ABSTRACT
The role of the supervisor in guiding students through the provisional year can vary from institution to institution and from supervisor to supervisor. This chapter provides an overview of what to consider important in the first year so that students are well set up to produce a carefully considered and cogently defended research proposal. It focuses on helping students understand the relationship between reading, thinking, discussing and writing about the proposed research topic. After all, some applicants have been known to ask other students or academics to write their proposals. The most effective proposals are those in which students reveal a clear understanding of the literature they have read; have selected that which is relevant to the problem, issue or question they plan to investigate; and have clearly and rhetorically organized an argument and justified each component of the argument, using the literature they have selected.
