuscript and hence they are embraced in the academic community with a lot … Continue reading “Is use of abbreviations good or bad for research?”

When we talk of academic research, particularly in the genre of sciences, abbreviations are staple and indispensable.  They surely help to bring down the wordiness of complex sentences but there major use is down to bring down the word count of the manuscript and hence they are embraced in the academic community with a lot of preference.

The use of abbreviations has an influence in the design and figures of the paper and a lot of unnecessary use of abbreviations does make the paper difficult to read. They are particularly more troublesome for journal reviewers when they receive the figure legends separate from the figures.

If as an academic writer, you avoid using unnecessary abbreviations in your figure design, it will benefit you in ways more than one. Audience often have less time and attention span to understand figures and with minimum use of abbreviations there we make their task far easier.

When you have to link the use of abbreviations in figures as well as text in the manuscript, avoid the use of abbreviations that appear only at one or two places in the text and nowhere else. This does not create vagueness and ambiguity for the reader and they are able to establish a better link between the table and the text. It is also true for reviewers and not just readers so do not create an extra barrier in the understanding of your document by the reader. When you have coined or used an abbreviation in the text of the manuscript, it is more acceptable to use it in figured but still not recommended.

In a situation when the abbreviation you wish to use has been used extensively in the literature review, it is more acceptable to use it. But if you want to make you work get appreciated and accepted in the community outside your academic area, it is more recommended that you minimise the use. It would enhance the accessibility to a broader audience as they would not be apprehensive of terminology that is acronym or abbreviation specific to a sub field.

If you wish to use some abbreviations that are ubiquitous in nature, it is perfectly fine to use the as they would not come in your of widening your audience and understanding of your manuscript. It is all the more good to accommodate those globally accepted abbreviations in figures that have already been used in the text before.

 

You Need to Know How to Write Literature Review for Dissertation

Take an overview of the topic, concept or theory under discussion, to begin with. The core objective of the review is to provide the background on the key components that you would be discussing. Raise the major issues, questions and the chronology. Literature reviews expects that you would introduce the work you are discussing and … Continue reading “You Need to Know How to Write Literature Review for Dissertation”

Take an overview of the topic, concept or theory under discussion, to begin with. The core objective of the review is to provide the background on the key components that you would be discussing. Raise the major issues, questions and the chronology. Literature reviews expects that you would introduce the work you are discussing and also give reasons why they are important for a particular paper. If you mention topics or concepts that have not been discussed before in the introduction, you are sure to take your readers completely off guard thus losing the grip of your topic.

You would have to break up the outside work into concepts and categories and give an outline for the same, stating that you are doing that. If you do that in the right manner, it would be easier for you to write your review and at the same time your audience would find it easier to comprehend and make sense of the complex network of sources.

You literature may have chronological diversity and you may have work that may be few years apart, to mention the least and sometimes perhaps, even decades apart. As a writer it is your job to build up those connections and reflect them in your work to establish a relevant link for the reader.

Give a conclusion about all works in a concise and comprehensive manner so that a good and closure understanding if your topic is achieved. That is what your primary objective is. Usually, the readers expect the conclusion to reiterate the major points and synthesise the ideas that have been presented in the chapter. To do this, mention all of the work you have used to show the connection and how they connect together towards the point you wish to state. A good conclusion is the one that convinces the reader of the reasons you have chosen to incorporate the different studies into the review.

Your ideas should be the centre of your literary critique and should demonstrate the connection to the literary work that came before, having done that your narrative becomes embedded into the long discourse that has made the literary criticism.

If you follow this process and keep these in mind, be sure that your literature review would come out worthy and well connected with the other content in your document.

Is It a Good Idea to Work While Writing Thesis?

During the journey of thesis writing, the thing that scholars are most hard pressed on is “time”. This is all the more true if you work while you are doing PhD as being able to do justice to two things at the same time surely puts pressure in context to timings. Is it like, having … Continue reading “Is It a Good Idea to Work While Writing Thesis?”

During the journey of thesis writing, the thing that scholars are most hard pressed on is “time”. This is all the more true if you work while you are doing PhD as being able to do justice to two things at the same time surely puts pressure in context to timings.

Is it like, having a job while writing your thesis is a mistake? It surely becomes very difficult to balance your working hours with the time you have to devote to doing a thesis project. It becomes all the more terrifying when you have deadlines to meet from time to time at both the ends. And then if you fail to accomplish what you have set out to, it can become depressing, demotivating and perhaps to grow you in a state of vicious circle that would drain you not just physically but also mentally and emotionally.

There can be a lot of professional advice on techniques to balance work, family and thesis work while doing PhD, but here what you really need to know and keep in mind is if your working hours are too many then you need to reduce them to as minimum as possible so that you can increase the productivity of your thesis progress as that should be indeed your utmost priority.

My first and foremost recommendation is that full time PhD scholar should try not to be involved in a full job so that there is complete focus on the PhD work. This , trust me, is the fastest way to get done your thesis and always remember that your PhD research work is not anything less than a full time job that you do. There a middle path here and that is if you have to work, then try to get yourself a part time job. This can come in as a solution if there is no way that you can actually quit your job. I don’t know how many scholars are able to find such flexible and accommodating employers who could adjust work days or timings to suit your other priorities. If you have one such employer, know that you are the lucky one.

If you are able to strike such a balance, believe that your distractions will be reduced and you would be able to stay on the track of writing your thesis as you would not be occupied in thinking about other things that need your attention as much. So we could say that you must look at your research as nothing less than a full time job in itself so that you have your schedules, deadlines in place without many distractions