A Lack of Clear Guidance

Or: My Kingdom For a Flowchart

I used them all the time when I was teaching - visual guides for how to set out an assignment.

They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but my favourite ones (and the ones my students seemed to like best) were flowcharts.

They were wonderful, magic things that helped you to understand the form of an essay by literally showing you the shape of one - a box standing in for the sentence you would write here, a line guiding you through the checklist needed for a good paragraph there.

If you put your main points in the appropriate boxes, writing the assignment was like running a hot knife through butter. It was a simple matter of wrapping some sentences around those points according to the specified rules (this sentence must give a general introduction, this one must point back to your thesis, that sort of thing).

I know how useful these things are. I know how much they benefited me when I was stuck on an assignment, and how much my students appreciated them. I still direct students to them all the time.

But I can't find one for a thesis. I've been asked if I know of one, and I've looked, but no one seems to think such a thing is worth producing. Now that I'm writing my own Masters thesis, I'm really feeling the lack of such a clear, simple guide.

You want a guide for writing a thesis? Here, have a whole book on the subject, full of wonderful things you don't have time to read and not a single thing resembling the simple, clear flowchart you desire. Or, here, look at a couple of examples of other theses. Surely you can glean what you want from here? Or, wait, here are some general guidelines for things you should think about when writing a thesis - what do you mean, they don't give you any actual writing guidance in regards to form? Why would you want that?

Just draw me a picture, man! Show me what the shape of the thing is supposed to look like.

I don't have time to read half your prattle - especially when most of it is great advice, but not relevant to the particular problem I have right now.

I want to see the form. I want to have it staring in my face. I want to be able to assemble my sentences like one of those jigsaw puzzles that have the shape of the missing pieces etched into the backboard. I've got fifteen thousand words to write, and I want to make sure I know where each of them are supposed to go before I waste any more time.

Oh, and if someone out there actually has such a flowchart, what the heck are you calling it? Why isn't it turning up in any of the most logical searches? What book have you buried it in without mentioning it to anyone?

Really, people, it's quite frustrating.