Why no one will ever read your thesis

http://kent.ewakened.com

by kentf • 17 years ago

27 30 17 years ago

kent.ewakened.com

TriinT4• 17 years ago

No one will ever read your thesis... if it sucks. I have read many, many theses. In fact, I prefer to read theses than conference papers, because a thesis does not have as many editorial constraints.

This kind of generalization is dumb. "No one will read your thesis". Is that a law of nature? Does that apply to Claude Shannon? His M.Sc. showed how to map Boolean logic to electric circuits. I mean, who would ever want to read such a thing, right? ;-)

OK, enough of the title. I am all for making research work available and accessible, just as long as the quality of the work is not sacrificed. Research will always be difficult. It can't be made easy by adopting a new writing style, but it can be made easier.

der_ketzer• 17 years ago

Sure there must be some interesting thesis to read. But I think thesis are like patents, there are many and most of them are useless.

kentf4• 17 years ago

Hahaha. Thanks for the honesty :)

I think you are an exceptional person if you are reading more than 1 thesis.

Didn't mean to offend with the title, but I was hoping to elicit that kind of reaction. I have had this talk with a bunch of people at the University of Toronto and we all sort of agree.. but I am an extremist I guess.

If you are interested in Context Awareness and HCI then I will send you a copy when I am done ;)

kentf4• 17 years ago

How about the title.

"Why most people won't read your thesis"

TriinT4• 17 years ago

That would be (sigh) depressingly accurate :-(

brg2• 17 years ago

I think the author is correct in the result, but not in the reasoning. The vast majority of M.Sci thesis are not read because they are neither ground-breaking nor well written.

As for ground-breaking, they are only one year projects on average. No one can expect much more from it.

The author's main critique is the style of the thesis, but here I think he is incorrect. Research papers need to be concise and precise, and to do that they must use an agreed upon language and style. The proper place for a casual style is in a survey or popular article (re: advertisement).

I think another reason that one shouldn't expect their thesis to be read is that a M.Sc thesis is usually the first full publication of the author, while even a PhD thesis is too often the collation of the author's first publications. One simply does't have the practice necessary to write a great paper.

Also, it is good to remember that the audience of a thesis the review committee. It is not written as a dialog in the research community as a journal article or conference paper is. Most advisors will not push for style changes or expanded references because at that would engage a larger review.

brg2• 17 years ago

Claude Shannon's thesis is special in that it is the most influential M.Sc. thesis ever written.

See the second paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

shard2• 17 years ago

This kind of generalization is dumb.

So is reading hyperbole as logical fact. It's his thesis that needs to be accurate and unambiguous, not his blog entries.

TriinT4• 17 years ago

I was criticizing the title, not the post. It's hard to name blog posts, but some names are more inflamatory than others. I was not attacking the thesis.

kentf4• 17 years ago

Sorry shard... didn't mean to strike a chord... it was a poor choice of title.

I am merely saying that we should bring the best parts of fiction and storytelling to academic writing as I believe more people would be read it and gain inspiration / insight from it.

sown2• 17 years ago

I can't agree with your sentiment. :(

Your have an interesting anecdote but it is just that -- a special case. You might as well say that prayer works.

Given the ratio of ground breaking theses compared to all the rest that are it is safe to say that no one will read a given thesis. At least, the chances are effectively 0. The sad part is that even if it is a good thesis it still won't ever see the light of day.

TriinT4• 17 years ago

I've said it before, and I will say it again: I regularly read theses. Maybe I am insane, but I find them rather enticing when they're really, really good. OK, only one thesis every 100 years can be as monumental as Shannon's thesis, but that does not mean other all thesis suck. I often find myself reading theses by former MIT and Caltech grad students. I like Math, CS and Engineering theses. Needless to say, I don't read bullshit theses on women's studies or other pseudo-intellectual junk.

Conference papers are limited to 6 pages or so. Authors need to cite the right papers to ensure they won't offend anyone. They need to revise prior work. They need to stick to the core of the idea and refer to 1000s of other papers. Theses have less editorial and political constraints, so they're much more enjoyable to read IMHO. And, fortunately, theses don't have that hideous double column format.

