MBA Dissertation Writing Techniques That Will Ensure Your Success

Writing your MBA dissertation is one of the last steps to proving that you’re ready to move on from academia and strut your stuff in the business world. So, you want it to be great and really show off your abilities. Here are some techniques that will help ensure your success!

• Plan your dissertation before you start writing. One vital step to successfully writing a dissertation is to plan it out before you dig into it; a dissertation needs to have a firm, coherent structure so that each chapter can build upon the previous one while also seamlessly blending into the next one. If it helps, you can think about your dissertation as a novel: you have to introduce the characters before you can talk about what happens to them, and certain events need to happen before others in order for the storyline to make sense. Your dissertation is no different; you need to be able to introduce basic concepts and facts first, then you can develop them into more sophisticated and nuanced ideas in each successive chapter. Look for a sample structure online; there are some great resources available that will give you the tools you need to begin planning your dissertation.
• Allow yourself to free-write. Once you have the structure in place and some preliminary research done, you should allow yourself to just start writing. You can start anywhere, you don’t need to start at the beginning. The critical thing here is just to start getting words on the page and get your creative juices flowing!
• Spend almost as much time editing as you spend writing. If you spend three days per week writing, spend at least one day editing. The editing process is vital to your success; edit for grammar, spelling, and sentence structure, but also for cohesiveness and readability. Make sure that you’re adhering to the structure you developed, and re-arrange or remove paragraphs as needed in order to ensure that your dissertation flows smoothly from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter.
• Don’t think you can put it off until the last minute. Whatever you do, don’t procrastinate! Treat your dissertation like a huge project for work, one that needs to be perfect. Even if you can only devote four hours a day to working on your dissertation, make sure to take advantage of every minute of those four hours. A dissertation isn’t something that can be pasted together at the last minute, so don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise!