1) Getting to know your thesis first:
| Analytical Thesis | Empirical Thesis | Argumentative Thesis |
| It breaks down the idea or issue into its component, evaluates the idea and presents its evaluation and breakdown to the audience. | Empirical Thesis makes propositions resulting from experiments, involving laboratory or field research. | Argumentative Thesis makes a claim about the topic and justifies the claim with relevant evidence. This claim could be a policy, an opinion, evaluation or interpretation. The objective of an argumentative thesis is to convince the audience that the claim is true based on the evidence provided. |
Thesis Statement:
A thesis statement should be substantial, supportable, precise, arguable and relevant.
Below is a table for sample thesis statement.
| Analytical Thesis | Empirical Thesis | Argumentative Thesis |
| “An analysis of consumer behaviour towards FMCG products based on seasonal consumption”(involves analysis and study, surveys) | “Optimization of routing protocol for VANET” (involves experiments) | The habit of bullying is caused by parental neglect.(whether or not the reader agrees, it seems like a reasonable claim and one that could be supported in the thesis) |
2) Save your time by using writing software
Who wouldn’t love the idea of software that allows you to organise the bits and pieces that you write? Scrivener is a writing software that helps you in writing and organising your thesis in an efficient way.
From organising the course material, keeping versions of the draft, brainstorming lists to taking notes from the supervisor, Scrivener assists you in all and saves your time.
3) Managing Citations & References:
Managing references and citation in your thesis is a time-consuming process but with the advancement in technology, there are many software available that help in this section.
EndNote
EndNote is here to serve you with this incredible capability of managing bibliographies and references. There are many ways to add a reference to a library: manually, exporting, importing, copying from another EndNote library, connecting from EndNote. It enables the user to select multiple citations and saves the user from having to manually enter the citation information and the abstracts.
Zotero:
Zotero is a reference management program that makes your job easy and accurate. It is available both as a standalone program or plugin for Firefox web browser. You can save the references using Zotero plugin and later on import that reference into your thesis.
4) Creating questionnaire for online data collection:
Going person to person for creating questionnaire isn’t an easy task. In that case, you can take help from online data collection tools for creating the questionnaire. Get your answer by easily creating online surveys.
- SurveyMonkey: For using SurveyMonkey, you have to first signup with SurveyMonkey, and then you will be asked to enter the title of your thesis along with the category. Then, you have to select a template to use for the survey. Now, you can post your survey to social media and your website. You can easily collect responses from the site.
- SimpleSurvey: SimpleSurvey works same as SurveyMonkey and creates a more professional questionnaire. You can select the deployment channels and options best suited to your need.
5) Take backup at every stage:
After putting a lot of efforts into your thesis, you also need to make sure that you are backing up your data often. Everything you do should exist in a minimum of two places. Everything can seem fine one day, and then the next day, and you go to open a file, the operating system gets crashed, anything can happen like files corrupt, hard-drives fail, liquids get spilled, computers get stolen.
In that case, you can use:
Evernote:
With Evernote, data exists locally on your device as well as up on Evernote server, so that you can access your data anytime, anywhere.
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