Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-181) and index.

Introduction -- The need for a 'watertight' thesis -- Structuring your proposal -- Structuring in the early stages -- Focusing on the major research question -- Creating your research sub-questions -- Linking the research sub-questions to the thesis chapters -- Structuring the early chapters -- Structuring the middle chapters -- Structuring the later chapters -- The examiners' need for structural clarity -- Preparing for the summative viva -- Structuring and publishing your first articles.

Writing a doctoral thesis can be an arduous and confusing process. This book provides a clear framework for developing a sound structure for your thesis, using a simple approach to make it watertight, defensible and clear. Bottery and Wright draw on their extensive experience of supervising and examining numerous doctorates from an internationally diverse and multicultural student body both in the UK and overseas, and include examples of how successful theses have been made watertight along with exercises to enable readers to do the same thing to their own thesis. The authors demonstrate how the key to making a thesis watertight lies in selecting the central research question and the sub-research questions that together collectively answer this main one. If these questions are well formulated the thesis can be defended successfully against criticism on structural grounds - a major part of the battle.