Preparing & Writing your Dissertation
A dissertation or thesis is a long piece of academic writing completed by students at the end of a degree based on a topic of choice accompanied with conducted research. This isn’t a task only common in the architecture field but also in many other professions like Law, Psychology, History, etc.
It is expected for architecture students to complete a dissertation in their final year of their undergraduate degree about a specific subject under the umbrella term ‘Architecture’ (unless the university advises otherwise). Now that we have completed our undergraduate studies, we thought we would give you guys some advice on preparing and writing your dissertation to think through over the summer break, especially for those of you going into third year.
Let’s begin!
Research
It is likely that many of you won’t know what you want to write 5000+ words about. This is why many tutors or lecturers might suggest reading a range of content in different areas of Architecture to see if anything sparks your interest over the summer break. From here, you might start making broad dissertation topic pairings such as ‘Architecture & Psychology’ or ‘Architecture & Education’.
You shouldn’t be researching with the intention to find something of interest, but instead with the intention of broadening your horizon about potential topics that you might enjoy writing about. Read through archives, past dissertations, news articles, research papers, interviews, lectures and books to cover a range of topics that could give you ideas. In addition to this, universities tend to also provide reading lists for each department, which might be a good place to start. Take advantage of what your course leaders may have suggested in these lists as they are directed specifically to you and relevant architecture topics out there. We have a post dedicated to ‘resources for architecture students’ which has an extensive list of sources that can be referred to once you begin researching.
The summer break tends to be the best time to dedicate time towards a bunch of reading in order to enter third year with some ideas that you can discuss with your dissertation tutors. However, any research done during the summer break shouldn’t solely focus on coming up with a single question or title for your dissertation. Do not attach yourself to a question too quickly because it may backfire so avoid stressing about finding the perfect question at such an early stage. Try and have a good range of research across multiple branches in various subject areas to avoid being faced with a blank start in September as a result of disapproval from your tutor and a whole load of more research to do again.
Topic
The ‘topic’ might be the most important part of the preparation stages of the thesis. Firstly, you really have to feel passionate about the topic or, the researching and writing process will be a struggle. This process in itself takes a long time to finalise.
In the scenario where you’ve determined a vague branch of Architecture from the hours of research beforehand, it is now time to pick out the specifics. Some workshops that I had attended at the end of second year had us write these vague starters, such as ‘Architecture & Psychology’, and have them further elaborated until we ended up with something extremely specific. An example of the breaking down process can be found in the diagram below.
Even after the breakdown, there are still elements that can be more specific in the question suggested in the diagram; cohort of people, a specific material type, the type of question it is, etc. I found this to be the best method of generating potential dissertation topic questions that I would be interested in writing about.
In my personal case, my dissertation was heavily influenced by a personal experience in secondary school which made my topic selection process much simpler. Referring back to a past experience as influence for a dissertation topic might be the fast-track route to a solid start as the thesis instantly gains some individuality. However, it will still need to go through the digging process to rule out any vague terms. Then again, do not force this upon yourself. It should come naturally. You wouldn’t want to convince yourself that you like a certain topic only because you know how specific you can make it.
It is also important to point out that your dissertation question will change overtime. This can happen whilst you are writing it, researching about it or even after finalising the whole dissertation which was the case for me. I didn’t have my dissertation question until I wrote it up. This wasn’t ideal but it happened naturally so don’t panic if you find yourself in the same position. During one of the workshops that I attended, we were also informed to not write a dissertation that has already been written before. This is why there is a strong emphasis on making your dissertation as specific as possible.
Research… again
As your dissertation question might be changing, you may find yourself needing to fill in the gaps in your research whilst you are drafting the thesis. Again, this is very normal and shouldn’t take as long as the researching period back in the summer break. A part of your dissertation might get you to conduct primary research which you will need to organise into your busy schedule and prepare any equipment for. This could be camera equipment for any filming, microphones for any oral interviews, documents to enter specific buildings or permission requests. In essence, you also become a researcher alongside your full time position as a busy architecture student who’s juggling all their modules, so the quicker you organise your research method, the better!
I would recommend conducting your own primary research if you can. This makes your thesis all the more specific and personal knowing that the results you’ve obtained cannot be found anywhere else. It is also great to bring a new set of results and put it into context amongst all the qualitative and/or quantitative research you have compiled from secondary sources. You can delve into critical analysis by interrogating existing data which will not go unnoticed.
Time Management
Do not leave it to the final week to write your thesis. Although you may have convinced yourself that you work best under pressure, most of us are inexperienced when it comes to writing a long piece of academic text with an extensive set of research. Do not fall into the trap of thinking dissertations and essays are the same. You will soon come to realise that they are not.
You need to read your work carefully and read over it multiple times. You should constantly be writing and drafting so you can take advantage of your tutorials with academic staff because they are limited. I think this is something that I regretted the most. Although I was happy with the end result, I did question soon after how much more I could have improved my dissertation if I had turned up to tutorials with more material. Try and adopt a consistent routine of writing a couple hundred words every other day so you can get stuff on paper and having a discussion with your tutors.
Another minor piece of advice… print out all your sources. When you are writing your thesis, spread out all your sources with all the relevant bits highlighted on a table or have them pinned up in front of you. This will save you time looking for a piece of paper you remember having in your hand 2 seconds ago or squabbling between countless tabs.
Referencing/Bibliography
Get yourself familiar with the referencing method that your university uses. In our case, we were advised to use Oxford referencing for our footnotes and bibliography but this may not be the case for you. The last thing you would want is to be marked down for the wrong referencing style which could ultimately lead to a bad mark. Have a rule book ready to go alongside you whenever you are writing up your dissertation to avoid any confusion. If you are someone who struggles to get your head around referencing methods there are always websites and extensions that will save all your references for you until you need to compose your bibliography. Some of these include ‘citethisforme.com’ and a chrome extension called ‘MyBib’.
Proofreading/Computer-Aided-Assistance
Personally, written work is not my strong point. I have a lot of self doubt when it comes to explaining myself through words without me being physically present. As a result, I had people proofreading my work to make sure what I was saying was clear and if any rewording was needed then I would change it.
This could be a friend, family member or your tutor during tutorials. In the worst case scenario, I’m pretty sure I had my computer dictating my dissertation back to me a good few times to see if it sounded right. The moment I spotted a mistake, I’d go back, change it and replay the audio. I would definitely recommend this. It’s also a good method of picking up on any typos that you may have missed.
On the topic of help from technology, you can also opt for third party platforms such as ‘Grammarly’ to edit your work.
These were some of our tips for preparing and writing your dissertation. To help with understanding what a dissertation looks like and what to expect, you can view a PDF version of my dissertation using the prompt below.
That brings us to the end of this week’s post. We hope that for those of you who will be writing up or thinking about your dissertation in the near future, these tips were useful in making the whole process more manageable and less daunting.
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