ABSTRACT
As was suggested in the first two chapters, the key to getting started on your dissertation is the production of a research proposal. It has three related and central rôles to play in the successful completion of the dissertation which are summarised below:
1 The preparation of a research proposal will force you to address what it is that you are actually hoping to achieve. Nothing focuses the mind more than having to write your thoughts down on paper. If the author had £1 for every student that had ever said ‘I know what I want to do but just can’t write it down,’ he would be a wealthy man indeed. The standard reply to such a statement goes something like this, ‘If you truly know what it is that you want to do, you can write it down. The only reason that you can’t put any-
thing down in black and white is that you’re not really sure what it is that you want to achieve.’ Most people do however find that once they’ve set their initial ideas down on paper and read them over it make its considerably easier to then form a balanced judgement about whether their ideas are realistic ones. By ‘realistic’ is meant, ‘Do the ideas have intellectual merit?’ ‘Am I going to risk overloading myself with the amount of work that will be needed to turn these ideas into a written dissertation within my time and resource constraints?’, and so on. The sooner you get a research proposal finalised, the sooner you can get started. Remember, as noted in Chapter 1, procrastination is the thief of time. In the final analysis, sitting around just thinking about what you would like to do in your dissertation means that valuable days, weeks or even months (in the worst case) that could have been spent on improving the quality of your dissertation will have been lost forever. As Preece notes, ‘Excessive delay in defining a topic in the early stages may lead to a failure to submit an adequate dissertation on time’ (1994: 186).
