Dissertation Writing: How to Write Better Academic Papers and Research Articles?

As a scholar, you’ll someday be needed to write an academic paper like a research article, thesis or dissertation writing project once at least.

A great academic paper involves the finest of a scholar’s writing talent. A dissertation or thesis is a lot different than writing notes and this difference is what makes a student a scholar. Paper writing is the most important part of academic writing and has been always a tough nut to crack.

Starting from a single plan, collecting information & data and then merging them together into a document – dissertation is all about doing perfectly by time and any mistake can bring the whole project down. Every scholar wants his academic paper to be a perfection: a symbol of excellence so that she gets her degree with perfection too.

But is it this easy to reach this perfection level?

Offcourse, by following some well-appreciated rules one can write an impactful yet beautiful dissertation to support their research. In this article, we are going to discuss how better academic writing can be done by not wasting a lot of “energy, potential, and time”?

Plan better

crop woman writing down notes in diary dissertation writing
Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

The start of a dissertation involves planning. The topic you are going to write about must be well planned and this plan should be well executable. The planning itself involves three essential steps.

  • Choosing a perfect topic
  • Designing a great title
  • Deciding the length of the dissertation.

1. Choosing the perfect topic

While most of the topics are decided by residing institutes & mentors, the scholar should try to pick a topic that is:

  • appropriate & influential
  • trendy
  • scholar’s favorite topic.

Scholar must choose the topic only if enough information is available about it and some former work had been done on the same topic. Else, it will become very tough to get added information and your project will be a boring & long-lasting project in the end.

2. Designing a great title

Great titles always catch great reading attention and also imposes great influence to the readers. If you got your dissertation title right, assume you are done half to your project.

Choose it wisely because a well-executed title executes a great writing work.

3. Deciding the length

Tiny dissertations are not appreciated nor are very long ones. The scholar must decide how long will her project should be, before she starts writing. Even though, the length of the dissertation may be edited later in the revision process – it is important not to write a lot more than the limit of words you set for your dissertation. This may cause trouble in revision.

Also read: How to Publish & Proofread? Awesome Writing Tools for Windows

Execute better

source: unsplash.com
source: unsplash.com

Now that you have a great plan set for your work, it is the time to execute the best of it. The execution process starts by writing the planned paragraphs one by one. Make sure that your paragraphs are neither too long nor too short. Also, the sentences must be of the relevant length and of readable complexity. Images, lists, and graphs must be used at the places they are required with explained captions if needed.

Academic writing is a whole new level of writing, so if you plan the same way you speak and write other kinds of stuff, you’re going to lose a big.  Here you will always have to be formal, precise and must make sure that there is no added junk.

A dissertation must be proofread more than once and made completely error-free. Try avoiding repetition of words and graphics. Use formal synonyms instead of informal words. Add suitable references and bibliography in the footers or in the end.

A dissertation can be typed into any word processor, like Microsoft Word, Google Docs etc., and there you can use spellcheckers to make the content look spotless. There are also some paper writing services available online.

Revise better

Revision is the last step of dissertation writing. In this process, scholar eliminates all the possibilities of any mistakes that can be made. It is better to ask the mentor for a revision. If that is not possible, you can again hire editors or senior scholars who are professionally excelled in your writing area.

Make it look better

After all that you have written, you dissertation will be of less meaning if that doesn’t look better. You should be concerned about.

Which font and what font size is being used?

For academic writing, a simple and highly readable font must be used. We suggest the use of Arial or Helvetica like sans-serif fonts for headings & titles and at least 12pt Times New Roman, Charter or Georgia like serif fonts for paragraphs.  For captions and codes, monospace fonts would look the best.

Whether your dissertation is one column or two-column?

If you are going to print your thesis/paper on an A4 or larger page format, you must try two-column paragraphs with the introduction, the abstracts and other noticeable content being single-columned. A sample of such an explanation is visible in this image:

example of a dissertation in a4

Whether to use footnotes and page numbers or not?

It’s optional to use footnotes, but page numbers must be included somewhere in the page. This helps readers and fellow researchers cite your work accurately.