Learn how to

COMPLETE YOUR THESIS,

DISSERTATION OR FINAL
REPORT
Learn practical lessons about confidently writing
& completing each section of your biggest
postgraduate level writing project

by PETER ALKEMA
PREVIEW
I want you to complete your dissertation and finish your
postgraduate degree. This document will determine if you
pass or fail. Its also called a thesis, or final report for a re-
search degree, and its often the one thing that students
don’t complete or leave too late and it. It might feel like
you have a mountain ahead of you but in this course I will
teach you how to climb that mountain and get to the top.

Are you busy with your final report for a masters or a PHD?
Or are you at another stage in your study but aware that
you will have to write such a document in order to grad-
uate. Maybe you’ve already started but you aren’t under
pressure to hand in yet. Whatever stage of your postgrad-
uate study, you will need to be thinking about your final
report.

Its basically the single biggest measure of your research

project. At your level, its all that counts, its what will be ex-
amined and the quality of it will determine whether you
pass or fail. Many students underestimate the importance
of planning their final report. Many students think that
they can leave it till the end of their study and worse still,
many students drop out of university precisely because
they can’t get their final report done.

In this course you will learn how to complete your final re-
port because I’ll show you exactly how I planned and wrote
my own document, for my PHD. When you are in the mid-
dle of your studies its difficult to have the clear thinking
that you need, and I was grateful to have useful guidance
when I wrote mine, but only after I graduated did I look
back and realise how much I wished I had someone ex-
plain it to me in practical terms.

Basically, this course is what I wish I had been able to go

through when I needed it. Whatever stage of your post-
graduate degree, you will find this course incredibly useful
to learn the tips and tricks you need to complete your final
report. In fact I would even say this course might be just
what you are looking for to keep your degree on track. You
will need to do the work, but I absolutely commit to teach-
ing you everything you need to know to get your final re-
port completed.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Background 04

The final report 06

Introduction 07

Literature Review 10

Methodology 12

Results 15

Conclusion & Discussion 17

Front and Back 20

Useful Links 21
Background
I run a postgraduate writing workshop at my university every year. I always ask
how many students are busy with their final report and few hands go up. Then
I ask how many of them wich they had started writing their final report earlier
than they actually did. Every time, all of them put up their hands. This is the
crux of this whole course; start writing your final report as early as possible,
work on all the sections in parallel, as and when you have something ready.

In this course I take you through the sections of
the final report, and how you should approach
each one so that you don’t leave it too late and you
don’t sit down to try and write it from start to fin-
ish, this is basically setting yourself up for failure,
or at least a lot of stress, which you want to avoid.
I’ll teach you what needs to go in each section, I’ll
show you in my own final report what I did, and
what I learned about how you want to present the
relevant aspect of your study, for each section.
This course then builds up your confidence about
the final report so that you can really get cracking
with it at any stage of your study. If you are at the
very end and you are delayed and stressed, then
don’t panic, take it section by section and I will
help you get through it. But you have to see your
final report as a structure, each with its compo-
nents, that you build up and put them all together.
I also teach you how to plan out the final stage of
completing your final report. I give you the steps I
took when I had about 6 months left to hand in. Ev-
erything needs to come together and there’s a very
specific planning process that I will teach you to
get this right and hand in your final report on time.

4 | COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT

I’ve done my phd, and I’ve also written a best selling book, so I understand how to write high volume and
high quantity, but also to make sure that the structure and flow of the final product meets the expectations
of its readers.

In the case of a final report, your readers are your examiners, they are the people that you have to satisfy with
your writing projct. But unless you are doing a 2nd phd or 2nd masters then you’ve probably never tackled a
writing project of this size. I will teach you everything you need to know. I’ll also talk about using an editor
and I’ll share the resources and experts that I also used to help me get through.

I really want you to succeed in getting your final report completed, submitted, passed and ultimately for you
to get your degree. I look forward to helping you do that, and please remember to leave a rating and a review
on the course.

COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT | 5

The final report
The final report is a document that brings your
whole study together and presents it to your ex-
aminers. Before you started your research you
would have written a proposal, which sets out
what you are going to do in your study. It introduc-
es the field and the literature as well as your spe-
cific research questions relating to the topic that
you want to investigate. The final report loops back
to the proposal to confirm what you actually did in
your study, what were the results, the findings, the
applications of your study as well as an limitations
and other information.
I like to think of the final report as basically a com-
pleted and extended proposal. When you were at
the proposal stage you didn’t know about all the
possible literature, you had some idea about your
research questions, you had selected a method-
ology, but you hadn’t yet applied it in the field to
actually gather data. In your final report you docu-
ment all this work, you write about how you actual-
ly applied your chosen methodology, what worked,
what didn’t work and what the results of that was.
6 | COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT
The final report has 5 main sections: Introduction,
Methodology, Results, Findings and lastly a discus-
sion or conclusion section. I’ve read many reports
that have more than this but generally speaking
these are the big 5 sections. You don’t have to fol-
low this pattern, but one of the skills I teach in this
course is actually to stick with a pattern for your
final report and then deviate within that based on
input from your supervisors.
This is the approach I teach in this whole course:
your final report is an active document that you
continually update throughout your study. As soon
as you have something ready to put into it then do
that and tick it off the list, don’t wait to come back
to it at the end of your research, because you won’t
remember the important context around that piece
of information. Now of course, much of the results,
findings and conclusion has to go in towards the
end but you would be surprised how much you can
get done much earlier in your degree.
Introduction

What goes in the introduction

A background which sets up some conflicting views

Definitions of key concepts in your thesis

Problem statement, use diagrams if needed

Research questions, sub-questions & objective

Motivation for your study, what will it achieve?

Your hypothesis about the research questions

Limitations, assumptions, chapter overviews

In the introduction of your final report you create some important context for
your reader. Even though your examiners will be experts in your field, you need
to assume that a broader audience will pick up your work. This first section
creates a link between the world of the reader and the more detailed, specific
world of your study and its findings. This is an important balance to get right:
on one hand you can’t assume your reader has too little knowledge about your
field or your introduction will be too long as you have to explain too much.

On the other hand, you can’t assume they know
too much otherwise you won’t need to do too
much introduction. This is something you can test
with your proposal . Presumably you would have
presented your proposal or at least got some feed-
back on it at the first stage of your study and this
will give you an idea of the level at which you need
to pitch it. My advice would be to assume less
knowledge in your average reader which means
you might need to do a more extensive introduc-
tion, but then you can always edit that down if you
need to.
So what are the key elements of your introduction?
In any sections of your final report you may be
asked to do more than what I teach in this course,
but what I teach you is what I included and I was
successful with my document. So I suggest you
use what I teach you as a framework, and then take
your supervisor’s feedback as additional guidance

COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT | 7

on top of that and you can always move things
around and add things in if you need to.
So firstly in your introduction section, you should
start off with a background to your work. Set the
scene for what people can expect if they continue
reading. Start to tease out some of the conflicting
ideas or issues that tee up your study. Link it back
to common knowledge as much as possible, and
see if you can set up the main opposing views –
this is not the place to expand them in detail but
you will come back to them later so its important
to frame these topics in your background
Then you should go into some key concepts that
you will be using in the study and which you
should list out with some definitions. Remember
to always put definitions in your own words; this
8 | COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT
is not where you should be defining the literature,
that will come later. You must now build on your
background paragraphs with some explanations
of the key topics you will be using. I had nine key
concepts in this part of my introduction, and in fact
one of the criticisms of my final report was that
there was a key concept I hadn’t expanded on suf-
ficiently, so watch out for this.
Then you should talk about the problem state-
ment you are investigating. In your background
you maybe introduced some opposing views on
something, now you must explicitly describe the
problem this causes. Remember that your study
must make some sort of contribution, so although
you may find your topic really interesting, it must
also aim to solve a problem, and that’s what you
need to describe. You can definitely start bringing
in the literature here, but don’t duplicate what
you put in the literature review later on. In my
problem statement I used diagrams quite ex-
tensively to really visualise the conflict that I
observed in the area of my study. Remember
that you have introduced your key concepts
so now you can use those concepts to explain
how they interact in ways that cause problems.

Next is your research questions and the ob-

Then in my final report I had
jective of your study. In order to address the a few paragraphs titled the
problem you have highlighted, you need to motivation for the study. This
pose some research questions. All great re-
builds on the concepts, the
search is anchored on great questions. You
need to frame a question in such a way that problem statement and the
the answer to it will help solve the problem research questions by say-
you have highlighted, or address the conflict- ing; ok if we investigate these
ing views that you have introduced. Typically
issues, by asking those ques-
there needs to be a core question and possibly
some sub questions to that or related ques- tions, what will be the value of
tions. The questions should also help you start that? What benefit will there
narrowing the focus of the paper, and draw the be from the application of any
reader along the path of how you are going to
answers to the questions or
approach your study.
any findings that might arise
Next you should have some kind of hypothesis.
from your study?
Even before you enter the field to apply your
methodology, you have a good sense of how
you think that will go and broadly speaking,
what you think you might find. Be careful not to show any bias about what you think might be the outcome
of your study, otherwise you are prejudging it and people won’t trust your methodology as an academic in-
strument. You can also use this part of your introduction to tee up your methodology as well as this will be
a future section and its good to start incorporating relevant language so readers can anticipate it, but again,
don’t duplicate what you are going to put in your methodology section

