Typical Weaknesses in Theses
(The following are some typical
weaknesses that occurred in the theses written by former SFS graduate students
specializing in translation studies and linguistics. You may want to check your
draft thesis against them and rectify any similar weakness or mistake in your
work.)
Too long. Main reasons:
Topic too wide Not
sufficiently restricted or specific.
Irrelevance Mostly in the introductory sections, which
are often too long. Writers may start too far away from their actual topic, from
too general a level, so that it takes e.g. 25 pages instead of 5 to put the
reader in the picture and get to the point.
Repetition Note that readers who are told the
same things many times feel that their intelligence is underestimated.
Banalities Do not
waste time and space saying things that your readers will certainly know
anyway, because they are obvious.
The work lacks an overall awareness of what the point
of the whole thing is and how the various sections fit together into a coherent
whole. The relation between the title and the individual sections may he odd,
for instance.
The writer neglects some major relevant sources. The
writer is uncritical of the sources used, or relies very heavily on one or two
sources only, giving a biased picture of what others have done.
Lack of
explicitness The topic question (the aim) is too
vague if it is formulated merely as e.g. to discuss X or to analyze X.
Lack of evidence
Conclusions are not justified by the analysis.
Lack of a
critical attitude Methods are described with no
critical comment, naively taken at face value, assumed to be perfect. Other
scholars poor inferences are adopted and copied with no critical reaction.
Lack of
statistics In a
quantitative study, necessary statistics are not used where they would be
appropriate.
Lack of
appropriate theory the analysis seems to proceed merely
at random, from one subjective impression to another, with no theoretical
justification.
Lack of criteria
for data selection The choice of data is not sufficiently
motivated with respect to the research question. The reader wonders why the
writer is looking at material X if the question at hand is Y.
No
implications The
conclusion does not answer the question So what?.
Conceptual confusion Concepts
or terms are vague, slippery, used in more than one sense, ambiguous,
undefined.
Non-like
categories A
classification is set up in such a way that the categories are not in fact of
the same kind, so that they are not mutually exclusive. Books might be
illogically classified as red, religious or fat, for instance.
Fallacious argument
A general conclusion is drawn from a
particular textual passage, for instance, but the passage is not first shown to
be typical. A writer seeks to explain the occurrence of X by hypothesizing a
cause Y, but neglects to consider other variables apart from Y which might also
cause X. One form of this fallacy is known as an attribution error: that is, an error in the attribution of
causation. Here, you infer that a cause is internal to the agent (e.g. a
cognitive factor, in the translators mind) but neglect or underestimate
possible external causes (such as the clients instructions).
Confusion of
correlation and cause Note that to say A and B correlate is not to say that A causes B.
Readability is
bad: lack of signposts, too much verbosity, sentences too long and complicated,
too many parentheses and subclauses, poor punctuation.
Quotation Too much
direct quotation, rather than paraphrase or discussion. The general impression
here is that the work of other scholars has not been properly digested.
No personal
touch, or personal
opinion.
The research brings nothing new: no new information,
no new data, no new way of looking at the question, no new answers, no new
concepts, no new research methods, no new evidence
that supports or weakens a hypothesis, no new theoretical contribution.
Taking ideas or passages of text from other authors
without saying where they come from a kind of stealing. Plagiarism is a serious
matter, with serious consequences; maybe even the end of an academic career.