8 Typical Mistakes in Writing a PhD Thesis

Your PhD thesis is one of the most important parts of your college experience. If you mess up your thesis, it can ruin your entire grade and set you back as you have to repeat a class or worse. That being the case, you definitely want to get your PhD thesis right the first time; and this guide provided by a professional thesis writing service will help you do that.

1. Don’t Procrastinate

This tip has nothing to do with the actual writing of the thesis, but rather your motivation to start it. There’s no denying that a thesis is a massive project, and it can be extremely overwhelming. You often get months to complete it, and a large amount of time fools students into thinking they can put off their overwhelming thesis until it is closer to the due date.

But as stated, your thesis is a huge project. You want to take full advantage of the time provided to you. Even if you are just taking notes or brainstorming bullet points for your thesis, you need to start early and put a little bit of work into it every day. It’ll be a lot less stressful if you grind the thesis down a little bit at a time rather than having to tackle it all at once.

2. Accept the Reality of Multiple Drafts

If you think you’re going to write your thesis perfectly the first time, you’re wrong. No matter how good of a writer you are, no matter how well-versed you are in the subject matter of your thesis, you won’t get it right the first time. And that’s completely alright.

Again, you have a lot of time to write up your thesis. There’s nothing wrong with writing up multiple drafts, slowly identifying and fixing problems as you identify them through multiple attempts.

3. Do Not Aim for Perfection

Because your PhD thesis is so important, many students believe that it has to be absolutely perfect. There’s no denying that it is important and you should do your best, but perfection is impossible. If you focus so much on making your thesis perfect, you’ll do nothing more than stress yourself out and possibly miss smaller, more important details.

No professor expects you to make a completely perfect thesis. If you focus so much on making it perfect, you might not even finish the thesis, and that is much worse than having some flaws.

4. Do Not Proofread your Own Work

One would think that it would be easy to proofread something that you have written multiple drafts of, but this simply isn’t true. You should never proofread your own work, because, on a mental level, you know what you meant to say, and you can often misread what’s actually on paper in favor of what you meant to write.

If you already know what a sentence says, you are likely to just skim it or skip it entirely. That’s why you should always get someone else to proofread your thesis. This is just for standard language errors, of course, so you don’t need someone experienced in your field to do this. Just get someone who has never read your thesis draft before to do it.

5. Accept Feedback

When other people proofread your thesis, they will almost definitely have feedback to offer. And you would do well to accept that feedback, regardless of how critical it is. This isn’t to say that all feedback will be correct; you shouldn’t make every change that is recommended to you, but you should at least be willing to consider the feedback you receive, no matter who gives it.

6. Conducting Unnecessary Research

It definitely sounds a little strange to postulate that you can do too much research for your PhD, but you, in fact, can. Don’t shy away from a little bit of research if you need it, but the fact of the matter is, at the end of your PhD, you should only be writing your thesis about something in which you already know everything required.

If you don’t know enough about your topic to write a thesis on it without considerable research, you should probably pick something else to write your thesis on.

7. Don’t Forget Paperwork and Formatting

While these steps are just the fine details of your thesis and may not seem important, that just means that students are likely to forget about them and put it off until the last minute, forcing them to scramble near the due date.

There’s usually a lot of paperwork to turn into your university, and no matter how well you write your thesis, it has to be in the right format to be accepted for submission. Don’t forget about these minor details that can still make or break your whole thesis submission.

8. Maintain Your Mental Health

This bit of advice might seem a little odd, as it doesn’t have to do with the thesis itself, but rather how you let it affect you during the course of writing it.

Writing a thesis is stressful; there’s no denying that. But if you let that stress affect your sleep, eating habits, and physical activity, your performance in writing your thesis will drop anyway. That being the case, working yourself to the bone and ignoring your own well-being is more counterproductive than helpful.