Lastly in your introduction you should state any anticipated limitations of your study, as well as assumptions
and then as the last few paragraphs you should give overviews of the rest of the sections of your final report.
I found this to be a very important part of the introduction. Its almost like an abstract of each upcoming
section, so the reader feels they’ve had a very brief overview of the rest of your document, even before they
have read it in detail.

Be sure to watch the demonstration lesson where I take you through the introduction section of my own final
report and illustrate a real example of what you’ve learned in this lesson. You’ll see exactly how I’ve tackled
what I described in this lesson and that will make it real for you. I’ll see you in another lesson!

COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT | 9

Literature Review

What goes in the literature review

Introduction to your main lines of inquiry

Academically confident overview of relevant work

Important works in each topic highlighting gaps

Overall synthesis of the overlapping topics

Proper referencing techniques as per your faculty

Summary of the key works in each topic

Let the other research studies speak for themselves

The literature review is where you sketch the overall landscape of related work
in the field. You will have done a lot of reading of the literature when you did
your proposal and selected your topic, so now you need to provide an updated
version of that in the final report. Your examiner won’t have read your propos-
al so they won’t have the context of the relevant literature at all and you can
re-use much of what you did for your proposal, but you may also have missed
some relevant work that you should add in and make sure you cover as well.

Another important point about writing your litera-
ture review in the final report is that once you get
to the end of your study, you have become an ex-
pert in that very specific area. So your academic
writing voice should be a lot more confident than
at the beginning, when you were just starting out
and exploring existing research. Also from an ex-
aminer’s point of view they will be an expert in the
field and they will know the other experts and who
is respected in terms of which other studies you
quote. Its highly likely that you will even reference
one of your external examiners, even though you
might not be aware of it.
The way to approach your literature review is to
have some lines of inquiry that ultimately converge
on your exact topic. Think about it like a venn dia-
gram of a number of circles that overlap in the mid-
dle. In order to fully understand the narrow, spe-
cific topic you have researched, your reader needs

10 | COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT

to have the broader overview and then understand Once again I’ve included a demonstration lesson
how these all intersect. that shows you my own literature review from my
final report so you can get an idea of exactly how
So at the beginning of your literature review, in- I handled it and what this looks like in a real life
troduce these lines of inquiry, or main areas of example.
your literature review. This then introduces the
sub sections where you will go into more detail for
each one of these. What I found challenging was
the sequence in which I took my reader through
these main areas. You should be able to move
your sub sections around, so when you write them
make sure they are self-contained and so its not
too much work if you need to re-order them if you
change your mind about the sequence. Ultimately
you want to start as broadly as possible and then
narrow down towards the end. The way I decided
on the sequence in my literature review was to
start with discussing the papers that were most
relevant to the end of my introduction, so at least
there was some continuity.

Then each sub section must really demonstrate

your ability to critically engage with other research.
The language and writing approach for a literature
review is very important. Once again you must not
show any bias on your part as a researcher, you
must let the other work speak for itself but you can
start demonstrating how other work supports the
problems you’ve introduced and justifies the re-
search questions you have set out to answer. Your
last sub section of your literature review should be
on the topic that most relies on all the other previ-
ous work. It’s the sub section that can be least read
in isolation of the other areas and actually starts to
describe the narrow area of research already done
related to your topic.

Importantly you should also demonstrate that

there is also a gap in the research, which you will
aim to address with your study. At the end of your
literature review you should have a conclusion
sub section which summarises all the studies you
referenced. I found this quite hard to write as you
have to distil a massive amount of your own read-
ing right down to only whats absolutely relevant
for your study, while also not missing anything that
an expert might be looking for.

COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT | 11

Methodology

What goes in the methodology

Position yourself philosophically at the beginning

Use the “onion model” for assistance if needed

Describe why you chose your methodology

Explain the steps you used and any practicalities

Don’t over-use any specific experts

Don’t over-use direct quotations, don’t plagiarise

Note any ethical considerations, medical / human

The methodology section of your final report is where you outline exactly how
you are going to perform your research. Remember that you will have already
completed your study by this point so on one hand you are describing it before
the results section, but its technically in the past. Just check with your faculty
whether or not you should write this section in the past tense. Remember that
in your proposal you would also have been required to discuss your methodol-
ogy so once again you can reuse some of that, but it should be vastly improved
because you now have the benefit of going through it and actually using it.

An important aspect of your methodology section, which many students miss, is the importance of posi-
tioning yourself philosophically. I used a model for doing this in my phd which I found very helpful and many
of the postgrad students which I coach have also found it very useful. Its basically an onion that says you
need to work through some layers before you get to the specific techniques and procedures of your study. A
research philosophy is a set of beliefs about how knowledge is created. Remember that working at a post-
graduate level is advancing our knowledge of the world. You’ve found a gap in the literature and its likely that
the work you are doing on the precise topic you have described, has actually not been done yet.

A lot of students jump into whether they are doing mixed methods, or case study, or qualitative or quan-
titative etc. Often we’ve seen the application of these types of methods in other papers and we are drawn

12 | COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT

to them in some way. There is nothing wrong with
that but even though you have some implicit rea-
son for that, you have to make it explicit for your
reader. you have to show why you chose a certain
methodology, and this is called positioning your-
self. Its important because in your research you
will make assumptions or conclusions based on
this same positioning and you need that context
before you dive into the actual methodology
So the outer layer of the onion is your philoso-
phy, your world view. From a researcher’s point
of view there are 5 major philosophies, and each
one affects how you actually do your research. So
whether you are aware of it or not, you have a phi-
losophy embedded in how you see the world and
therefore how we should do research to develop a
better understanding of that world. For example,
are you a positivist, do you have a view that says
you can do research while being independent of
the topic you are investigating. Or you could have
a view that actually as a researcher you are an in-
tegrally involved in what you are researching. You
can’t entirely detach yourself from your work, you
have a philosophy of interpretivism. Make sure you
position yourself philosophically
Then the next layer is your approach to theory
development and there are really 3 main types of
theory development; inductive, abductive and de-
ductive. Inductive reasoning aims at developing
a theory while deductive is about testing existing
theories. Any type of method will be informed by
your approach to theory development, for exam-
ple in my own phd I used grounded theory. My
approach was inductive – I was developing a the-
ory about what is going on in a specific area and
grounded theory is a suitable methodology for
that. I chose grounded theory before I examined by
own research philosophy and approach to theory
development, which are implicit but I needed to
start with those before diving into describing my
methodology
Then the next layer of the onion is the method-
COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT | 13
ological choice you make. These can be your mixed what I did and you will see a practical example of
methods, quantitative, qualitative etc, and then the what you have learned in this lesson.
next layer is the research strategy; are you doing
an experiment, action research, ethnography, case
study etc. I’ll also show you this onion model in my
own methodology section in the demonstration
lesson which will make it real for you.

Once you’ve unpeeled these layers of the on-

ion then you have created context for your read-
er about your choice of methodology, which you
should then describe in sufficient detail for some-
one to repeat it on a different set of data. This is
really important, many students just state the The bulk of your method-
steps of the methodology. Even in your proposal, ology section needs to be a
you should have some idea of the practicalities of detailed description of the
applying your method. If you are doing a survey;
exact steps you followed and
how are you going to get access to people to fill it
in and send it back. Once again, in my own study I the practicalities of how you
did grounded theory which is qualitative and I had did that in the real world. Re-
to interview people. Having completed my study member that you will have
by the time I wrote my final report, I was able to
a section later on where you
describe exactly what the practicalities of using
that method. Mostly this related to getting people can talk about limitations of
I could interview and how I would interview them your study, and very often
etc. also did I use software like Nvivo or Atlas.ti to these relate to the challeng-
house and analyse my data.
es you had in applying your
methodology. There might be
You followed a methodology to gather and analyse a best practice description of
data, and the results of that analysis are what you the methodology and how it
put in the next section, so don’t include results in should be used in research,
methodology, but you can describe what someone
will read in your results section without actually
but then there is the actu-
stating the results. This is an important distinction. al use of it in your study and
You don’t want an unexplained gap between the how did that go. You must put
end of the methodology section and the beginning
all that in this section. Now
of your results. The reader should be able to fully
understand exactly what you did in your method- your next section will be your
ology section, and then follow that by reading the results, so you are leading
results of those actions in the results. towards that.
Once again, I will show you in my own final report
exactly how I wrote my methodology section and
in that demonstration I walk you through exactly

14 | COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT

Results

What goes in the Results

Consistently use a well articulated framework

Always orientate your reader on the framework

Introduce the section with a recap and context

Quantitative studies will have lots of numbers

Qualitative studies will have lots of text, narrative

Inductive results present the new theory

Deductive results test an existing theory

The results chapter of your final report presents the outcome of your work to
the reader. So far you have created some context about your work in the real
world with your introduction, then you positioned your work in the academic
literature and in the chapter before this one you have explained the method
you used and how you used it in your study. Now its all about what your pro-
duced in your study, the results, or often called, the findings.

