Proposal writing for a thesis often overwhelms students. besides having to determine what to include, and the supervisor’s expectations, students are required to put in tons of work to ensure the proper topic selection and to exhaust research of the available materials.
Unfortunately, the dissertation proposal is a vital statement of intent that gives you a go-ahead for a given research topic. This allows the tutor to guide you on how to approach your dissertation proposal, reducing errors and complications in the latter dissertation writing stages.
This article will guide you in writing a dissertation proposal to help you overcome the challenges you could encounter as you tackle your dissertation.
What is a dissertation proposal?
A dissertation proposal is a document highlighting your research question, methodology, and approach to data collection and analysis. This document allows you to envision your final research paper and to save time and effort through insight from your tutor.
The dissertation proposal, therefore, shows your mastery of a topic and also allows your supervisor to test the feasibility of your topic, ensuring that your efforts do not wash down the drain.
How to write a dissertation proposal: Tips for writing a dissertation proposal
Although many students are familiar with the process of writing a dissertation, the approach to writing a dissertation proposal is often a cause of confusion. If you are also unfamiliar with the process of writing dissertation proposals, these tips ought to come in handy to ensure a quality proposal.
- Identify the research methodology
The research methodology highlights the approach you intend to take in your research and various considerations made in selecting your participants and research methods. This part of the dissertation proposal gives readers a good grasp of your research scope, making your paper simple to comprehend and feasible with the resources at your disposal.
The proposal should therefore tackle all the finer details in your examination, to show the supervisor that you are familiar with what you are doing.
- Discuss the data analysis software
When dealing with complex research, you may require software such as SPSS, SAS, Minitab, and MATLAB to analyse the data at your disposal. These tools may require some training to solidify your understanding of the software, assuring your supervisors that the data yielded from your research will be properly interpreted to inspire correct deductions.
- Consult online samples
Unlike the dissertation, your proposal is written without the data from research, making it unnecessary to include the results and discussion section. The common dissertation outline is thus improper for your dissertation proposal.
Online samples should serve as a template for a dissertation proposal allowing you to familiarize yourself with the structure and style for writing a dissertation proposal. Alternatively, reach out to peers and tutors for guidance and tips for writing a dissertation proposal, and overcoming the common challenges faced by students.
- Develop an outline
Alike all academic writing tasks, a dissertation outline is a crucial element in mapping out ideas to ensure that you tackle all the details that are relevant to your research topic. Outlining gives you a better grasp of what your dissertation will appear as, helping the tutors to gauge how your ideas connect and your approach to confirming your research objectives.
Before developing your outline, conduct extensive research to broaden your perspective on handling a topic and highlight the research approaches that have already been taken, ensuring the uniqueness of your paper.
Also worth noting, familiarize yourself with the thesis proposal format to tackle all the relevant information in your thesis.
- Outline potential implications
The last section of your proposal should highlight what you hope to achieve through your research, giving the supervising panel a gist of your arguments and the research gaps you intend to approach. Doing so creates room for insight into the changes to make in your paper to ensure the relevance of your research.
- Include the references
When writing your proposal, be keen to include the references of the sources you have interacted with in the course of writing your paper. This assures your supervisor that you have conducted ample research to diversify your perspective on a topic and also shows that there is ample material to support your claims in the discussion.
Final take
We hope that these tips have helped you overcome any confusion you had regarding your dissertation proposal. However, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with the tips for preparing for your proposal defence to overcome issues that may delay your dissertation writing timeline.
