Hi all,

I am writing up my thesis, I am really confused about tenses, I seem to get difference of opinion on this and people mixing up tenses in a thesis. What tenses should be used and would they be different for the following sections.

Introduction
Literature Review
Methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
Further Work

My supervisor's general rule for any writing (from rough ideas right through to the thesis) is "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you've told them".

I interpreted that as in the intro, it's future tense ("this thesis will"), in the methods, results and discussion it's present ("such-and-such data shows") and the conclusion is past ("this thesis has shown") and seemingly that's what he meant. At least, when I've used that convention he's not corrected me!

Lit review is a strange one. The instinct is to talk in the past tense, but I was told to talk in the present ("Bloggs et. al. [2010] show", as opposed to "...showed"), because while the research was in the past, you're reading the results "now". When critically evaluating literature in terms of your thesis, it's future ("...but this thesis will show that their approach has its drawbacks...").

Hope this helps!

i try to make most of them in the present tenses. LOL

THESIS TITLE : The Complexity of Tenses in Postgraduate Writing

INTRODUCTION
writing IS a challenging endeavour for most postgraduate students. this IS further exacerbated by the disheartening complexity of tenses in asserting a particular point in their thesis.

LITERATURE REVIEW
MrBean(2010) ARGUES that the complexity of tenses is due to the fact that most students are concerned of portraying an accurate impression of the thought processes that occur in relation to the temporal domain, when it is not really a necessity to do so.

METHODOLOGY
to analyze the complexity of tenses, 50 students ARE studied. they ARE told to write a simple but elaborate tractate that would put other students to sleep almost immediately upon sight.

RESULT & DISCUSSION
the result SHOWS that 80% of the postgraduate students would fluctuate between four different tenses in a page. this IMPLIES a high complexity of writing.

CONCLUSION & FUTURE WORK
in conclusion, postgraduate students have a high tendency to employ complex tenses in their writing.
possible future work can expand further on this affinity as to whether postgraduate students would exhibit the same predilection of complexity over informal exchanges in a forum, like the one we're roaming right now. :)

A standard thesis should be as follows, where you use present, future and past tenses depending what you are describing. For example, present tense in chapter 1, past tense in chapter 4, etc.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Research Aim and Objective, Literature Review

Chapter 3: Methodology, Research Approach and Data Collection Techniques

Chapter 4: Research activity

Chapter 5: Research Findings

Chapter 6: Conclusions and Recommendations, future work

References and Bibliography

I hope this will help!