Tips on the structure of History dissertations

Structuring your History dissertations correctly is very crucial. Standard dissertation structure in the discipline of History is made up of the following sections:
 
Title page, also referred to as the cover page
 
Your cover page should indicate the History dissertation title, your names, the reasons as to why you are submitting the dissertation, Institution and department’s name, and date of submission.
 
Acknowledgement page
 
In the acknowledgement page, you are supposed to give appreciations and thanks to those who contributed in the development of your History dissertations.
 
The abstract page
 
In the abstract page, you present a comprehensive summary of your dissertation work. Briefly explain the aim of your study, the methods of research utilized in the study and the findings.
 
The table of Contents page
 
In the table of contents page, you should list the topics and subtopics, chapters and subsections that constitute the dissertation paper.
 
The introduction Chapter
 
Give comprehensive reasons and justifications for your study. The introduction should also contain the research question and hypothesis.
 

The Literature Review Chapter
 
In the chapter of literature review, you are supposed to present information from the previously published works pertinent to your dissertation topic.
 
The Methodology Chapter
 
This is one of the most important chapters in any dissertation paper. Explicate the research methods you used to arrive at the findings.
 
The Findings Chapter
 
Discuss the findings of your research. The findings should be free from any subjectivity for purposes of credibility and accuracy.
 
Discussions Chapter
 
This is where you will present your views and opinions regarding the research findings and results presented in the previous chapter.
 
Recommendations Chapter
 
Recommendations chapter gives suggestion for future research and improvements in the History discipline.
 
Bibliography Chapter
 
In the bibliography chapter, you are expected to list all the sources used in preparing the dissertation.

Business Report Format: Looking at Its Structure

Report writing is not a very challenging task for a person who knows how such papers should be structured. Overall, they have to include the following components:

1. An executive summary that briefly describes the main questions discussed in the report and presents the major findings. This section has to give the gist of the entire paper.
2. Background. In this section, you should explain the problem that you intend to solve and the objectives that your organization has to achieve.
3. The methodology that was used to collect and analyze data.
4. The evaluation of various alternatives that are available to the company.
5. Recommendations.
6. Conclusion, reference list, and appendixes.

Business Report Format: Making the Paper More Readable

There is another issue that you need to consider when working on your business reports. In particular, such papers must enable the reader to find the necessary information as quickly as possible. This is how you can help your reader:

1. First, you should highlight the headings in bold type to make them more easily identifiable.
2. Secondly, you need to make use of visual aids. A well-constructed table, diagram or chart can be extremely informative. They can be of great use when you have to present quantitative data.
3. Moreover, bullet points can help you better present your main recommendations or arguments.
4. Finally, you should make sure that your sentences are clear and concise. A business report is not an exercise in creative writing, and you should avoid too complex phrases and sentences that can mislead the reader.

Business Report Format: References and In-text Citations

The format of business reports also includes rules for referencing and citing sources. You may have to follow different styles like MLA, APA, Harvard, but in any case, you should first pay attention to the structure of your bibliography entries. They have to include the following elements:

1. The name of the author;
2. The title of the book, article or official document that you reference;
3. The number of pages, if you are using a textbook chapter or a journal article.
4. The date of publication;
5. The publisher;
6. An URL address when you are using an online document;
7. The place of publication.

Besides, you shouldn’t forget the in-text citations. Whenever you are using someone else’s words or ideas, you need to name the author or authors and specify the number of the page where the relevant passage can be found. So, these are the most important elements of business report format. If you use this article as a checklist for your papers, you’ll see that report writing is much easier that it seems.

Informal Essay: Its Most Distinctive Features

There are several traits of an informal essay, which distinguish it from typical academic essays that people usually have to write. You should take into account the following issues:

1. First, an informal essay appeals not only to the readers’ reason but to their emotions and feelings as well. Certainly, it has to be thought-provoking, but it also has to be entertaining.
2. A person who writes such a paper can use more colloquial language. For example, it is quite possible to use contractions such as don’t, haven’t, or isn’t. Moreover, the writer can use personal pronouns like I, we, or you. In contrast, such colloquial language is hardly appropriate for other types of academic essay writing.
3. The thesis of such a paper is not always stated at the very beginning. In fact, in many cases, it is not stated at all, because informal essays normally prompt readers to make their own conclusions.
4. There are practically no structural requirements for such papers.
5. Finally, an essay is informal when it is mostly based on individual experiences and perceptions of a writer, rather than some empirical findings.

