Choosing A Proper Format For A History Dissertation: Useful Hints
If you're doing a dissertation then it probably means that you're near the end of your college or university course – you might even have already finished it. You've probably done more essays, assignments, and projects than you can count during your time at college or university and all of this were in preparation for the final hurdle: your thesis.
This is likely one of the most challenging tasks you'll ever tackle in your whole life. A dissertation is much more involved than essays or smaller projects: there's more content, more research, and a totally different format and style.
Given that it is so different from assignments you've done in the past, it's understandable to assume that you may need some help with the specific format. The format is sometimes also called the structure or layout and basically encompasses the entire project and how you piece all the information together.
Hints To Help You Choose a Proper Format for Your History Dissertation
- Your workings should start with an abstract. This is basically a synopsis of your entire workings. The idea is to give the reader of your dissertation an overall understanding the objectives you had when starting out. The actual outcome of your workings should also be briefly mentioned in this introductory section.
- Provide context with background information. This is a lot more important than many students seem to think. The best way to provide context for your workings is to include a literature review - you look at all research and workings conducted on your topic by others in the past, and the summarise that information in this section. This makes it easy for the reader to understand the starting point upon which your dissertation will build.
- Reference your sources. What you're writing is a thesis - or, in other words, a very large research project. As the name suggests, this will mean that you'll be researching a lot of things about your chosen history topic. A crucial thing that you must remember is to reference accurately or cites every book, website, newspaper, or journal where you get information. If you don't do this, or if you do it wrong, you risk committing plagiarism. Plagiarism basically means "stealing" someone else's work for your own use, without giving them credit. In every academic setting this is absolutely unacceptable - committing plagiarism will not only invalidate your entire workings, but it may even get you kicked out of your college or university, or prevent you from being able to graduate.
Keep these three hints in mind when choosing your History dissertation format and you'll be well on your way to delivering a truly fantastic final project.