Last Update: 02.14.02     

~ Court Crowther, Director, Graduate Admissions & Enrollment Mgmt., RGS
Published Winter 2002

This article should be informative to all graduate students, but offers several resources that may be uniquely valuable to non-native English speakers. Having developed appropriate content for your thesis or dissertation, you are presented with the task of actually writing the manuscript. The process of writing a thesis or dissertation can be difficult for at least two different reasons. First, assuming that you've developed content that is acceptable to members of your committee (whether master's or doctoral), you need to communicate, in writing, your content in a clear, economical, and effective manner. Writing grammatical, clear English prose can prove challenging even for those graduate students who are native speakers of English. Second, while you may not be aware of it, the required physical format for writing theses and dissertations (e.g., margins; pagination; etc.) is quite stringent, and, in some cases, non-intuitive.

Grammar

There are a couple of informal ways to determine whether your writing is clear and grammatical. One is to have a fellow student with good writing skills review your manuscript for clarity and grammatical correctness. Even if this person lacks in-depth knowledge about the content of your manuscript, s/he should be able to critique its grammar. Similarly, you might read the manuscript aloud to a fellow student - often "clinkers" are easier to detect when text is read aloud.

While UCI's Learning and Academic Resource Center (LARC) is aimed at UCI's undergraduate population, LARC's website houses their "Electronic Writing Center", which includes several different pages that overflow with useful information about English grammar, as well as links to other sites that include writing handbook-type content. Among the Center's offerings is the "Grammar Checklist," which covers concisely, among other topics: word endings; verb tense; active vs. passive voice; and parallelism. Their "Readability Checklist" is essentially an algorithm for evaluating your manuscript for, as the name suggests, readability. Overall, the site may be more helpful to international students. As an example, native speakers of several non-English languages often have difficulty using English articles appropriately. The Center's "Article Finder" page can help the novice understand the arcana of article usage.

Manuscript Formatting

There is extensive assistance, of both electronic and human varieties, available for help with thesis or dissertation formatting issues:

• The page "UCI Thesis/Dissertation Writing" on our OGS website includes a brief discussion of resources available for students who are writing academic manuscripts.
• The UCI Thesis and Dissertation Manual is available electronically from the Main Library's Special Collections and Archives page. The manual covers manuscript formatting in great detail, and even includes a sample manuscript (properly formatted, of course), as well as important dates/deadlines for submitting thesis/dissertation paperwork.