Writing your thesis

Most doctorates culminate in a written thesis. Ideally you'll be ‘writing up' as you go along. Writing a thesis will certainly be one of the largest scale and most complex tasks you will undertake. It is important to submit on time, or as near as possible, for personal and financial reasons, as well as meeting your sponsors' targets.

However, there are instances when, for a complex range of reasons, a postgraduate researcher may not complete their thesis on time. Your impairment may impact upon your ability to complete your thesis on time. Consequently you will need to ensure that you utilize methods that you normally use to manage the impact of your impairment on your work.  If these methods prove ineffective in the context of postgraduate research, VITAE/Premia recommend that you seek advice and support from your university's disability office or equivalent.

This section provides advice and signposts resources to help you manage your impairment.

Experiences of disabled PGRs identified during the Premia research

The Premia research identified some of the challenges faced by disabled postgraduate researchers (PGR) when writing their thesis:

• some dyslexic researchers found the ordering of ideas, decisions about structuring  and/or the sequencing of the thesis elements problematic.
• some researchers with physical impairments found that the extensive time, concentration and/or energy needed to produce a thesis could present challenges.
• for researchers who are deaf and whose first language is BSL (British Sign Language) the confident usage of academic terminology, sentence structure and conventions of academic writing may pose barriers.
  

The links on the right provide advice and resources on how to approach the writing up of your thesis.