Conclusions

[altariel]

So writing a conclusion to a PhD thesis is a lot harder than I would have imagined. I would greatly appreciate any thoughts that any of you might have.

At the moment I am leaning to the kind of advice given here (scroll down), that it is a purely instrumental section saying, "This is what I've done, this is how it's great, this is what I'd do next if you gave me the cash." Or something on those lines.

I know some of you have already passed through this elusive initiation rite. Any advice?

Comments

[altariel.livejournal.com]

This is a tricky thing for me, actually, because the work I did was a practical project (built a website), and disentangling writing that kind of report from writing up a thesis has been one of the big stumbling blocks. So I don't want to fall too much back into doing a 'report' style conclusion.

[epsilon-delta.livejournal.com]

Well, I have all the English education of a high school student, so I'm not too clear on the difference between a thesis and a report. But now that you mention it, you might check out some theses by engineers? I know that all masters & PhD engineers tend to research some very practical stuff, but they still end up writing theses, so... might be helpful?

Although judging from the *ahem* writing skills of some of my fellow students, I'd say ignore the grammar/style and look for the content. *g*

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Good suggestions, thank you.

Giving the engineers I teach the confidence to write continuous prose (in essay format) is one of the big mental blocks I try to break through with them. I have a nice flowchart which shows how essays work.