Remember in the methodology section we spoke
about two main research approaches, either you
are testing an existing theory, which is called de-
ductive research. Or you could be producing a new
theory and this is called inductive research. So
your results really need to proceed on this basis.
The results of your research must be the scaffold-
ing of your work. This is also the chapter of a thesis
that will be the most divergent across faculties and
disciplines. The results section of a medical thesis
will feel extremely different to that of a human-
ities, or a sciences thesis.
Its important at the beginning of the results chap-
ter to just quickly link back to the journey you have
taken the reader on so that even if they jumped to
the results they still have sufficient context. A good
practice in all sections is also to briefly introduce
what you are going to present to the reader and
in the results section this is even more important.
You really are getting into the heart of your work

COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT | 15

now, this is the foundation of the contribution you will make. Its
yours, its unique – everything up until now is like the shop window,
but now the reader is actually inside and engaging with the most
important part of your study.

The content of your results will also differ a lot, based on anoth-
er difference in methods, qualitative or quantitative. A qualitative
study will have a lot more text and descriptive results, while a quan-
titative study will have a lot more tables and numerical content.
Qualitative studies are generally associated with humanities relat-
ed fields while quantitiative studies are more common in the sci-
ences. There are exceptions however, and a lot of cross disciplinary
studies shows this mix quite effectively

For example, my study used a grounded theory method to study en-

gineering. Grounded theory is a qualitative method but engineering
is one of the sciences. However, I was studying the human aspects
of software engineering, so I needed a suitable method. Equally, in
the humanities you could find aspects that require a quantitative,
or even statistical flavour of research methodology to study. In the
demonstration lesson of my results section, you will see a lot of text
and description, whereas in a quantitative methods study you will
most probably see a lot of tables, graphs, numbers etc

The one important approach you must have in your results section
is to have some sort of framework that you use to present your
results. Your reader must be able to orientate themselves in your
study. Maybe you have adopted a framework or perhaps you have
developed one, its important to always explain to the reader where
you are in that framework and how the results you are presenting
relate back to it. For example in my thesis I presented a range and
my results section broke down this range into 5 different parts, and
each part had 3, so on the range I went from minus 7 to plus 7 and
that’s literally how I numbered the sub sections. If you were reading
it you could always work out where you were on the range.

Its also crucial in this section to demonstrate a high quality of anal-

ysis in your work. Y our results are not your actual data, you will
have applied some sort of analysis to your data which is part of your
methodology. Your main reader is your examiner and they will be an
expert in your field, so this aspect is crucial. Also make sure you can
focus your reader on the most important results, is there one part of
it that matters more than the rest. Its likely this will come up in your
discussion section, so be sure to highlight it in your results.

Be sure to check out the demonstration lesson where I walk you

through my own results section and point out the practical applica-
tion of what you have learned in this lesson.

16 | COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT

Conclusion & Discussion

What goes in the Discussion, Conclusion

A summary of your study, recapping results

Move from “what?” (results), to “so what?” (discus-

sion) and “now what?” (conclusion)

Answer the research questions and sub questions

State the implications and applications

Limitations, contribution and future work

Describe any propositions, confirmed hypothesis

In this last part of your thesis, you will discuss your results and conclude your
study. Sometimes these are 2 different chapters and sometimes they are com-
bined as sub sections of one main section. BY now you have presented your
results, you have been through the detail of what all your efforts over many
years have actually produced. And interesting this is an area that I find stu-
dents really struggling. I coach a number of postgrads and they often find it
hard to make this transition. Especially during your actual study, how do you
know if you have gathered and analysed enough data? No one else has done
this exact study so there is nothing to compare it to. Then in the actual write
up, students often go on presenting their results in their discussion.