Informal Essay: Strategies for Achieving Success

There are various rules and strategies that will help you cope with this paper successfully. Some of them may seem to be rather obvious, but they have been of great help to many students:

1. First, you should choose a topic that is interesting to you and your readers. For example, you can describe a moral dilemma that you had to solve or a person who deeply influenced you. Remember: this paper has to refer to your individual experience and observations.
2. Avoid clichés and hackneyed expressions. For example, phrases such as “arrive at a conclusion”, “at this juncture”, or “it should be noted” shouldn’t appear in your paper because they sound too formal.
3. Try to capture the reader’s attention right from the beginning. You can do it by asking a rhetoric question, telling an anecdote, or by using an interesting quote that best fits the topic of your essay.
4. Don’t force your reader to accept your own conclusions. He or she will surely understand the point your are trying to make.
5. Don’t try to refer to the so-called authority figures when making an argument. Your professor wants to evaluate your own ideas, rather than someone else’s. Instead, you should rely on a narrative to illustrate your ideas.

Informal Essay: Learning by Example

At this point, you know much about informal essays. Yet, you should also take a look at the best examples of such papers. For instance, you might find it useful to read the works of Bernard Shaw, Umberto Eco, Virginia Wolf, and other writers. You can learn a great deal from them.

Research paper outline: the basics

An outline is a plan for your research and writing process. You can use it to ensure that you don’t overlook any parts of your papers. For instance, some students fail to include implications or limitations in their papers. Your detailed outline will prevent you from making this mistake. Basically, there are three main parts of your research paper: introduction, main body and conclusion. However, a good outline for a research paper will give much more details. See the following sections to learn how to make an outline for a research paper and what to include in each of its parts.

Research paper outline: introduction

• Rationale for the choice of this topic;
• significance of the study;
• the objectives of research;
• your main hypothesis.

Research paper outline: main body

1. methodology (what methods and procedures you have chosen and why; if you are going to do an experiment, state who are the participants of your study, how many of them and why);
2. literature review;
3. findings and discussion (analyze evidence from your sources or experiment; interpret your findings);
4. limitations of your study (as a college student, you are expected to acknowledge certain weaknesses of your study, just state them and mention what you have done to minimize them);
5. implications (discuss how your findings can be used in practice and/or what are the opportunities for future research).

Research paper outline: conclusion

• a brief summary of the answers to your research questions;
• approval or disapproval of the hypothesis from the introduction part.

Research paper outline: main dos and don’ts

1. Do consult specific requirements for the required citation style.
3. DO use consistent grammatical constructions at all levels of the outline (if you use a noun phrase in the first section, you should use noun-phrases throughout).
4. DO NOT use single subtopics (if there is an A, there should be a B; if there is 1, there should be 2).
5. DO NOT use too much or too little detail.
6. DO NOT use fewer than three sections in the entire outline.

Research paper outline: APA format

This is an example of a research paper outline in APA format. Please note that outlines for other formats can be slightly different.
 
Outline
 
INTRODUCTION

• Significance of the study of man-made pollution
• Man-made pollution as the main cause of global warming

MAIN BODY

• Secondary research as methodology
• Literature review
• Main sources of pollution and their effects on global warming
• Only modern studies as a limitation of the study
• The need to improve population awareness on hazards of pollution

CONCLUSION

• Risks of global warming resulting from man-made pollution
• A call for action

As you see, there is nothing difficult in writing outlines for research papers. If you use this quick guide and make some efforts, your research paper outlines will ensure the success of your papers.

1. The Role of Competitive Intelligence in the World Market;
2. Business Online: The Significance of E-Commerce and Internet Marketing
3. Marketing Mix: Definition, Basic Elements and Its Role in Business Development;
4. The Importance of Collaboration for Knowledge Communities;
5. Connective Knowledge in Contemporary Business: Methods and Tools;
6. Current Techniques in Management: The Efficiency of Innovations;
7. Small Business Wins Against Large Corporations. Reasons for Success;
8. Knowledge Communities and the Importance of Their Collaboration;
9. The Many Faces of Franchise Ownership: From Chain Stores to Monopolies;
10. Globalization and World Business; Getting Ready for the Consequences;
11. Independent Business Promotion: Is It More than Merely a Tendency?
12. Business and the Credit Policy: The Prospects for Future Improvement;
13. Business Ethics vs. Concrete Jungle World. When Being Fair Is of no Profit;
14. The Aftermath of the Close Corporations Development;
15. The Effect of Bank Stakes Raise on the General Economy;
16. The Antitrust System Regulates World Trade… Doesn’t It?
17. Corporate Accountability Can Eliminate Business Fraud;
18. The Foundations of Bargaining: Basic Principles and Key Challenges;
19. What Efficient Leadership Is: Developing a Business Strategy;
20. Corporate Financial Policy Change: Difficulties of Adaptation;
21. Consistent Executive Mechanism: Definition, Elements, Work Principle;
22. Experimental Economies and the Monetary Equilibrium: Exploring the New Methods of Economy Sustainment;
23. The Process of Negotiation as the Basic Business Element: Essentials, Challenges, Ideas;
24. Surviving the Global Financial Crisis Aftermaths. The Basic Issues;
25. Do All Business Problems Have to Be Faced as a Whole?
26. Outsourcing as a Crucial Element of Company Development;
27. Team Management and the Assets of a Strong Leader;
28. Stages of Creative Management in Practice. Planning vs. Implementation;
29. The Cyclic Nature of the Business Process: Surviving the Crises;
30. The Current Issues of the Eurozone: After the Formation Period.

