Making Dissertations Samples for High Schools – Part 1

High school institutions spend a lot of time and resources to prepare students for the challenges ahead. Whether these challenges sit in the preceding higher education, or in their career lives, such prepping is considered to be part of this institution’s mission.

An example of a particular area of prepping up is dissertation. And the oft-used preparatory tool for this is the so-called dissertation samples. Samples or models had been around the education scene for quite a long time.

These preparation aims to cover a number of advance academic endeavour – from writing to research, analysis to defence. Apart from these point-specific areas, it also facilitates the exploration of emotional road-trips inherent in such academic undertaking.      

Dissertation Proposals: Journey Map for Dissertations

Those who are already highly experienced at writing dissertations are all of the opinion that the contents of a dissertation proposal are subject to a lot of modifications once the actual research has begun. Therefore, one would wonder, “What's the point of writing a dissertation proposal if it's going to undergo a lot of changes anyway?” Well, the answer is that it will be the guide which will point the writer of dissertations to the right direction. Taking the metaphor of travel, a dissertation proposal serves as the map that will help the student determine the starting point of the journey, the landmarks along the way and the end point. The actual experiences of the travel, which will not be known until the trip itself, represent the dissertation project.

General Steps for Formatting a Dissertation

A dissertation project, or treatise or also known as thesis could be written by undergraduate degree students or by master's degree students. But the basic or general steps or guidelines in formatting the treatise would still be the same regardless if the student is taking up a bachelor's degree or a master's degree. The formatting of dissertations would be based on the style guide or style manual that is specified by the lecturer or the supervisor of the project. The style guide is the written set of standards to follow for the design and writing of academic documents, including dissertations.

For example, a particular style manual could have the specific dissertation formatting guidelines for the paper of the document. The guidelines would include the type of paper such as an A4 paper, using double-sided printing for the soft-bound or hard-bound documents of the dissertations, font size of 11 to 12 for the text and 10 for the footnotes, and font type of Arial or New Times Roman. The other technical aspects for the formatting of the document would include the typing font and font size, in-text citations, quotations, referencing, listing of sources and the details of sources, the margins of the paper, and the style of presentation of figures, tables, graphs, images and other visuals.