These pages presents an overview of what needs to be considered when writing a postgraduate thesis or dissertation. For simplicity, this page will use “thesis” as a term to describe both a PhD thesis and a Master’s dissertation.

Official guidelines

The exact requirements for writing a thesis vary by discipline, so you should ask your supervisor if there are specific guidelines when starting to write your thesis. There are some central guidelines, however, which can be downloaded from here:

Preparing a Thesis for Submission Guidelines

Submitting your Thesis Guidance for Students

Specification for Binding of the Thesis

University of Hull Templates

The Skills Team have created some Microsoft Word templates for formatting your dissertation or thesis.

These can be found on the MS Word page of our Microsoft Office SkillsGuide.

The nature of a thesis

A thesis is an examinable document (possibly with annexes and additional material) that must:

Display your knowledge of your chosen subject.
Clearly demonstrate your ability to describe what you did and how and why you did it.
Acknowledge which parts were done or helped by others.
Be honest (no plagiarism!), factual, critical, and as interesting as it can be.
Display your original contribution to knowledge (PhD thesis only).

Your thesis should argue and establish the grounds for believing a claim or conclusion; these grounds should be based on:

Evidence from your own results
Other evidence or accepted claims warranting you to draw the conclusion from your evidence.

Therefore you must:

Make it clear what your central claim/conclusion is.
Make it clear how your research supports the claim/conclusion.
Keep the background (eg literature review) relevant to your argument linking data with conclusions

Other resources

Working with supervisors - from University of Reading Study Advice

Click Next to look at the structure of a thesis