Guidelines on the draft thesis documentation

Information on the draft thesis document.

Draft Thesis Document

If we take a thesis to be an argument consisting of a claim and a body of evidence presented in its support, then there comes a point where a research student (with guidance from his/her supervisor) has identified the claim s/he wants to make, has developed a significant amount of evidence in its support, and has circumscribed the range of remaining evidence that s/he believes necessary to provide to make the argument convincing.

At this point (usually, about 60% the way through a student's research), the student and his/her supervisor stand to gain from the student's doing two things: (1) committing some of this to paper in the form of an abstract of the dissertation (1 - 1.5 pages), a clean draft of a core chapter, and an outline of the dissertation as a whole; and (2) giving an open oral presentation on the work done so far and how they propose to complete it, to a small committee of experienced researchers in the same or related fields. The dissertation draft defense should be scheduled nine months before the expected date of submission for full-time students, within four weeks of distributing the above documentation to the members of the dissertation committee.