If I want to learn a new field, I don't read papers. I read theses.

tetha• 17 years ago

Basically he is talking about the trench war one has in scientific writing. Call one side side A, and the others side B, and imagine there is a student who tried to read a thesis and did not get it. Side A will say: "Well, he is too stupid to unterstand my thesis", while Side B will say: "well, he might not know enough basics to understand your thesis, but I rather think that you just wrote incomprehensible gibberish".

I second his part about the informal parts very, very much, even though I would call this 'informal part' examples and motivations. Tell us in simple examples what your definition means, what your algorithm does, how your consideration works in this simple example, even if the example might be borderline with wrongness and oversimplification. It helps a lot, even though it is hard to find good examples :)

dlevine• 17 years ago

No one will ever read my thesis because I wrote it to fulfill a bunch of requirements set up by my program and my advisors. I didn't actually write it for the average person to read - it probably isn't even all that readable by most standards. But it flew through the approval process, which was my intention.

After two years in grad school, I was looking to finish, and not to win an award. I could imagine that PhD students are even more desperate after 4-6 years in school.

kentf4• 17 years ago

haha wow... so true

larsberg• 17 years ago

There are multiple audiences: 1) peer scholars familiar in your area of research trying to determine if you really did and understood what you said you did and understood 2) someone who is not a scholar and wants to learn about your topic

Write a separate paper for #2. Use contractions and exclamation points. Present related work in a framework that tells a good story instead of that catalogs the space. Skip correctness details and drill in on implementation specifics.

Something for both audiences will just be too long and boring for either.

mattheww• 17 years ago

I accept the fact that not many people will read my thesis.

Scientists in the field will not read it because they are not interested in all of the details of the analysis. They are only interested in the result, which will be published in a four page paper that only broadly explains the methods of the analysis.

My mother will not read it because I won't be writing it for her. When she asks me what I did, I will explain it in a way that she can understand. If I'm lucky, some science journalist will write an article about it, and I can send her the link.

hack_edu• 17 years ago

Each academic paper, thesis, dissertation etc. should be written in two parts: One formal and one informal.

This should serve as a reminder to all researchers and writers; write a good abstract

Abstracts not only help the informal reader understand the concept. They introduce the reader to the broad stroke of the research and greatly assist information workers in their discovery.

hopeless• 17 years ago

This was what I wrote in my post-PhD failure write-up:

"It is important to understand, from the outset of the PhD, who your target audience is: it’s you. I remember hearing that, on average, 1.6 people will read your PhD thesis. I’m pretty sure that includes yourself, your spouse, your supervisor, your second supervisor and your examiner (yeah, that’s technically 5 people. If someone says they’ve read your thesis, they’re probably lying -- they read page 9). You have to accept, that no one in the world will want to wade through this document. Ever."

http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2008/07/things-i-learnt-during-...

mark_h• 17 years ago

Oh man, that rang true! (I just read the whole post). I did manage to finish mine a few years ago, largely running on fumes and requiring a re-write largely from scratch after the initial examination with a near-nervous-breakdown during each write-up... but other than that I think every point resonated.

tybris• 17 years ago

Too late. Many people already did. It helps if you produced something other people can base their research on.

sketerpot• 17 years ago

Simon Peyton-Jones manages to write papers that are genuinely readable. He has some good advice on the subject:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

gchpaco• 17 years ago

Once I was writing a simulator for a reversible CPU, and the best documentation available was the man's PhD and Master's dissertations. When I told my instructor about it, he said "geez, I hope nobody ever has to read my thesis" which I thought was sort of an odd concept.

_cbsz• 17 years ago

Every professor I have actually talked to about what constitute a thesis has professed the staple method: you take your best research papers and staple them together. This is an exaggeration, of course, because the document actually has to flow, but I have the definite impression that you can get a Ph.D. in computer security with multiple at least somewhat discrete projects.

dave_au• 17 years ago

I can think of about 10-15 people worldwide who might be interested in my thesis, and since 3 of them are going to be examiners and all of them know each other it seems like a pretty quick way to disseminate the information. Well, except for the writing time... :)

beefman• 17 years ago

Tell the University you refuse to make it double-spaced. Then maybe I will read it.

ilyak• 17 years ago

In software, you can write code, why bother writing theses?

Write some useful code, open-source it, promote it with talks on conferences.

Noone wants your "research".

bhseo• 17 years ago

No one will read your post after you write a new blog post and the link to your blog's root has nothing to do with the HN title.

Why no one will ever read your thesis

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