See? With these research topics for business, you can pick paper topics that suit you perfectly well, and you can at the same time work on your own unique topics for business research!
 
Business Research Topics Generation Mechanism to Your Service!
 
Want to see the machine that can generate business research topics for college students as well as for high-schoolers and university folk? Here it is! It’ll help you develop some strategies of your own to develop wonderful business topics for research!

• The sphere: the issue; additional elements.
  E.g., for business research topics on business strategies:
  Leadership Qualities: Efficient Strategies and Their Effective Implementation.
• This vs. that: the conflict
  E.g., one of business research topics ideas in management:
  Stability Strategy vs. Growth Strategy: Combining Old Ideas and New Tendencies.
• Asking questions
  E.g, for research topics for business papers:
  When Will U. S. Markets Rise from Ashes? A Business Prognosis.

As you can see, business topics creation is quite an easy task. So why waste your time – start developing topics of your own!

1. Therapeutic effects of music;
2. Musical improvisation as a means of treating mood disorders;
3. Musical memory of children and methods for its development;
4. The effects of background music on attention;
5. The causes of amusia and the treatment of this disorder;
6. The impact of music on various brain regions;
7. The influence of music on people suffering from heart diseases;
8. Artificial intelligence and the recognition of music;
9. The connection between the savant syndrome and musical talent.

Music Research Topics: History, Culture and Society
 
History of music and its cultural development can be a great subject for your research paper. Moreover, you can speak about the influence of social and technological changes on music. You can take a look at the following prompts and questions:

• The development of online technologies and their impact on recording industry;
• The separation of church music and secular music during the Baroque period;
• Ragtime and its cultural origins;
• Chamber music and its evolution;
• Musical genres that emerged during the Middle Ages;
• The evolution of folk music in the United States;
• The origins of trip-hop and the main features of this musical style;
• The development of classical music in the first half of the twentieth century.

Musical Research Topics: The Works of Great Composers
 
If you are searching for a great musical research topic, you can surely discuss the works of great composers. Moreover, you can speak about great musicians and their performing techniques:

1. Jascha Heifetz and his violin-playing technique;
2. Richard Wagner and his contribution to the development of opera;
3. Igor Stravinsky and his use of rhythm. Refer to the Rite of Spring.
4. Chopin and his approach to the education of pianists;
5. Verdi’s La Traviata and its instrumentation.

There are many challenging and interesting topics for music research papers. If you choose one of them and put forward a solid argument about it, you will be likely to receive a good grade.

1. The hypocritical nature of political correctness;
2. Discrimination against minorities in educational institutions;
3. The necessity for increased gun control;
4. The effects of anti-trust laws on modern companies;
5. Negative or positive impacts of online social networks;
6. The advantages and disadvantages of online education;
7. The increasing role of product placement in modern movies;
8. Peer-to-peer file-sharing and its influence on the musical industry;
9. Sub-prime mortgage crisis and its effects on pension funds;
10. Violence in mass media and its impacts on adolescents.

Exemplification Essay Topics: Looking at Social Sciences
 
A student, who needs a good exemplification essay topic, may focus on such areas as education, psychology, management, and so forth. These social sciences can offer you plenty of great ideas, for instance:

1. The dangerous effects of work stress on a person;
2. The effects of cramming on a student’s academic performance;
3. The importance of role plays for the development of children;
4. The effects of Darwinism on social sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;
5. The implications of the feminist movement for the modern workplace;
6. Jean Piaget and the importance of his ideas for modern education;
7. Freudian psychoanalysis and its implications for treatment of mental illnesses.

Exemplification Essay Topics: History as the Chain of Causes and Consequences

History can be a great source of inspiration for people who need topics for their exemplification essays. You can certainly discuss one of the following questions in your paper:

1. The philosophy of the Enlightenment and its influence on the political system of Western countries;
2. The ideas of Adam Smith and their impact on the economic development of European countries;
3. The Dreyfus Affair and its effects on the political life of the nineteenth century France;
4. The importance of the American abolitionism movement in the nineteenth century;
5. The French Revolution and its impacts on the political life of other countries;
6. The fall of the Soviet Union and its consequences for the world economy;
7. Industrial revolution and its effects on the life of workers;
8. Regional trade agreements and their implications for local businesses.

