Honours Thesis Writing Tips

As department head, the last couple of years I have sent out a message in the Spring to students who will be writing their honours thesis (aka “senior thesis”) the following year. Part of the message is specific to our program, but part of it is a more general set of tips for anyone starting to go through this kind of process. Our honours theses are typically about 50-60 double-spaced pages (~12,000-15,000 words), and in terms of academic credit, the equivalent of a full-year (two-semester) course. I’ve now supervised close to 20, so have some experience, and last year’s students seemed to find these tips helpful. Or at least mildly amusing. But I certainly don’t feel like I have the process totally mastered, so welcome insights in the comments section.

Acadia Politics theses, with Diefenbaker mug.
Photo: Andrew Biro

So, here are a few (ok, seven) tips on writing an Honours thesis. But all of the advice really boils down to: think of yourself as becoming a researcher and writer, and work to become a better one.

1. Use the internet. The internet provides a whole lot of advice for aspiring writers, including aspiring thesis-writers. You can find “how to write” tips from everyone from Stephen King to Walter Benjamin. Many of them actually offer good advice, although some may seem questionable (Dan Brown hangs upside down; Hemingway advises “Write drunk; edit sober”). Literaturereviewhq.com is one example of a blog with lots of good advice and resources for academic writing in particular (not just literature reviews). Gradhacker is another, aimed at graduate students, but honours thesis is not that far off. It has my all-time favourite: Katy Meyers, “Write damnit” (April 3, 2012). If you read nothing else on the internet, read this.

2. But not too much. I haven’t researched this exhaustively, and I’m sure you could spend a lot of time combing around such sites but, as with everything on the internet, it’s best to try to avoid getting sucked down the rabbit hole for hours on end. A general rule when doing interviews is that once you find yourself generally getting more of the same, it is time to stop. The same applies here. And for all the advice you find, online and off, use your judgement. Writing is an idiosyncratic process that is at least a little different for everyone; follow the tips that work for you and discard the ones that don’t. (Note: instructions from your thesis supervisor don’t count as “tips.” Don’t ignore them.)

3. Make time for your thesis. A thesis is a big project. One of the things about managing a big project is that by the time it is more “urgent” than any of the smaller projects you have to do, it is too late. One way to avoid the problems associated with this is to schedule a regular time to work on your thesis: a few hours weekly or even daily if you can. Know that Tuesday and Thursday evenings, or every day from 9 to 11, or whatever, is the time when you will work on your thesis. If you wait for a time when you have nothing else to do, or if you wait for “inspiration” to strike, you are almost guaranteed to get nothing done. Very often just sitting in front of a blank screen, or a pile of books with a notepad, knowing that you are not going anywhere for a couple of hours, will get you going.

4. Take care of the little things. For those days when you just can’t do any heavy intellectual lifting, there are more routine but still important things that you can do. Make sure the document that will become your thesis is formatted exactly the way that Research & Graduate Studies wants it: they are strict about this, and you don’t want to be trying to figure out how to get “mirror margins” in the last hour before the thesis is due. If you are using bibliographic software, enter the info for the sources you will be using. (Acadia students: Refworks is a bibliographic software program available free via the library website.) Learning to use bibliographic software can be a real time saver (especially if you are going on to graduate school), and saves you the painstaking work of formatting references.

5. Write. Another pitfall for thesis writers is to wait until they think they know everything before they start writing. “Research” and “writing” are not two separate stages. It will always be tempting to think that there is “just one more thing” you need to read before you are ready to start writing. Resist that temptation. You are already ready to start writing (you’re just not ready to stop writing yet). You should be writing all the time, even if it is “just” notes, drafts, partial outlines, etc. Writing early and often is important because you don’t really know what you know until you start writing it.

6. Rewrite. A related point is that almost nothing comes out just right the first time. Count on the fact that everything has to be edited, revised, rethought, re-written. Students often make the mistake of taking “revisions” to mean “corrections” as if it were just a technical matter of fixing errors. It is that as well, but revising is also a generative process where your ideas become clearer to yourself. In my experience, the difference between a decent thesis and a very good one is very often determined by whether or not the student has sufficient time (and energy) for a thorough revision of the whole thesis. Often insights achieved later in the writing process can affect what was written earlier. Unlike a course paper, where (usually) you know what your argument is going to be pretty much from the start, the scope of a thesis, and the fact that you are picking the topic, means that it is much more of a process of figuring out what you want to argue as you are writing it. This is why it is so valuable to finish a draft well before the “deadline.”

