No doubt you have been given numerous guides on how to write your dissertation, how many source you should be looking for and in what tone you should be writing down your research and evaluation/conclusions for your reader, but how do you actually structure your dissertation? Do you really know if the rationale comes before the methodology? This short article identifies the main structure that colleges and universities go from and expect students to follow when setting out their dissertation.

Abstract

This is a synopsis of the whole document, which should allow your reader to gain an understanding of the objectives and outcome of the actual dissertation. You are looking to keep this part brief and to the point, looking to write no more than 130 words.

Contents Page

Here you should list the major parts to the dissertation, with subsections, and the page numbers that they are on. Having more than one page for your contents page isn’t advisable and making a really rough draft before you begin any part of your dissertation will allow you to plan your research and writing more effectively.

Introduction

Your introduction should provide a detailed and focus overview of the background on the dissertation topic and the structure the paper will follow. Your main findings are provided and you should also summaries the conclusions that you have gained from analysis of your results. You should base your introduction around a journey of the reader – it explains to them where they are, where they are going, and what other things they will find when they pass by.

Literature Review

Your literature review will simply outline all previous research that has been undertaken on the topic for which you are investigating. You should concentrate on the most important points that are relevant to your chosen topic and angle to gain maximum effect.

Methodology

Your methodology should identify an understanding of methods of data collection, and here you should outline the ways in which you will collect empirical data (i.e. questionnaires, interviews, etc). You will need to substantiate your argument for using these methods and allow the reader to understand that these were the best possible methods to choose for this particular research project.

Data Analysis

Here you present your empirical data collected and highlight the main issues which have emerged from your research. You will most probably use graphs, charts and diagrams to illustrate trends and analysis – you should not, however, draw any conclusions at this point. The way to write this section and structure weak is to show data gathered and set it out so that the data collected could be used independently of your conclusions.

Discussion

This section is for a researcher to identify the data they have collected and analyze it against one another to develop an analysis of gathered data and present your main findings.

Conclusion

Your conclusion is a summary of what you have already said in the paper. If you can clearly draw a conclusion from what you have said in earlier parts, then this needs to be stated here clearly. You could also include an assessment of how appropriate (firm or tenuous) that particular conclusion is, with indication of further research or analysis to overcome this issue.

Bibliography

All reference should be listed alphabetically, this doesn’t matter whether you have quoted from them or not. You should include the author’s name, title, place of publication, publisher and date when including any material in your bibliography.

Appendices

The appendices are a place where you can place extra information so that your dissertation does not become cluttered. It is a place to provide the reader a fuller picture of the information you are writing about, for example, a blank questionnaire that you used.

Overall, you should allow your structure to flow between your dissertation seamlessly. You do not want your reader to be structured in reading your dissertation in a way that will regiment their reading, but you also do not want them to be lost for where to go next, or be reading the data analysis before the literature review. You should also have your work checked by a professional before you submit.