My 7 top tips for finalising your PhD thesis

6 June

Into the final stretch and getting your thesis ready to submit? Excellent. Now, your job over the next month or two in the lead-up to submission is to get your thesis as polished as it’s going to get in the time you have. Here we’re really trying to fix anything that might catch the examiner’s eye (in a bad way) – inconsistent headings, for example, or figures that are incorrectly numbered. But it’s a question of being very pragmatic about how best to spend the time you have left before submitting, and mistakes will almost inevitably sneak through. And that’s okay. Let me share with you the little tips and tricks I wish I had known when I was in the last couple of months of my candidature in the hope it makes this last push a little easier.

1. Allow time for at least two rounds of editing with a break between them.

It’s great if you can get a little bit of time and space between copy-editing your thesis and doing the proofreading. If you can get a week or even two between the edits (by sending it back to your supervisor for feedback, for example), that’s ideal, but even just taken a day or two (say to go through your references and bibliography) will help. This is just because you have been sitting with these words and ideas for so long… but you want to try read it as though you are reading it for the first time (in other words, like your examiner will be).

2. Do your final-final proofread in hard copy.

I like to do the final proofread in hard copy because I find I pick up different mistakes and it also helps me to see if there are any formatting issues that I might have missed on the computer. But it’s also incredibly satisfying. Getting to this part of writing a dissertation is a huge achievement – having a stack of paper filled with words that you wrote is a testament to the hard work that you have put in over your candidature. Having tangible evidence of this magnificent thing that you have produced over the course of your PhD journey is a moment to celebrate.

If you are a bit of a stationery nerd like me, an added nice touch is to get the draft spiralbound – printing shops (think Officeworks in Australia or Staples in the US) can often do this for a few dollars and I think it is money well spent. It keeps all of your pages together, and it really does drive home the fact that you have written your dissertation.

If you do decide to do this final edit on paper, find a way to make your edits stand out. You might use a different coloured pen, or you could use a highlighter to make it impossible to miss your edits when you go to enter them, or you might circle smaller edits and make a mark in the margin to remind you it’s there. I do this when making small edits, liking adding a comma, so I don’t miss it.

3. Proofread in a consolidated block if you can.

I always suggest doing the final proofread in a consolidated block – set aside a couple of days in a row if you can to just sit and read it in as close to one sitting as possible. Do what you can to make life easier for yourself while you're doing this close reading because I'm telling you: it is exhausting. Meal plan in advance or get food delivered; if you have a job, see if you can take leave for a few days; or look into getting extra support for childcare if it’s available. Do what you can to give yourself a few days where it's just you and your thesis.

And then it's a case of starting at the beginning and reading through. I'm not a huge fan of checklists, but I do think it's useful in this case. These are the questions you want to consider when having your proofreading hermit time:

Do all of my headings and sub-headings show up in the navigation pane/Table of Contents?
Is all the text the same font, colour, and size (including footnotes and endnotes, bibliography and the Table of Contents)?
Is the spacing consistent across paragraphs?
Is my left margin set at 1.25 inches (if printing)?
Have I got pagebreaks at the end of every chapter?
Are all my lists formatted consistently?
Are all my tables formatted consistently?
Are all my figures formatted consistently (including captions)?
Are all my tables and figures numbered consistently and sequentially?
Have I clearly stated my thesis statement in my introduction?
Have I clearly stated my thesis statement in my conclusion?
Have I included enough signposting?
Is my voice consistent throughout?
Is my language pitched at the right level (formality, plain English)?
Are all my acronyms consistent?
Is my usage of American or British English consistent?
Have I checked any non-English words that spell-check wouldn’t pick up if they were spelt inconsistently or incorrectly?
Do all my citations have a matching entry in the bibliography?
Do all bibliographic entries have a matching citation?
Is my bibliography the most up-to-date version (if using software)?
Have I cited any possible/likely examiners?
Are my citations formatted consistently?
Are my bibliographic entries formatted consistently?
Is my bibliography definitely in alphabetical order? (Sing the song if you need to - I do, all the time.)
Have I got all of the bits of my dissertation in place as required by my institution?
Have I checked all bold or header text (especially the title!) for typos?

Once you've done all that, I'd suggest running any editing software you use once more. (For what it's worth, I use a mix of PerfectIt, Grammarly, and Microsoft Word's 'Editor' tool.)

4. Remember to update your Table of Contents and List of Figures.

Pretty much the last thing I do before sending a final draft of a PhD thesis back to a client is update the Table of Contents and List of Figures (if you have auto-generated one in Microsoft Word, you do this by right-clicking and saying ‘update field’) because there’s a good chance that your page numbers or headings will have shifted over the course of the editing process. I'll then tend to do one more scroll through to make sure my pagebreaks are all working and everything looks good… and then you're ready to save and submit.

5. Expect PDF shenanigans.

Because they tend to be such massive files, converting your dissertation to a PDF can occasionally make funny things happen. So, after you’ve converted it, be sure to scroll through and make sure everything looks right – for example, that headers aren’t left on their own at the bottom of a page or that random blank pages haven't appeared out of nowhere. I know it can be irritating to have to go back and fix the document and resave it (possibly multiple times), and that by this point, you will be completely fed up. Persevere! You’re nearly there.

Then, once you’re happy with how the dissertation is looking – or you’re just entirely over it, or it’s half an hour to your deadline – check how big your dissertation file is. I had quite a few images in my dissertation, and this made the file too big to email or upload to the submission portal. If you have the same problem and the file is too big, save it as a ‘reduced size PDF’.

6. Update your file name.

Make sure your file name is something sensible – many institutions will have file naming protocols, but if not, go with something like Surname_First name_PhD Dissertation or your student number. Don’t go with aaa_Thesis_Final_Final_v14_finalforsubmission, even though that might well be where you get to in the fog of the final weeks.

7. Expect the post-submission blues. (They are very, very normal.)

By way of a heads-up, it’s really common to feel a bit flat in the days and weeks after you submit your dissertation, so go easy on yourself. I expected to feel happy and relieved, and instead I felt a bit directionless and very, very tired. Try to work in some celebration and rest while you wait for your examiners’ reports if you can, but it’s also okay to just mooch a bit and eat lots of cheese. (That’s what I did and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a strategy.)

Caitlin Hamilton