Formatting

The last drafts of your thesis should be spent proofreading and formatting your thesis. Formatting is mostly up to you, as NMBU has few guidelines on how a master thesis should be formatted. You can look through previous master theses and see how other students have formatted their thesis, but there is no requirement that your thesis should look exactly like previous master theses at NMBU. The most important thing is that you format your thesis in a way to make it look organized and easy to navigate. Including page numbers, for example, might be a good idea. But generally, you should put more effort into proofreading.

Proofreading

The proofreading process is very important and involves looking at things such as spelling, grammar, and punctuation. A proofread thesis ensures readability and it also says something about your attention to detail and precision, which an examiner may use as an indicator for the precision of your research altogether. It is a time-saver to use spell checking software in Word or any other word processing program while you write. The software will continuously check your spelling and grammar while you write your drafts. However, if you also paste your document into another document software in addition to Word, it may recognize other types of mistakes. Google Docs, for example, has their own spelling and grammar software that will recognize different types of mistakes than Word. There are also several online services that can help you with grammar and spell check, such as Grammarly, which allows you to upload pieces of your text and identifies spelling and grammar mistakes in addition to other issues in your writing such as wordiness.

There may be small mistakes in your thesis that will never be caught by any of this software. Sometimes you write the wrong word, for example by writing “form” instead of “from”, or “now” instead of “know”. These words are spelled correctly but out of context, the software may therefore not recognize that something is wrong.

Before you submit your thesis, you should always print the entire thesis and read it to yourself out loud. This will help you find these mistakes, which you may miss when reading it many times on a screen. Try reading your thesis backwards one paragraph at the time. This can be useful because your concentration is often reduced when you get to the last parts of your thesis, which makes it more difficult to identify mistakes. If you have time try to even read each sentence backwards to recognize mistakes in each word. Reading it out loud to yourself also helps you recognize that a sentence is too long, lacks a comma, or is too complicated.

Recheck literature

Before you submit you should also recheck your literature. If its' been some time since you have read some of your sources it might even be a good idea to go back to them and check whether they actually say what you claim. Often when one has focused exclusively on writing for many weeks, you may have changed the description of a research article so it does no longer match the original source. Rechecking your information might be a time-consuming process but is worth the effort. You may also prioritize which sources are important to recheck, for example, those that you refer to a lot, or have not read in a long time.

Reference list

The reference list and citations also deserve a last look over. The reference list is something an examiner often looks at in a thesis to evaluate your level of precision. Be aware that if you use reference managers such as EndNote, these softwares also make mistakes. At some point, you must remove the link between your document and the reference manager, and this is a perfect time to manually review your citations and references and correct any mistakes. Check that you are consistent with the reference style you have chosen and that all the necessary information is included in each reference. NMBU provides the NMBU Harvard style but does not require that you use that style. The most important thing is to be consistent with one style.

Tables and figures

Lastly, look at your tables and figures. The labels of tables and figures are often forgotten when proofreading, but should also be looked over. As you are editing your text you often move tables and figures around in your thesis and to the appendix. Go through in the end and check that you are referring to all your tables and figures somewhere in your text, and in the correct order.

Proofreading and formatting is important, but something you will never completely finished with. In most books and publications, you will find small mistakes. You can look over your thesis a hundred times and still find new mistakes. Your examiner will not fail you or reduce your grade due to a couple of grammar mistakes. At some point, you need to say that enough is enough and send the thesis off to print.

Proofreading resources

Grammarly

Writer's diet

Grammar Girl

Lesbarhetsindeks (Norwegian)

Proper use of semicolons