How to Write an Error-Free Doctoral Thesis

Your doctoral thesis will likely be more than one hundred pages long. With a word count of over 100,000 words, you are bound to make some grammatical errors. The last thing you want when you submit your dissertation is to lose points because you weren’t thorough enough; you need to know how to write an error-free doctoral thesis.

First, it starts with your drafts.

When you are writing your first and second drafts, you may be thinking, ‘It’s a rough draft, I’ll go back and fix it later.’ Don’t think that. If you want to write an error-free doctoral thesis, do the spell checks at every step of the process; even for your first rough drafts.

Second, when you get to your final draft, don’t rush.

And don’t just focus on spelling and formatting errors. Read your paper out loud as you write it to make sure that it makes grammatical sense. Verify that the syntax helps to convey the meaning that you are trying to get across.

Third, get feedback from someone.

It may be your roommate or even better, a classmate who is willing to sit down and listen while you read your paper aloud to them. They can help you hear a confusing sentence structure that you may have overlooked. Reading aloud to someone is a good way to solicit feedback.

Fourth, have it professionally proofed.

You can hire a writing service that will do the final edit of your doctoral thesis to make sure that you have not missed any typos. The benefit of that is a professional service should be able to guarantee an error-free doctoral thesis.

Fifth, proofread it yourself.

Even if you hire a service to proofread your doctoral thesis, you should also proofread it. While there may not be any errors, you may notice that there is a chapter you’ve left out, or a point that you meant to make but forgot to include it. Giving your document a final read before you are ready to submit it can help you to produce an error-free thesis.

Lastly, rinse and repeat.

You may have read your paper a dozen times and still there may be an error that you have overlooked. Step away from your paper for a couple of days and then go back and read it as if you are reading it for the first time. Putting fresh eyes on it may help you see errors you have overlooked.

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