7. Put your ideas out there and talk to others about them. Having someone else read your work, or just willing to listen to you talk about it, can also be very helpful. Staying inside your own head allows you to take mental shortcuts, and to use concepts in your writing or make research choices without fully understanding them. Talking to other people and trying to explain what you are doing (and why you are doing it that way) is a great way to clarify things for yourself. Having someone who you can trust to edit your written work ruthlessly is invaluable.

Rex Murphy and Privilege

“White Privilege” and the checking of same, is one of the latest memes to exorcise conservatives. Things got started when Tal Fortgang’s,  “Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege”  was somehow plucked from the obscurity of The Princeton Tory and ignited the blogosphere.

Fortgang probably got more piling on than he deserved. Despite the self-confident tone, a freshman writing a column for a campus newspaper, in April, with the same word twice in the title, all suggests that Fortgang was laying out some unpolished thoughts. If the discussion was on a much smaller scale – say, within the campus – it could be seen as an opening statement, or invitation to constructive dialogue. But the teachable moment, if ever there was one, was lost some time before the essay was reprinted in Time magazine a month later, with the title tellingly changed to “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege.” “Check” doesn’t generate nearly as much ressentiment as “apologize for.”

But if we can forgive Fortgang for a youthful indiscretion, National Post columnist Rex Murphy is old enough that he should know better. Yet his column of May 17 repeats the same tired tropes of campus political correctness run amok. Bad enough that he recycles Fortgang’s arguments – halfway through the column I was expecting Murphy to say that his own grandparents’ suffered at the hands of the Nazis – he also doubles down on the “fundamentalist fury” of anti-racist activism (or as he styles it, “the privilege movement”) on campuses.

“Fundamentalist” anti-racism, as Murphy sees it, is the other side of the coin of racism. The “privilege movement” asserts “that all a person does and is springs from the colour of his (sic) skin.” Of course, many of those who responded critically to Fortgang argued against exactly this, but Murphy ignores them, because they don’t fit with his thesis, namely that the identification of “privilege” is a “blatant attempt to chase effort, merit, industry and determination off the field entirely.” Outside of the fevered imagination of conservatives like Rex Murphy, though, about the only place we might actually find this is the 1980s SNL skit (“White Like Me“) where Eddie Murphy (no relation) goes undercover as a white person. But instead of engaging with ideas that are seriously presented, Murphy prefers to ask about universities: “do they ever test an idea?” And particularly the one that he describes as “strange, absurd and utterly self-contradictory.”

Well, yes. The racial inequalities are well-documented with respect to wealth, access to jobs, housing, protection from toxic environments, police suspicion and harassment, educational (mentoring) opportunities, and so on. (And if you think this applies only to the USA and not Canada, see here, here, and here.) So it is at least equally strange and absurd to argue that privilege is non-existent in our world, and that all difference is attributable to individual effort or “character,” as Rex Murphy implies.

And self-contradictory. On April 4, two days after Fortgang’s first published his refusal to “check [his] privilege,” Rex Murphy wrote a column about Justin Trudeau. It’s title? “The Pain of the Privileged.” In it, he describes Trudeau as, you guessed it: privileged.

Trudeau, according to Murphy, is “a man too advantaged by benign circumstance and nature.” A well-connected family, wealth, education, good looks… To be sure, these are reflections of Justin Trudeau’s good fortune rather character. And here, Murphy may well be accurate. But we can easily imagine a Trudeau defender responding to that April version of Rex Murphy with the May version of Rex Murphy:

Why should all a young person’s effort and sweat, holding on to a moral code, and determined application to make something of their life be turned against them, be denied its efficacy, and everything praiseworthy about a person be dismissed as merely a gift of their [inherited characteristics]?

And what of the questions that Murphy (May version) insists universities should be asking about “white privilege”? Before insisting that Trudeau is privileged, does Rex Murphy ever think to ask:

What part of the great DNA chain, specifically, houses the gene for [Trudeau] privilege? How does [family name] and privilege interlink, and why does privilege always follow only one [Canadian political family]? Do individuals always and only reflect the characteristics of their [family] group? Do “[Trudeaus]” have any qualities or achievements at all that do not spring only from their [family name]?

When Rex Murphy looks at someone else, like Justin Trudeau, he can spot privilege easily. When he looks at a social group that he belongs to, that as a group has disproportionate access to political power, material wealth, educational opportunities, healthy environments, freedom from police harassment… Nothing to see here! Move along!

It is, for all of us, easier to see privilege operating in the lives of others than it is to see it operating in our own. And that is why we need to be reminded to check for it.