Theses

UBC has regulations and guidelines for theses. Please be aware of them.

Thesis are usually written in MS Word or LaTeX. Either is OK with me, although the type of feedback you will get is different for each. If you use MS Word, I expect to get both the MS Word source file and a PDF version of each draft. If you use LaTeX, I expect to get have access to the various LaTeX source files, including bibtex and other auxiliary files through a tool such as ShareLaTeX (my preferred mechanism for sharing LaTeX documents).

If you use Latex, be prepared to demonstrate that you can use bibtex to produce the following reference without mangling Strunk's name.

Guidelines

This is not an exhaustive list, but it covers some of the issues that in my experience occur frequently when students are writing theses or dissertations.

• Know the proper rules for possessive apostrophes, so that Fitts's, Charles's, and Jesus' are correct in all documents you submit. See the very first example on the very first page of the main body of Strunk and White if you are not sure of the rules. A good test of whether you know the rules is whether you think these two cartoons are funny:

  • singular possessive
  • plural possessive

• Know how and when to use the Oxford comma.

• Use APA-style citations such as to the seminal work by Fitts (1954), whose bibliographic reference would be as follows.

  Fitts, P.M. (1954). The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47(6):381-391. (Reprinted in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 121(3):262-269, 1992.)

• When discussing work by others in a lit review chapter (or anywhere else) don't say "According to the author(s) ..." because "author(s)" refers to you. If you mean the authors of a reference you are discussing, name the authors explicitly so there is no confusion on the part of the reader: "According to Fitts..."

• The word "since" has connotations of a temporal relationship. Use "because" when you mean a purely causal relationship and reserve "since" for purely temporal relationships.

  Since the beginning of time supervisors have dreaded reading students' theses because of the many stylistic errors they contain.

• A similar rules applies to the word "as" that can be used instead of "because" but it also has other meanings that can cause ambiguity. Try to avoid using "as" as a substitute for "because" because it is clearer to use "because."

• Know the difference between "that" and "which" and when to use each and when and if a comma is necessary.

  This is a rule that is important to know, which is explained quite well by Strunk and White (page 59 in the Fourth Edition, published in 2000).

• In a scholarly publication "We aim[ed] to . . ." or "We strive[d] to . . ." when describing the objectives of research is strictly speaking correct, but most people read these as "We attempted to . . . but fell short of our goal" or even "We attempted to . . . but failed completely." Sure, most research falls short of its goal, but I think it is much better to start a publication more positively and say "Our goal/objective is/was to . . ." and then later, after giving the background, the approach, and a summary of what was done and accomplished, discuss the shortcomings (of which there are often many).