Motivations

The motivations of your project are one of the most crucial sections of your dissertation. Here, you will engage the readers and spark their curiosity about your project. Therefore, you need to clearly demonstrate the purpose of your project. In other words, you must attempt to answer the following questions:

• What is the problem you are tackling?

• Why this problem should be studied?

• Why is your project worth reading?

• What will the readers learn from your project?

If you manage to answer these questions, then the readers will be interested to discover your project.

Content

While the motivations of your paper are crucial, the entire paper should convey some interest. What is the story of your project? What do you want to tell the others? And never forget, What is the big picture? Details matter, but so does how you connect them. You need to keep in mind what is the big picture of your project, but you also need to explain it to the readers!

How to write a good project? In addition to being interesting and motivated, it should be accessible! Your story should be clear and logical. The readers should understand your thought process! Organise your ideas and structure your text. Define terms, abbreviations and important concepts that the readers are unlikely to know. You want the reading of your project to be as smooth as possible. Imagine that your target audience is an undergraduate student in economics, but who might not have studied the same courses as you. Therefore, think how you would explain your story to this student to be sure that it is understandable.¹

You need to keep in mind that the rigour of your dissertation is at least as important as its scope. Having a good story is great, but you need to back it up with a strong argumentation (i.e. with an adequate methodology). Otherwise, your dissertation will not demonstrate anything, which is the height of a dissertation.

However, developing a strong argumentation does not mean that you should not talk about the ‘weaknesses’ of your project. On the contrary, you want transparency! Your project will be taken more seriously if you address the potential weaknesses of your analysis. This shows that you understood the limitations of the available data, certain techniques or your analysis, and that you can discuss the real impact of your results having these issues in mind and not deceive the readers. Therefore do not hesitate to discuss potential issues that you face or the limits of your analysis. It can be done in the appendix if there is no adequate place in the main text.

Finally, remember that you are writing an academic paper. Your dissertation should be scientific, meaning that you should make abstraction of your personal opinion/experience. This does not mean that your beliefs or personal experience cannot drive your project, but you must remain neutral in your academic process.² This is what we call research integrity; conducting research in such a way that allows others to have confidence and trust in the methods and the findings of the research. You should realise that this part on integrity closely relates to the part on transparency.

Methodology

The research methodology is used to justify to the readers your research process. You need to keep in mind that your justification should be derived from an analysis of the relevant literature, if existing.

First, begin with this section by stating, again or in a different manner, the research objectives of your project. This will enable the readers to assess the validity of your chosen research methodology. Second, state your methodological process and describe it. Finally, explain and clarify your choice within the context of the existing literature and discuss potential issues

Data

This section is used to present the data you are going to use in your analysis. Explain what type of data you are going to use, where it is located (name of the database), the unit (level, growth rate, ...), how many observations there are, which periods are covered by your data and what is the frequency? Ideally, create a table summarising everything above with an extra column explaining the rationale of this data/variable. You can include a simplified table in this section and a more detailed table in the appendix if needed.

Results

Remember, the econometrics is only a tool, the focus is on the economics. While the research methodology is the backbone of your dissertation, the story is the heart, and this story needs to be grounded in theory. Thus, you need to think about how to present your results and more importantly, how to interpret them. That is where economics enters: use economic theory to interpret and explain your results. Modern economic theory is mostly based on the utilitarian approach (micro, macro, game theory, etc), therefore, you should analyse your results through the lens of this framework (if possible, some projects or research questions might not be suited for that).

Form

• Justify your text: distribute evenly your text between the two margins

• Use simple sentences: you are writing an academic paper, not poetry! The readers have to process a lot of information while reading your text. Therefore you should make it easy for the readers to read your paper and not lose them with complicated sentences

• Use paragraph: try to express one idea per paragraph such that the readers can see the logical organisation of your thoughts

• Let your text breathe: do not write one block of text with a small font. The readers should not lose their eyesight while deciphering your text! Use sections (and maybe subsections), writes paragraphs, let a bit of space between the lines, etc.

Writing advice

No one is born Shakespeare, so it is fine to not write good sentences right away. The following advice might help you to write your dissertation: Write sentences as they sound in your head, even if they do not sound good. Write everything that seems important, even if it is not well formulated. Once you have everything on paper, you are going to reorganise your text. Try to find how to tell your ‘story’, rewrite some (many) parts and remove things that you do not like. This process should help you to see the entire structure of your dissertation and how to improve it without missing important parts.

So how should you write your dissertation?

To summarise, think about how your project (and text) will be perceived by the readers. You want to write a clear, logical and accessible story that is well-motivated and well-advocated.

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