Thinking About Your Readers

As you start to consider the quality of your writing, you will probably be thinking about how it sounds to you. However, more important is to consider how it will sound to your readers - specifically, in the case of your thesis, how it will sound to your examiners. It does not matter how good your research is if you cannot communicate it to others. Think about your readers' needs and aim to make your writing as clear as possible:

• do not use a difficult word where a simple one will do
• avoid excessively long sentences
• use punctuation correctly to aid the sense of your writing
• use paragraphs to break your text into logically self-contained units

Your readers will have certain expectations of your thesis and you need to understand what these are and what you can do to ensure they are met. In particular, your readers will have expectations as to how your thesis should be written - they will expect your work to follow those conventions that are common to all academic writing as well as any that are specific to your discipline.

Whatever discipline you belong to, there will be certain conventions of academic writing - for example, specific modes of phrasing, specific terminology, recognised acronyms/abbreviations, etc. It is important that you make yourself familiar with these and the best way to do this is through reading theses, articles, and other texts. This will help you learn how to use these conventions correctly in your thesis but you will also find that it can play a part in your own development as an academic writer - look out for writing styles in your discipline that you like and think about what techniques have been used that make them work well. See if you can identify techniques that you can use in your own writing - making sure that you are not just mimicking someone else.

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