Hi there.

I have my viva coming up next week and i am getting really anxious about the amount of errors i have found in my thesis. Basically, due to a number of circumstances (relationship break-up, and the sudden retirement of my supervisor with 6 months to go) i found myself running out of time. I was still writing right up to the very last day. As such i tried to proof read my thesis whilst totally exhausted and sleep-deprived and didn't do a very good job.

Now, when reading through the thesis i have found a LOT of small grammatical errors (30+) None of these make any of the sentences confusing, but i am still worried. Having read around on this site i have seen a lot of posts about typos and people reassuring that these wont matter a great deal. However, i am worried that, as my thesis is in the humanities, these small mistakes will have a much greater impact than in a scientific thesis.

Does anyone have any idea what impact this will have on the viva generally - i know that these things differ from examiner to examiner, but i'd be grateful to hear about anyone's experiences.

Thanks

Hi

Firstly, congrats for submitting your thesis ! I'm in Humanities too, and I'll be submitting in 4 months' time.

I think you already know that there's not much you can do right now. What is done is done.You will just have to wait and hope that everything goes fine. Good luck !

I take offense to this! I think good writing is just as important in the sciences as it is in any other subject. If I am ever supervising someone and they come to me with a piece of work full with typos and grammatical errors I shall be telling them to correct the errors before I even look at the work.

In a thesis however, 30+ errors are acceptable in my opinion. It's a massive piece of work and that's why people are passed with minor corrections - it's probably impossible to write a thesis with no errors.

I'm sure you'll be fine!