General Guide to PhD Writing Style
Bad PhD dissertation/thesis writing usually goes with murky thinking, thus by writing clearly, you are made to clarify your understanding. Considering layout, sentence ordering and simple things such as punctuation are important and they can have a great effect on your material understanding.
1. Avoid non-sequiturs. Sentences of your PhD dissertation/thesis should logically lead from one to another as easily as walking. English prefers short sentences with a good deal of structure joining across sentences. Ideas or words used several sentences back will be in your audience mind, so there must not be jarring topic change. If you would like to change your topic, it is necessary to warn your readers by key phrases such as “in contrast to this,” “moreover,” “on the other hand,” or “meanwhile.”
2. Avoid making sandwiches. An abstract sandwich takes place when you start with one idea, go on to another, and return to the first one. This indicates bad organization and it should be avoided. The more general topic must come first, with the definite subtopic following, unless you intentionally wish to be pedagogical.
3. Validation status of statements of your PhD dissertation/thesis. Every statement should have an obvious validation status. It means your paper’s statements should be understandable to your audience from context or signals in the syntax how the audience is considered to know that your statement is correct. Is it considered to be obvious from what was said; considered to follow from something presented a while back; a well-known fact your audience should know anyway; a fact proven by someone else that you had quoted a while back; or a fact you will be prove later?