You can definitely use one of these topics for exemplification essay. Overall, you need to make sure that your thesis is backed up by relevant and eloquent examples. If you do this, your paper will certainly earn you an A.

1. .First, you should not rely too much on last-night cramming. You memory is not a hard disk drive that can be packed with data whenever your want. Usually memory works much better when a person studies regularly during the term.
2. Try to help your memory by visualizing the things that you learn. Various tables, charts, and diagrams can help you better retain concepts and ideas. Certainly, you won’t use these visual aids during exams but it will be much easier for you to review the material.
3. You may also write brief outlines of your readings. If you have read a chapter from a textbook or a research article, you may write a bullet-point outline of this work. This exercise is not very time-consuming but, but in this way, you will better understand the logic of the author’s arguments. This is also a good way of improving memory.
4. Different mnemonic devices can be useful in those cases, when you need to memorize numbers and dates. For example, if you need to remember a date, you can associate with a short phrase. The number of letters in each should correspond to a specific digit. This approach helps people memorize hundreds of digits. So, you can see that learning style is essential for good academic performance.

Improve Memory? What Else Students Need to Remember

Our memory can work surprising well when we don’t expect, and at the same time, it can fail us in the most unsuitable moments. So, people shouldn’t forget about the things that harm our memory, in particular:

1. Continuous sleep deprivation;
2. Smoking and alcoholic beverages;
3. Malnutrition, especially lack of vitamins.

So, those people, who want to improve memory, should pay attention to their lifestyle. Besides, students often can’t overcome anxiety when they take exams or tests. This is one of the reasons why their memory doesn’t work as well as they expect. If you want to improve your memory, you shouldn’t regard exams or test as forms of torture designed specifically for you. Overall, positive outlook is essential for good academic performance and effective work of memory.

• Separate your observations from your inferences in the physical layout of the paper
• Use signaling phrases to let the reader know when you are making your own interpretation of your own (or others’) observations, for example: I infer, My interpretation of this is, This suggests to me, This implies to me.

What is included in discussions of dissertations?
 

1. An introduction – as with every section of your paper, the dissertation discussion needs a few sentences alerting the reader what to expect.
   • Don’t frustrate readers by being too vague;
   • Leave persnickety detail for the body of this portion of the text;
   • Ensure that the time pressed scholar happening upon your work in future years should be able to determine immediately if this is what they need (their first clue should be in your abstract, but that is a different article).
2. The general pattern of findings, whether you are a scientist or a scholar in the humanities, for example:
   • Trends in test results
   • Appearance of specific images in a body of literature
   • Changes over time
3. Any exceptions, caveats, or provisos to this pattern
4. Agreement/disagreement among previous scholars on your subject
5. Relate the results of your investigations to the question you originally posed in your overall introduction (that section warrants another article)
6. Hypotheses for why you found what you found – e.g., why did XYZ change?
7. Logical chain of causation
8. The implications/significance of inferences
9. Cite generously in your dissertation discussion!
10. Avoid intellectual fads in your dissertation discussion

Useful links:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/
http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/
http://writingcenter.unc.edu/
http://www.amazon.com/

1. Employ a Marxist reading of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth and write a dissertation for literature about Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as the proletariat revolutionaries and Macduff as the epitome of the bourgeoisie mentality
2. Employ a Marxist reading of the relationship between Lydia and Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice and explain why their actions denote a Marxist revolution
3. Apply the Marxist theory of alienation to the relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV and V
4. Conduct a feminist reading and interpretation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, placing particular emphasis on the character of Clover and her relationship with Napoleon and Snowball
5. Conduct a feminist reading of the major works of the Brontë sisters Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, placing special emphasis on sexuality

Compose several literature dissertations using the theories of various proponents of psychoanalytic theory including Freud and Jung:

• Conduct a Jungian interpretation of Alice Adventures in Wonderland. Explain how Alice is the archetypal hero who undergoes the archetypal journey
• Conduct a Freudian interpretation of Moby Dick, placing special emphasis on the relationship between Captain Ahab and the whale as a fetish object

Compose several dissertations for literature comparing characters from different works of literature:

• Compare the similarities between Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth and Bertha Antoinetta Mason from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Explain how they are the same person, one with power and one without
• Compare the similarities between Sancho Panza from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the Fool from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Explain how they are the same character with the same function