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Both sides previous revision Previous revision 2022/01/07 12:27 strakova [Conclusions] 2022/01/07 11:59 strakova [Conclusions] XKCD comics2021/12/16 10:35 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/16 10:30 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 11:48 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 11:48 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 11:48 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 11:20 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 10:59 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 10:57 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 10:57 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 10:55 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 10:30 strakova [Introduction] thesis motivation2021/12/13 12:59 strakova [Dedication] 2021/12/13 12:58 strakova [Front Pages] 2021/12/13 12:58 strakova [The Title Page] 2021/12/13 12:57 strakova [Dedication] 2021/12/13 12:56 strakova [The Title Page] 2021/12/13 12:55 strakova [How to Write a Master's Thesis: The Content] 2021/12/13 10:20 strakova [Related Work] 2021/12/13 09:58 strakova change header levels2021/12/13 09:55 strakova move content from main page2021/12/13 09:54 strakova created Go Next revision		Previous revision 2022/01/07 12:27 strakova [Conclusions] 2022/01/07 11:59 strakova [Conclusions] XKCD comics2021/12/16 10:35 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/16 10:30 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 11:48 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 11:48 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 11:48 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 11:20 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 10:59 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 10:57 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 10:57 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 10:55 strakova [Introduction] 2021/12/15 10:30 strakova [Introduction] thesis motivation2021/12/13 12:59 strakova [Dedication] 2021/12/13 12:58 strakova [Front Pages] 2021/12/13 12:58 strakova [The Title Page] 2021/12/13 12:57 strakova [Dedication] 2021/12/13 12:56 strakova [The Title Page] 2021/12/13 12:55 strakova [How to Write a Master's Thesis: The Content] 2021/12/13 10:20 strakova [Related Work] 2021/12/13 09:58 strakova change header levels2021/12/13 09:55 strakova move content from main page2021/12/13 09:54 strakova created Go
how-to-write-a-masters-thesis-content [2021/12/15 10:57] strakova [Introduction]		how-to-write-a-masters-thesis-content [2022/01/07 12:27] (current) strakova [Conclusions]
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	Truth to be told, most people, including some very busy committee members, will actually get to digest the Abstract and the Introduction before moving to the supervisor's and opponent's reviews. Therefore, I suggest investing extra care in the Introduction. By extra care I mean it should be, along with the Abstract, the most thought upon, rewritten and proof-read part of your thesis.		Truth to be told, most people, including some very busy committee members, will actually get to digest the Abstract and the Introduction before moving to the supervisor's and opponent's reviews. Therefore, I suggest investing extra care in the Introduction. By extra care I mean it should be, along with the Abstract, the most thought upon, rewritten and proof-read part of your thesis.
-	A good experimental/scientific thesis has what I call ''"a story"''. A story is a consistent narrative which is told throughout the entire writing, an umbrella for all your thoughts, a red line running throughout the work. A story is opened in Introduction and it is usually a scientific question or an unsolved problem. You don't just simply write ''"We added BERT to something because we felt like doing it/my supervisor told me to do it/it helps with something else/it was easy enough/there is a library for it."'' Instead, you present a hypothesis in Introduction, your thesis then validates it and you conclude so in Conclusion.	+	A good experimental/scientific thesis has what I call ''"a story"''. A story is a consistent narrative which is told throughout the entire writing, an umbrella for all your thoughts, a red line running throughout the work. A story is opened in Introduction and it is usually a scientific question or an unsolved problem. You don't just simply write ''"We added BERT to something because we felt like doing it/my supervisor told me to do it/it helps with something else/it was easy enough/there is a library for it."'' (Even though it is what you actually ended up doing.) Instead, you present a hypothesis in Introduction, your thesis then validates it and you conclude so in Conclusion.
	For some theses it may feel a little forced or downright impossible to make up a story, for example if you are writing what is a basically an application user manual. Anyways, it is always good to hold a greater picture of your writing from the Introduction to the Conclusion before you actually start writing.		For some theses it may feel a little forced or downright impossible to make up a story, for example if you are writing what is a basically an application user manual. Anyways, it is always good to hold a greater picture of your writing from the Introduction to the Conclusion before you actually start writing.
-	The Introduction usually starts with a broader introduction of the thesis topic. The purpose of the first paragraphs is to put your thesis topic in greater context, explaining why the task is important, presenting a motivation for your thesis. From the top of my head, an example of introduction opinion mining: ''"Every day, people freely express their opinions on social media. Understanding these opinions is important, but increasingly more difficult as there is more and more data. Opinion mining is a field of natural language processing (NLP), which ... (description of the task)..."''. Generally, you are striving for a ''"greater-good-for-humanity"'' motivation, or ''"interesting-scientific-question"'' motivation, as opposed to ''"my-supervisor-suggested-the-topic"'' or ''"it-seemed-easy-enough"''. Beware of too personal a motivation, such as ''"I have been doing this topic for years, so it seemed logical to continue in it."'' or ''"I do this for a living, so I might as well make a thesis out of it."''.	+	The Introduction usually starts with a broader introduction of the thesis topic. The purpose of the first paragraphs is to put your thesis topic in greater context, explaining why the task is important, presenting a motivation for your thesis. From the top of my head, an example of introduction about opinion mining: ''"Every day, people freely express their opinions on social media. Understanding these opinions is important, but increasingly more difficult as there is more and more data. Opinion mining is a field of natural language processing (NLP), which ... (description of the task)..."''. Generally, you are striving for a ''"greater-good-for-humanity"'' motivation, or ''"interesting-scientific-question"'' motivation, as opposed to ''"my-supervisor-suggested-the-topic"'' or ''"it-seemed-easy-enough"''. Beware of too personal a motivation, such as ''"I have been doing this topic for years, so it seemed logical to continue in it."'' or ''"I do this for a living, so I might as well make a thesis out of it."''.
		+
		+	By the way, a stylistic note: Many papers start with words like ''"Recently,"'' or ''"These days,"'', ''"Currently"'' or some such expression. It is very widespread and safe way to start an essay. It certainly gives a sense of generalization (which may be a good or a bad thing). Some consider it a little cliché, not terribly creative and even bad writing style. Some have no opinion on the subject (just checked with a colleague of mine). In my opinion, it is a safe, but unimpressive opening.
		+
		+	The central part of the Introduction will describe what you did from a high-level perspective, not yet how exactly you did it (at least not in detail, that is reserved for the Methodology section). You will want to explain the problem you solved to the reader, assuming that they know very little of the task. In this phase, it is usually not necessary to give exact definitions or formulas, you rather approach the topic with a broader view. An example of the task, if applicable, is always a good idea.
		+
		+	Rarely for master's thesis, more often for doctoral thesis, you may wish to devote one paragraph to the exact description of your contribution in particular. This happens if the work described  is a team effort and you wish to distinguish your own work. You may then write that, for example, that the work was a team effort and your contribution was the implementation of all (or such and such) TensorFlow scripts and measuring most of the experiments, and also (substantial/good) degree of writing of the joint publication (if there is a publication).
		+
		+	The Introduction often, but not necessarily, ends with one paragraph which lists the Sections and their content (example from [[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.05190.pdf|Mulang et al., 2020]]): ''"The structure of the paper is follows: next section defines the task followed by related work in 3. Section 4 describes approach and we present experiments in section 5. We conclude in section 6."'' . (You would obviously replace ''"paper"'' for ''"thesis"''.)
		+
	===== Theoretical Background/Related Work =====		===== Theoretical Background/Related Work =====

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