Writing an academic paper is no harder than telling a friend about your vacation. You just need to know what you packed.
In this video series, Prof. Dr. Paul Marx shares useful pointers and tips for writing seminar papers, bachelor's and master's theses. He walks through the approach to finding and formulating the research problem, doing the literature review, and the actual writing. Very useful for students in any field.
Every course of study ends with a thesis. Whether it's a bachelor's or master's program, at a university or a university of applied sciences — every student has to get through it, everyone has to hand in their thesis.
In your thesis, you have to show that you can competently apply the subject-specific and methodological knowledge and skills you gained during your studies to work on an academic research question, and that you can present the results of your research in a way that suits your audience.
Easier said than done! For many students, writing their thesis is a real challenge. Especially at the start, you often feel lost. So many questions come up: Where do I begin? How do I structure my paper? What are the relevant sources? Where do I find them? What should I write, and how much? How long should the individual chapters and sections be? How do I write at all? What absolutely has to go into the outline, and what can be left out? How do I phrase things so my ideas sound smart and make sense? When is my paper good and when is it not? This list of questions could go on for quite a while…
Indeed — writing a thesis is often a difficult undertaking. But it doesn't have to be! Because writing an academic paper is really no harder than telling a story — like telling a friend about your vacation. There are, admittedly, a few requirements placed on academic texts that set them apart from simple stories, but these aren't as tough as you might think.
Granted, there's quite a bit you need to know about writing a thesis to make it turn out well. That's exactly the purpose of this post — to tell you how it's done.
To that end, we've prepared the videos below for you, in which Prof. Dr. Paul Marx explains how to write a thesis and answers all the questions that typically come up along the way. While his videos refer to how the papers are written under his supervision, rest assured that the vast majority of his recommendations, tips, and answers apply to all theses. And, by the way, the same goes for seminar papers.
Enjoy watching!
Part 1. Intro
Part 2. Goals of the Paper and Necessary Skills
Part 3. Approach: Research Problem
Part 4. Approach: Finding a Topic
Part 5. Approach: Literature Review
Part 6. Structure of an Academic Text
Part 7. Writing: How to Write Aptly and Engagingly
Part 8. Formal Requirements
Links referenced in the videos: 1. Slides for the course "Scientific Writing"
2. EBSCO database
3. VHB-JOURQUAL (journal ranking)
4. Mendeley (reference management software)
5. Style guide for producing academic papers
Full-length video: https://youtu.be/YMLxYzsgODE
In addition, we'd like to point you to the Facebook groups run by Absolventen-Schmiede, where you can interactively discuss your questions about academic work and writing with the group members and experienced mentors:
Academic Writing for Beginners (term papers)
Academic Writing for Advanced Students (theses)
SOCIOLOGY: Term Papers & Theses
Business & Economics: Term Papers & Theses
We hope the information in the videos was helpful to you. And if you're writing an empirical seminar paper, bachelor's, or master's thesis and need to collect and analyze data through a survey, why not use QUESTIONSTAR — our online survey tool that lets you build online questionnaires, run online surveys and data collection, and analyze the data right in the tool. With QUESTIONSTAR, graphics and charts can be exported to native Office formats and edited there if needed — quite handy when writing a report or an academic paper. The raw data can likewise be exported to native data-analysis formats such as .csv, .xlsx (Excel), and .sav (SPSS). When exporting to SPSS, the variable labels are carried over automatically.
Date: June 13, 2019
Author: Dr. Paul Marx