10 Tips to Seriously Impress Your PhD Examiner During Submission

As thesis requirements may vary substantially depending on your subject area and your university, formulating a universal set of ‘commandments’ is a challenging task. However, your PhD examiner is a professional in their sphere who is obliged to objectively appraise your project and substantiate their criticisms where necessary.

This implies that their reports will rely upon specific ‘best practices’ in a particular field of study that can be studied and implemented by most students. The following list of 10 tips was compiled by experienced PhD thesis writers who have appraised hundreds of thesis drafts in the past. These recommendations will help you impress your PhD examiner and minimise the scope of possible corrections and revisions during your doctorate studies.

1. Focus on the Abstract

While thesis abstracts are frequently written as the final piece of text, your examiners will start reading your thesis from this section. Hence, leaving their completion to the last minute may be one of the worst choices for students willing to impress the reader. You should use short abstracts highlighting your study focus, significance, and ‘sales points’ to leave them wanting more. Think of it as a back cover of a book containing the annotation of its contents. If it does not ‘sell’ it to your prospective readers, they may not be fully invested in the revision process.

2. Mind Your Language

There are few things more disappointing to a PhD examiner than basic typos and grammar mistakes found in the first sections of a thesis. This instantly makes you look like a negligent person who disrespects the thesis defence committee. Proofread extensively and use automated spell-checkers such as Grammarly to ensure that you have eliminated 100% of such problems in your draft.

If English is your second language, you may want to use the services of an external editor or expert for PhD proofreading help. They can examine your grammar and syntax and provide some recommendations on making your thesis seem more professional in terms of academic writing quality.

3. Provide a Clear Problem Definition

Think of the first sections of your dissertation draft as a leaflet for a consumer medicine information leaflet. If you need one, chances are you want to find out what a certain pharmaceutical drug does as soon as possible. Your dissertation should function in the same way, by clearly defining a life-and-death situation in your sphere of interest and the reasons why it had to be investigated.

You need to attract the PhD examiner’s attention by showing a serious problem and making them interested in the solution you have developed to address it. This definition should stress both the significance of the issue and the absence of high-quality research in this field to demonstrate the academic novelty and significance of your PhD thesis.

4. Obey the Requirements

Prior to the completion of your draft, collect all relevant university instructions and guidelines and create a checklist of all key requirements applicable to your thesis. Next, read your thesis as an examiner and try to find some mistakes and potential violations of these rules. While you probably used a list like this at the beginning of your work, you may have steered away from it in some aspects or missed some new instructions published during your PhD writing process. Make 100% sure that you recognise and obey these rules since failing to do so instantly triggers a ‘red flag’ in the minds of many examiners.

5. Appraise the Quality of Your References

As soon as you have finished checking the format requirements, you may want to look at the quality of your references. Have you included all recent studies published by the moment of your project completion? Is the overall number of references sufficient for the dissertation standard you seek to achieve? In many cases, PhD examiners start inspecting your draft from this section to ensure that you used high-quality sources to support your arguments.

6. Support Your Claims

The very first sections of your PhD thesis must indicate that you have used proper data to support your statements and test your assumptions. We have seen dozens of drafts where a PhD examiner highlighted some conclusions in-text with question marks due to the lack of proper references for these ideas. Provide a reference for every idea you discuss to avoid this situation. The same relates to the discussion and interpretation of your results where you need to substantiate your claims of closing the earlier discovered research gaps and addressing your research question(s).

7. Be Critical in Your Appraisal of Previous Research

To offer new solutions to the identified research gaps, you need to fully understand the limitations of existing knowledge in your selected field. Hence, being critical in your appraisal of previous studies is the best way to demonstrate your understanding of your sphere of interest.

8. Demonstrate Your Expertise

The identification of research gaps in a selected field of study implies your expertise in this field and your full awareness of all key theories and recent research in it. Make sure that your Introduction and Literature Review chapters present sufficient evidence of your knowledge and cite all relevant publications related to your topic.

9. Substantiate Your Choice of Research Methods

Any thesis author has to balance two research perspectives. On the one hand, they have limited resources, which forces them to formulate SMART objectives that can be achieved within a set period of time with the resources they presently possess. On the other hand, methodological choices must suit the posed research question and address the limitations of previous studies in the field. Make sure that you include an in-depth appraisal of both perspectives. This will show your examiners the thoroughness of your approach to research design and your understanding of all potential choices and their strengths and limitations.

10. Discuss Your Thesis Limitations and Implications

Showing your weaknesses is not a problem in the world of academic research. As noted above, any study has its limitations based on the methodological choices made as well as existing resource constraints. The discussion of these aspects will show your examiners that you are fully aware of the consequences of your decisions and will support your claims regarding the future implications and scientific significance of your project.

If you need help finalising your thesis, proofreading, and compiling all of your chapters to ensure high-quality work, consider speaking to our PhD expert writers for help!