Typical Problems in Students’ Theses
The following are some typical problems that have been found in theses written by SFS graduate students specializing in Translation Studies and linguistics. You are strongly advised to check your draft thesis against them and rectify any similar problems or mistakes in your own work.
Too long. Main reasons:
• Topic too wide — Not sufficiently restricted or specific.
• Irrelevance — Mostly in the introductory sections, which are often too long. Writers may start too far away from their actual topic, from too general a level, so that it takes e.g. 25 pages instead of 5 to put the reader in the picture and get to the point.
• Repetition — Note that readers who are told the same things many times feel that their intelligence is underestimated.
• Banalities — Do not waste time and space saying things that your readers will certainly know anyway, because they are obvious.
The work lacks an overall awareness of what the point of the whole thing is and how the various sections fit together into a coherent whole. The relation between the title and the individual sections may he odd, for instance.
The writer neglects some major relevant sources. The writer is uncritical of the sources used, or relies very heavily on one or two sources only, giving a biased picture of what others have done.
• Lack of explicitness — The topic question (the aim) is too vague if it is formulated merely as e.g. “to discuss X” or “to analyze X”.
• Lack of evidence — Conclusions are not justified by the analysis.
• Lack of a critical attitude — Methods are described with no critical comment, naively taken at face value, assumed to be perfect. Other scholars’ poor inferences are adopted and copied with no critical reaction.
• Lack of statistics — In a quantitative study, necessary statistics are not used where they would be appropriate.
• Lack of appropriate theory — the analysis seems to proceed merely at random, from one subjective impression to another, with no theoretical justification.
• Lack of criteria for data selection — The choice of data is not sufficiently motivated with respect to the research question. The reader wonders why the writer is looking at material X if the question at hand is Y.
• No implications — The conclusion does not answer the question “So what?”.
• Conceptual confusion — Concepts or terms are vague, slippery, used in more than one sense, ambiguous, undefined.
• Non-like categories — A classification is set up in such a way that the categories are not in fact of the same kind, so that they are not mutually exclusive. Books might be illogically classified as red, religious or fat, for instance.
• Fallacious argument — A general conclusion is drawn from a particular textual passage, for instance, but the passage is not first shown to be typical. A writer seeks to explain the occurrence of X by hypothesizing a cause Y, but neglects to consider other variables apart from Y which might also cause X. One form of this fallacy is known as an attribution error: that is, an error in the attribution of causation. Here, you infer that a cause is internal to the agent (e.g. a cognitive factor, in the translator’s mind) but neglect or underestimate possible external causes (such as the client’s instructions).
• Confusion of correlation and cause — Note
that to say A and B correlate is not
to say that A causes B.
• Readability is bad: lack of signposts, too much verbosity, sentences too long and complicated, too many parentheses and subclauses, poor punctuation.
• Quotation — Too much direct quotation, rather than paraphrase or discussion. The general impression here is that the work of other scholars has not been properly digested.
• No personal touch, or personal opinion.
The research brings nothing new: no new information, no new data, no new way of looking at the question, no new answers, no new concepts, no new research methods, no new evidence that supports or weakens a hypothesis, no new theoretical contribution.
Taking ideas or passages of text from other authors without saying where they come from — a kind of stealing. Plagiarism is a serious matter, with serious consequences; maybe even the end of an academic career.