Hi everyone

I wondered if anyone can give me some advice please? I'm approaching the end of my 2nd year now and I've been asked by my supervisor to write an outline of my thesis - chapter headings, state of work for each chapter etc and to be honest I really don't know where to start with it! I don't have chapter headings yet or anything approaching them, i don't know which parts of my research will go in which section or how to begin to structure it. I have several areas that are linked but could be dealt with and combined in numerous different ways and until I've completed the data collection I really don't know which would be the best recipe for success here. I also don't really know how many chapters I need and am feeling a little lost.

He wants to work out a timetable for completion with me which I'm more than happy to do - he doesn't want me to rush and is acting on my concerns about my progress (which he says is excellent) and how long this is going to take me to finally complete so its incredibly helpful to address, but I feel a little out of my depth as I don't really know how to approach this with still not knowing quite what I'm going to find.

I'm sorry, this is a really woolly post but its kind of how I'm feeling :$

I've just about got to that stage too, I've done a revised plan of attack through to completion and have got my chapter headings sorted at last (I had some before, but was never quite happy with them, so regarded them as vaguely unsatisfying, if you know what I mean). I found three books most useful to help me sort things out, one is Dunleavy 'authoring a PhD' which I know many others have also recommended. It gives clear advice about the way to go about it. Clough and Nutbrown 'a student's guide to methodology' not exactly about chapters, but if you do the exercises as suggested, it certainly helps to get your head round things, and can help clarify exactly where you are going and what you are supposed to be doing, and last, but not least, I found Hart 'Doing a literature review' surprisingly helpful in getting my ideas sorted. I've used this one over the last few months when I was trying to get an idea about the best way to go about my lit review - I chickened out a bit and started on other chapters, kidding myself a bit that I should do these first as my research has a lot of book type stuff in it - and it has been so helpful, so much so that has put a completely unexpected slant on the research, a kind of 'eureka moment' i suppose. i did lots of diagrams etc. using this book as a starting point, and like you I had lots of 'stuff' and lots of potential homes for it, the book really helped me sort it out. Definitely worth a read :-)

I'm much earlier in the process than you are but my supervisors asked for a list of chapter headings before end of April - I did something really superficial (not much beyond intro, lit review, methodology etc) but then I did two things which really helped me get a structure (which not only delivers what they want but also will be useful to me).  The first was looking at someone else's PhD - even though it was only very vaguely related seeing the level of detail in the sections within her chapters really helped me. The second was drawing up a mindmap (using mindmap software) to build on the themes.  As I added to each top level theme I was able to spin them out into themes on their own and also I could draw links from one theme to another which really helped. From having no idea on how I will do the 30,000 words or so of the lit review I have now broken it down into much more manageable chunks.

Thanks so much :-) I'll certainly go onto amazon in the morning and have a look for those books, I feel I need all the help that i can get and they sound extremely helpful. Jepsonclough - where do you get the mindmap software? I used to use mindmaps a lot for revision in my BA years and found they helped me no end, but I don't think an A4 sheet of paper (or even A3 come to that) will do it for this - is it freeware or do you have to pay for it?

Half the trouble that I'm having is that things that I had proposed to do didn't work out when examining the sources and so things have changed a great deal and I've gone off in a totally different direction to what I'd expected to be in even earlier this year so I'm a little confused as to how its supposed to all fit together. I'm assured that it will, but its meant that even my over-riding questions have changed totally and I'm examining sources and writing about things that I hadn't considered initially which has thrown my structure totally and I'm having to approach my topic from a completely different angle. This exercise will be so useful to pull it back together and move forward but I'm just not quite sure which way I'm heading to begin to do that :-)

I meant to say, I have checked online for the mindmap software, but there are dozens and I'm not sure which to go for :-)

I use mindmanager 6 which I've had for a few years - they do a student discount. You can get Mindmanager 8 from here http://www.studentexpressware.co.uk/gbu0-catshow/mindjet.html

That's great, thanks so much, i'll go and have a look at it now :-)

Hi Stressed,

I am also approaching the end of the last term of second year and have been writing a chapter a month since Jan (first draft due this year in 2 months!) Somehow, my original plan for the PhD and the chapters have not changed. I always knew I wanted a short PhD - 8 journal article length chapters. I also knew I do not have book ambitions for this, but rather would like to get a couple of the chapters published as articles.

But this below seemed to me to be a coherent way of thinking about my chapters - basically my empirical component is best on three pegs, which also coincide with the 3 pegs in my conceptual framework.

The chapters all have cool names :-) lol but I am for obvious reasons just writing their content below.


1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
3. Conceptual Framework
4. Methodology
5. Empirical Chapter: direction 1
6. Empirical Chapter: direction 2
7. Empirical chapter: direction 3
8. Conclusions

I am preparing 3 of these today and tomorrow for my end of second yr submission to my committee to read, and must give a one page summary of all chapters, so your query has come at a really god time for I must spend the rest of today on this!!

NB: Also note I am in a different field...