Towards the end of your two years you will submit your Master’s Thesis (Shūron). Your adviser and co-adviser will assess it and if it fulfils the requirements listed in the Handbook (see below) it will be passed and you will have the opportunity to defend it at the Oral Defense Examination (kōtō shimon). This page looks at the criteria used to assess the thesis and offers some advice.

Length Requirements

Length: 15-20,000 words

The words in footnotes are counted toward this total, the following are not:

If you want/need to write more than 20,000 words, you will need to get permission from your adviser. The requirements are somewhat different for GJP students, please check the current Handbook for details.

Assessment Criteria

From the Handbook:

Formality requirements

1) Fulfill requirements regarding the required number of words
2) Be formatted appropriately (for example, the sources of diagrams must be noted, appropriate footnotes and citations, etc.)
3) Include an attached abstract

Substance Evaluation

4) Be sufficiently grounded on previous academic work in the relevant field
5) In the case of empirical research: must demonstrate an accurate understanding of the facts. For theoretical research: must contain a well-organized outline of theories and critical review
6) Be organized appropriately into chapters, sections etc., and show logical consistency (logical development and linkage of each chapter/section)
7) Demonstrate creativity (new points of view and new findings)
8) Be defended through appropriate responses during the oral defense (kōtō shimon)

Advice regarding these Criteria

1) Length

This is straightforward; a masters thesis has to be of a certain size, the idea is that you demonstrate your ability to create a consistent piece of work which brings together diverse elements in a logical manner. Text that you have created counts towards the word total (the main text, headings, footnotes), the words in your references don’t.

It’s a good idea to bear in mind this total when you are planning your writing; how do you want to weight your sections? Make a rough word-count plan for each of your sections and subsections if you can. Generally speaking the assumption is that the more words you decide to use for a certain topic, the more important you think it is. So roughly speaking ‘number of words’ = ‘importance’.

2) Formatting

The official guidance here is vague. My suggestion would be that your work should, in many ways, look like an academic book. My (totally unofficial) guidance would be as follows:

You can download my informal ‘formatting suggestions’ as an MSWord document or PDF. It attempts to embody the guidelines given here and add a few more visual pointers (if you spot any mistakes, please let me know!)

3) Abstract

The role of an abstract is to allow the person reading it to get an idea of what the work says; it is a highly compressed version of the whole thesis. It includes mentions of the theoretical approaches involved, the research question, the methodologies and data used, the results and, briefly, the important findings and conclusions of the work. Write this last.

4) Literature Review

This is probably one of the most important sections of your thesis, it is also one of the most difficult to get right. One of the things you are trying to demonstrate in your thesis is that you have a decent understanding of the relevant literature for your topic, of course this means that you have to have identified, read and understood this literature! I would go so far as to say that reading is the main job of a masters student; I would suggest that even though your aim is to ‘write a thesis’, the activity you spend most of your time on isn’t writing, it’s reading. For a masters degree I would suggest that about 70% of your time is for reading, 20% for writing, and 10% thinking. Not that thinking is not important but your first job is to acquire information and knowledge with which to think!

If you want to know more about literature reviews and how to write them Google around a few university websites, they often have good guides.

5) Hmmm…

This criteria seems to be an artefact of the original Japanese language phrasing. It’s unlikely that anyone will be writing a thesis that is ONLY theory or ONLY empirical, so what we have to assume here is that this criteria ultimately means make sure your facts and figures are accurate and up-to-date, and make sure you have chosen appropriate theoretical approaches for reasons which you understand and are able to justify. Be accurate, be logical.

6) Organisation

There are two aspects to this:

  1. logical organisation, and
  2. presentational organisation

The first is sometimes quite difficult and requires you to have a good overall picture of the various elements of your work and how they fit together and complement one another. Part of the difficulty emerges from the fact that you will have to turn a selection, a network(?), of various things — theories, facts. methodologies etc — into a thesis, which is a linear piece of writing. So, 1 and 2 above might be pulling you in different directions and your task is to reach some compromise and present your work in a way that makes sense in a linear way.

