Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language: a handbook for Supervisors

Disciplinary differences in thesis and dissertation
writing
Disciplinary differences in academic writing have been studied by a number
of researchers. Ken Hyland (1999; 2005; 2005b) for example has looked at

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disciplinary differences in research articles and academic textbooks. These are
not the same as theses and dissertations, however. Research articles and text-
books have different audiences and different goals from theses and dissertations.
Research articles, as mentioned earlier, are ‘experts writing for experts’. Thesis
and dissertation writing, however, is much more a case of students writing ‘for
admission to an area of study’. While there are some similarities between each
of these kinds of texts, there are also important differences.
Hyland’s (2004a) study of master’s and doctoral students’ writing points
to many of the unique features of thesis and dissertation writing, as well as
important disciplinary differences in this kind of writing. One important
feature he examines is metadiscourse in thesis and dissertation writing; that is,
the ways thesis writers use language to organize what they want to say in
their text, how they ‘shape their arguments to the needs and expectations of
their target readers’ (Hyland 2004a: 134) and how they show their stance
towards the content and the reader of their text. This topic is returned to in
detail later in this book. It is important to point out, however, that Hyland
did find there were important differences in the use of metadiscourse across
disciplines. He also found there were differences in the use of metadiscourse
across degrees. He found, for example, that PhD students used much more
metadiscourse to show the organization of their texts than did master’s stu-
dents. This could be partly explained, he suggests, by the longer length of
PhD texts requiring students to show the arrangement of their texts more
than at the master’s level. It could also be, he suggests, the result of doctoral
students being generally more sophisticated writers than master’s students
and much more aware of the need to write reader-friendly texts and to
engage with their readers. In terms of disciplinary differences he found social
science disciplines used the most metadiscourse overall, especially in the use
of hedges (such as possible, might, tend to and perhaps). The social sciences stu-
dents also used more attitude markers (such as unfortunately, surprisingly, and
interestingly) and self mentions (such as I, we, my and our).
Thompson (1999) carried out a study in which he interviewed PhD supervi-
sors about organization, presentation, citation and argumentation practices in
PhD theses in different areas of study. He looked, in particular, at theses written
in the areas of agricultural botany and agricultural economics. He found a wide
range of differences, even in the length of the texts that he examined. He also
found quite different views of how students were told they should position
themselves in relation to their texts. One supervisor, for example, argued that
the research project should be the main focus of the thesis and the author should
not intrude on this by using the personal ‘I’ in their writing. Another supervi-
sor gave the opposite advice when he felt the use of personal pronouns would
help the student to communicate their ideas. Thompson’s work suggests that is
really not possible to say there is one single way in which theses and disserta-
tions should be written in a university. How the thesis is written will be
influenced by a number of things. It will be influenced by the set of values
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Introduction

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underlying the particular discipline in which it is written, by the research per-
spective the student adopts, as well as by advice that is given to the student by
their supervisor (see Chapter 5 for further discussion of thesis types and disci-
plinary differences in thesis and dissertation writing).
Introduction
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