How Long Are Dissertations And Why It Is So Important?

How Long Are Dissertations And Why It Is So Important?

Writing a dissertation is an important part of every student’s academic life. Cheesy speeches aside, for you, that mostly means that there’s no way to avoid it if you’re still serious about graduating from college in the near future.

While writing a dissertation has proved to be a more challenging task than working on an academic essay, for instance, you certainly shouldn’t treat it as some kind of extremely difficult, unsolvable problem. Without further interruption, let’s talk about the main things you should focus on while dealing with this task, as well as about the average length of a dissertation and more.

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How Long Are Dissertations: Key Factors

The answer depends on many factors, including the rules determined by your institution and the specifics of a concrete case. In general, you should aim at 100-200 pages, but it won’t work well if you decide to prioritize this over research itself. The thing is, write as many words as you need to answer all the questions associated with your particular project — no less, no more.

Once, we had a client, for example, who hadn’t bothered to think about the optimal doctoral dissertation length and asked us for help only when everything went out of control. Their paper consisted of at least one thousand pages, and so it took them forever to write even a rough draft.

That was overkill, for sure, our review showed that the initial text could be significantly shortened, by approximately 60%. It happened because the student didn’t ask themself, “how long is a dissertation paper?” in good time, didn’t think about how many words they’d probably need to cover the assigned topic.

The opposite happens, too: a student’s advisor gives him or her comprehensive information on how long their doctoral paper should be, and so they decide to write a lot of spam words in order to finish the project ASAP. If you’ve been thinking about using this trick as well, we recommend changing your mind because your dissertation committee won’t be pleased with the result – that’s guaranteed.

How Long Is A Dissertation Paper: Following The Requirements

If you aren’t satisfied with the answer that the average length of a Ph.D. dissertation is 100-200 pages, you’re absolutely right. However, there’s no single standard — an attempt to pretend as if there’s one would only affect students in a wrong way. There are two key principles you should follow to avoid dissertation writing too much / not enough.

  1. First, review your dissertation handbook before embarking on the project. If you don’t have it, acquire one. A dissertation handbook is basically a guide on how you should write a paper for it to stand a chance of successfully going through the review process. The funny thing about this valuable document is that having received it at the beginning of the year, many students just forget about its existence later. That is, in fact, the main reason why the questions like “how long are dissertations?” have become so common as of late.
  2. Second, make sure that you have access to the dissertations that were written by other students before you. By carefully going through an academic paper that has already been accepted by a committee (ideally, by very same people that will be reviewing your work, too), you’ll acquire valuable information about how your own document should look and how long it should be.

 

Don’t be lazy, though, as simply using the same approach as another person did may not work well for you. Why is the length of the dissertation the way it is, and not another? That’s the question every student should ask himself or herself after reviewing other people’s papers.

In many cases, however, the content of a dissertation handbook is more than enough to get the basic idea of what a committee will be expecting from your paper during the review process. The second point of the list above isn’t always necessary, but we don’t recommend skipping it even if you perfectly understand how long a required paper should be — it simply gives you too many advantages compared to the average student.

The Page Count for Every Chapter of a Dissertation

When people ask, “how long is a doctoral dissertation?” they often forget one thing: even if the total length of a document is fine, an author will still have trouble if some of the chapters are too wordy or, on the contrary, short. The general rule is that you mustn’t have chapters that differ in length too much compared to the other ones.

If the introduction page is, like, 50% of the whole paper, then you’re doing everything wrong, but that’s an obvious example. More often, noticing that your dissertation chapters don’t relate to each other well may be difficult even for an experienced person having dealt with a lot of academic papers before.

In order to avoid the worst scenario, ask the right questions. Instead of “how long should my dissertation be,” ask yourself, “how long should every chapter be” for example. For most dissertations, the answer will be the following (pages):

  • introductory part: 15;
  • review: 25;
  • methodology: 15;
  • ​results: 10;
  • discussion section.

Achieving the Necessary Doctoral Dissertation Length

Doing everything right from the start is not a simple task even if you have a lot of experience writing academic papers as a Ph.D. dissertation is one of these final bosses that exist to test every skill you’ve acquired and mastered on the long road toward getting a great education. Asking more experienced people for assistance is only natural in that case, and so, in order to make things easier, our writing/editing online service exists.

If you need a professional dissertation writer’s help, feel free to place an order using this website’s interface. In case you have any questions, use the chat section. Reasonable, affordable prices are guaranteed!

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