One way to achieve this compromise — to allow two structures at once, if you like — is to use plenty of internal cross-references, for example, where necessary include a cross-reference pointing your readers to the relevant bit of your literature review (eg. “For a discussion of this issue see section 2.3”, “I dealt with this issue in detail in subsection 1.2”), or to the relevant data, etc. This will rather depend on your writing have an easy to understand ‘presentational organisation’ too; discuss with your adviser how this can be achieved and how you should format things as preferences and traditions vary across disciplines; for instance, I am happy to see numbered sections and sub-sections, some people find them abhorrent!

However you decide to do it you will have to find a way to demonstrate your organisations and communicate it to your readers.

Also, if you are not aware of the concept of ‘signposting’ in English-language writing, please take some time to get up to speed as it is quite important and will help you present your work in an organised and logical way, and help your reader follow your argument.

7) Creativity

Luckily, nobody really knows what this is!1 If we look at the list of words mentioned in an English-language thesaurus…

creativity noun […] inventiveness, imagination, imaginativeness, innovation, innovativeness, originality, individuality; artistry, expressiveness, inspiration, vision, creative power, creative talent, creative gift, creative skill, resourcefulness, ingenuity, enterprise.

you can probably work out what this criteria is getting at. I would say that what we are looking for is ‘insight’, that is, an awareness of the meaning and implications of facts and ideas and the ability to link this awareness to a deeper or more thorough understanding of the problem or topic under investigation, perhaps linking on again to innovative solutions.

8) Oral Defense

As long as you have written your own thesis and you understand what you have written then this should not be a major hurdle for you. You will be asked to present your research; to summarise the main questions, to describe the theoretical approaches adopted, to justify your chosen methodology and to explain and reflect on your results and conclusions. This is helpful to the examiners as it allows us/them to get a better understanding of what you have learned from carrying out your research project.

Other advice

Plagiarism

This is not mentioned in an of the criteria above but it is something that anyone how advises you will check for; plagiarism (or other forms of academic dishonesty). Put very simply, plagiarism is ‘academic theft’, it is passing someone else’s work (words, ideas etc) off as your own. If you include a ‘direct quote’ — you use the actual words — from a source (an academic article, a blog, a newspaper, anything!) you must enclose those words in quotation marks and include a citation to the source at the end of the quote. Failure to do so constitutes plagiarism and may result in disciplinary action by the department or university.

Most universities have some sort of webpage that explains plagiarism, try Oxford Uni’s page for a good overview (obviously, the section covering disciplinary action is not relevant to GSIR students).

Language checks

At very least, remember to spellcheck your thesis; but you also need to read it through carefully, after all, the words ‘dairy’ and ‘diary’ are both spelled correctly but you probably don’t want to mix them up!

Writing

You will have to find a way of working that works for you; there are lots of guides available that give you hints as to how to go about dealing with the problems that academic writers encounter. I personally found …

Dunleavy, P. (2003). Authoring a PhD: How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

very useful. As you can see from the title it is aimed mainly at PhD students but it contains a lot of really useful general writing advice. Our department also uses…

Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., and Williams, J. M. (2003). The craft of research (Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing). University Of Chicago Press, Chicago IL.

but I haven’t used it personally.

At a very basic level I often recommend the ‘Topic-Body-Wrap’ structure to students; each paragraph looks like this…

  1. Topic sentence - this tells the reader what they will be reading about in the current paragraph.
  2. Body sentences - this is the main body of the paragraph where you tell the reader all the useful and insightful things you want them to know and understand.
  3. Wrap sentence - this concludes the paragraph and summarises for the reader what you just told them and why it is important for them to understand this, that is, what the point of the paragraph was.

This is not the answer to all writing problems but it’s a good (and very simple) way to maintain your self-discipline and keep your writing focussed.

  1. Check out the wikipedia page for a taste of the breadth and diversity of the debate. ↩