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

Discipline-specific expectations
While there are general expectations of thesis and dissertation writing (see
Chapter 1), there are also discipline-specific expectations for thesis and disser-
tation organization. Many of these disciplinary conventions and expectations,
however, are subtle. As Parry (1998: 273) argues:

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The overall shape of theses and dissertations
[these conventions] may not be readily identifiable to experienced schol-
ars, yet doctoral students are expected to learn and master them,
suggesting that discipline specific writing norms and conventions are
learned largely by tacit means during doctoral study.
One of the arguments this book is making is that the more these norms and
conventions can be made explicit, the better (and more easily) students will be
able to learn them. The Application activities in this book have just this goal.
Among the discipline-specific conventions listed by Parry are the struc-
ture of academic argument, the ways in which ideas are linked in a text, and
conventions for citation and critique. Different disciplines also often have
their own preferred ways of doing things in terms of thesis organization. It
is important to make these as explicit as possible for students. This may
vary, of course, depending on the type of thesis being written and the
research perspective being taken by the student. Writers such as Belcher
and Hirvela (2005) have argued that the qualitative thesis, for example, is
in many ways ‘a fuzzy genre’ (Medway 2002). That is, there is often more
variation in a qualitative thesis than in a quantitative thesis in terms of how
it should be written, the issues it should address, the claims it can make and
how it can do this (see Chapter 8 for further discussion of this). The quali-
tative thesis is also often more difficult for second-language students to
write (Belcher and Hirvela 2005).