Signposting Your Thesis

As well as thinking about your readers' needs, you should also think about how they will navigate their way through your thesis from beginning to end.

In your plan, you will have developed a structure for your thesis that allows you to present your arguments and your findings in a logical way. However, this structure may not be as apparent to someone reading the thesis as it is to you writing it. You need to make sure that throughout your thesis you communicate your structure so that your reader is guided through it and can see why you have written in the way you have. 

To guide your readers, you need to have a system of "signposts" - things that explicitly or implicitly tell the reader what to expect. Signposts that you can use in your thesis are:

• a detailed List of Contents that gives the headings of both chapters and sections/sub-sections within each chapter
• a well written abstract that provides a clear summary of your thesis and defines your original contribution to knowledge in your discipline
• an introductory chapter/section that makes it clear to the reader what will follow
• a conclusions chapter/section that summarises the main points of what they have read
• an introductory passage for each chapter/section that explains what will be covered
• a consistent system of headings and sub-headings within each chapter/section
• textual prompts to alert the reader as to what to expect - for example, "In this section it is argued that..." or "This section will describe..."

As you come to re-draft your work, think about what signposts there are for your readers and whether you need to do more to help them navigate their way through. For each chapter/section and for your thesis as a whole, spend some time making sure that there are sufficient signposts and that these are effective in communicating the structure of your thesis and improving its readability.

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