6 Tips to Reduce the Length of Your Thesis
6 Tips to Reduce the Length of Your Thesis
Research work takes hours of work, sometimes months of hard work and you have a finished product of which you want to make the most. At the initiation, be it a research, thesis or a book, you hardly have findings to write a paragraph, but when you reach the end of your study, you have so much to say that it becomes a problem to brief the scope of it. When you publish your thesis online, many journals have a word limit for the researches they want to publish. The objective is to develop your research such that it attracts readers while still adhering to the guidelines of the publisher. Hence the best way to lure readers is to have a clear, definitive title and a precise abstract which will have only the necessary aspects and highlights of your study to grab their eyeballs at once. However, native English speakers, as well as those with English as second language find it hard to deal with brevity. They fall short in finding replacements for the descriptive phrases. Here are a few tips which you can follow to make your research brief but effective-
- Remove Needless Hedge Words– Again, some additional words which when added to a paper not only increases its length, but makes the author unsure or apprehensive about his/her findings in eyes of the readers and multidisciplinary journal. E.g. a sentence like “It seems that nitrogen has a positive effect on potassium carbonate” (11 words) is unnecessary (hedge word: ‘seems’) when samples have been tested already. It can simply be asserted, “Nitrogen positively affects potassium carbonate” (5 words), and here the adverb is not a junk.
- Use Active Voice Instead of Passive Voice Wherever Possible- Passive voices often use more words to complete the sentence, e.g. “It was found in the research that students have an affinity towards their home tutors”, while the same in active voice would be “The research found that students have an affinity towards their home tutors”.
- Look for Adverbs and Omit Them– The words ending with ‘ly’ are often extra additions. Words like “slowly”, “cautiously”, “effectively”, “rigorously” are regular adverbs which the show up within the text time and again, but they are unnecessary. For example, “We carefully and slowly proceeded to test the samples” (9 words) can be easily replaced with “We proceeded to test the samples” (6 words) or just “We tested the samples” (3 words).
- Referencing Doesn’t Need to Come as Additional Sentences– Look out for sentences beginning with “there is a previous study on,” “it has been reported that,” or similar phrases.References have to be cited, so there is no need to address them with phrases like “Jean Jacques observed in his earlier works that microscopic organisms can be harmful”. Check your literature review at the time of revision to identify such mistakes. Use paraphrasing and in-text citation to minimize this mistake, i.e. “Microscopic organisms can be harmful (Jean Jacques, 2013).” When you publish your thesis online, you have more scope, but you have to work harder to make the quality of your work up to the mark and stick to their guidelines.
- Look for Single Words or Short Phrases Followed by Comma– Words like ‘Hopefully,” “therefore”, “in fact,” etc. add emphasis to the sentence but can be easily avoided without compromising with the meaning of the sentence. They are connectors to your previous sentence but wouldn’t harm if your next sentence was to go as independent and individual.
- Manage Scientific Information Wisely– In the results section, avoid stating individual values for groups, followed by the values for statistical significance. Instead, place the values within parentheses. E.g. Original: The protein level was 5 mg in Group A, while it was 3 mg in Group B, the difference being statistically significant (p < 0.05). (25 words) can be replaced withRevised: The difference in the protein level was 5 mg in between groups A and B, while it was 3 mg in Group b, the difference being statistically was significant (5 mg vs. 3 mg, p < 0.05). (21 words)
Among other things, you may need to optimize every detail such as you may have to shift product names to parenthesis, use nouns in place of verbs and vice-versa if it is reducing the word count of a sentence, and several other tips and tricks to publish your thesis online in the best presentable way. However, if you follow the above six basic tips, you can definitely make your research more concise and meaningful to the readers.
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