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 thesis online, many journals have a word limit for the researches they want to publish. Most, definitely have the bounds on fitting in your abstract within half of a page. The objective is to improve the saleability of your research work. Hence the best way to attract 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-
- Look for Adverbs and Omit Them– The words ending with ‘ly’ are often extra additions. Words like “slowly”, “cautiously”, “effectively”, “rigorously” and many more come in the flow of writing and make the text flowery, but you can do without them, not hampering the actual meaning of the context. 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). Here we understand how removing the adverbs alone can reduce the sentence by 3 words and with an extra effort, the sentence can actually be reduced to three times the original.
- Do not Waste Phrases on Addressing References– 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 spot such mistakes. The above sentence can be reduced to just the main information followed by reference citation in parentheses, i.e. “Microscopic organisms can be harmful. (Jean Jacques, 2013)” When you publish your thesis online, you have more scope, but you have to look harder to make the quality of your work up to the mark and stick to their guidelines.
- 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 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.
- Place the Values within Parentheses – 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 with Revised: 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)
There are other things you may need to do 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.