Here’s a technique that I used in my own study to help me make this transition. Your results are all about the
what? What did you find? What did you analyse? What is your study all about. However your discussion
and conclusion is all about SO WHAT. You need to tell your reader – your examiner – why your work matters,
you need to link it back to the problem statement and the research questions you asked at the beginning.
Then you need to link it to the future value that can be derived from applying your results in the world so that
your study makes its contribution.

COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT | 17

So this is where you must start your discussion
section. An analysis of your results against the
original research questions. State the research
questions again and then systematically answer
them based on what you have established in your
findings. Once again, don’t just repeat your results,
specifically answer the research questions. And
its ok if you don’t manage to answer all of them
– this is research, things change and studies have
limitations - you will have a chance to state those
Then you should have a sub
limitations later on. section on the implications of
what you found in the study.
Then you should list your limitations, these are
the things people should be aware of when they What does it mean to existing
try and use your work or repeat your method on knowledge, certain groups
a different set of data. Did something go wrong? of people, the so what ques-
Did you have less data than you had planned? Was
tion could be more or less
there a problem with the data, etc? of course some
limitations are more serious than others, but pre- important under certain cir-
suming none of them completely undermine your cumstances or for different
work then just objectively state them. Limitations reasons. Once again, use your
don’t devalue your work, stating them actually
makes it more useful and practical because people
framework to help you pres-
can repeat it and apply it with better guidance and ent this systematically. There
understanding of the issues you faced and which might be different implica-
they might face.
tions for different parts of
The you should cover the application of your work. your results – make this clear.
Implications and application are slightly different.

18 | COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT

Application is how you think your study could be applied or used in the world. You are starting to bring
your work back to the surface, or back to the context you started with in your introduction. Think about the
problems you highlighted in the introduction, how would the new knowledge you have created, be applied
to solve those problems?

Linked to the applications you also want to talk about he contribution your work makes. Especially if you use
an inductive method, you will be developing a new theory and that must come through very strongly here.
Whereas your results describe something, and the application is how those results are used, the contribu-
tion is an explanation of something using your work.

And finally you will conclude your thesis. I found it difficult to write this section as it felt like I was bringing a
few years of my life to a close. but for your reader its just like the last chapter of reading a book. They haven’t
invested years of their life in your study, just a few hours in reading your thesis. So don’t be scared about
wrapping up your thesis like I was. Step back from it and just be objective about looking back on it and con-
cluding it all. You will need to briefly summarise why you did the study, what was the gap in the literature,
how you completed, what you found and why that matters. And usually the very last paragraphs are going
to be your recommendations for future work. Building from your thesis, what do you recommend other re-
searchers might want to investigate further. Isaac Newton said that he could see further because he stood
on the shoulders of giants. This symbolises scientific progress, because all research builds on other research.
So how do you want to see other work building on yours. Suggest a new angle, or research questions you
couldn’t answer. If you developed a theory, offer someone to use it and test it.

Once again I have included a walk through of my own discussion and conclusion sections so you can see an
example of how I’ve applied what I taught you in this lesson.

COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT | 19

Front and Back

What goes in the Front Matter

Title, declaration, abstract, dedication

Acknowledgments, contents, list of figures

List of tables, list of acronyms

What goes in the Back Matter

List of references properly itemized

Extensive appendices that contain important

information which doesn’t need to be in main

A final report will also have extensive front matter and back
matter. At the front you will have the abstract, declaration,
contents, figures, tables etc and then at the back you will
have your list of references as well as appendices. Students
often overlook the importance of appendices and how im-
portant they can be. I was on a coaching call with a student
the other day and they had finished their proposal and want-
ed to know how best they could anticipate their final report.
This is a great attitude, ie to start your final report straight
after your proposal, but she didn’t know what to do.

So I asked a few questions about her studies and found out

she had some ethics clearance documents from her universi-
ty because she had done interviews. So I suggested that she
start creating some appendices; for her ethics certificate, her
consent letters, the information sheet and a couple of other
documents. Now she can keep these somewhere else, but
why not put them in the appendix right away. One they are
in there then its done, you don’t have to worry about them
again

20 | COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT

Useful Links
Read Peter Alkema’s Thesis
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341803716_A_SEN-
TIMENT_SCALE_FOR_AGILE_TEAM_ENVIRONMENTS_IN_
LARGE_ORGANISATIONS_A_GROUNDED_THEORY

Read more about “Constructing A Good Dissertation”

https://www.exactica.co.za/book.php

Read more about Peter Alkema’s research on Agile Teams:

https://peteralkema.com/a-sentiment-scale-for-agile-teams/

COMPLETE YOUR THESIS, DISSERTATION OR FINAL REPORT | 21