So, a couple of weeks ago my supervisor asked me to produce a mock contents list for my thesis so that I could see how much I had done and what remained to do etc. This is no mean feat when you haven’t finished writing a thesis yet and are not really wedded to any overall structure.

Having done it, I immediately saw why my supervisor made me do it. In front of me now I have a list of chapters and subchapters arranged in to what appears to me to be a sensible order. I have highlighted all the bits I have done and discovered, much to my suprise, that I have written half of my thesis. I bought an orange box, scrawled ‘THESIS’ on it and put everything I’ve written in there. Having a physical pile of paper to look at actually makes me feel as if I’m achieving something. Which is pleasing.

Now, my supervisor wants me to write an abstract for the thesis.

An abstract?

Now, not only is this abstract meant to be a brief summary of what is going to be a 50,000 or so word document, but I haven’t read half of it, because I haven’t written half of it. Summarising is, therefore, tricky.

That said, I think it is a really good idea. It’s forcing me not only to get my head around what I’ve got to put in this damn thing but also to apply a structure to it. Structure appears to be my weak point. Vis my recent converstaion with my supervisor about a literature review I gave him recently, “it’s written really well… but what is it?”.

So, for all you thesis-writers out there who, like me, find writing fairly easy but structure really hard to keep track of I can heartily suggest writing a) a contents list and b) an abstract. Both will probably change as you go, but at least you have things on hand to refer to if you get lost. Also they are very handy when you’re hungover and discussing your thesis with your supervisor. Aides-memoires, is the phrase, I think.