ABSTRACT
The writing part of the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) is often the most difficult for many students. Writing well comes with practice, and most PhD students have had little experience with academic writing – even if they have already completed an MSc. The hypothesis is central to all of the writing in each chapter or paper, and students need to have a very good idea of how to formulate their research question into a hypothesis before they begin. There is a formulaic way to start writing their hypothesis because it usually ends up as an inelegant statement, which can be better refined for a reader. Students should have realised that biologists are principally interested in causal hypotheses because most mechanisms that are studied in biological sciences have no predetermined goal. Mechanisms (or causal explanations) fall into three main areas: endogenous, exogenous and evolutionary.
