umberto eco how to write a thesis summary

How to Write a Thesis, According to Umberto Eco

In 1977, three years before Umberto Eco’s groundbreaking novel “ The Name of the Rose ” catapulted him to international fame, the illustrious semiotician published a funny and unpretentious guide for his favorite audience: teachers and their students. Now translated into 17 languages (it finally appeared in English in 2015), “How to Write a Thesis” delivers not just practical advice for writing a thesis — from choosing the right topic (monograph or survey? ancient or contemporary?) to note-taking and mastering the final draft — but meaningful lessons that equip writers for a lifetime outside the walls of the classroom. “Your thesis is like your first love” Eco muses. “It will be difficult to forget. In the end, it will represent your first serious and rigorous academic work, and this is no small thing.”

“Full of friendly, no-bullshit, entry-level advice on what to do and how to do it,” praised one critic, “the absolutely superb chapter on how to write is worth triple the price of admission on its own.” An excerpt from that chapter can be read below.

Once we have decided to whom to write (to humanity, not to the advisor), we must decide how to write, and this is quite a difficult question. If there were exhaustive rules, we would all be great writers. I could at least recommend that you rewrite your thesis many times, or that you take on other writing projects before embarking on your thesis, because writing is also a question of training. In any case, I will provide some general suggestions:

You are not Proust. Do not write long sentences. If they come into your head, write them, but then break them down. Do not be afraid to repeat the subject twice, and stay away from too many pronouns and subordinate clauses. Do not write,

The pianist Wittgenstein, brother of the well-known philosopher who wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicusthat today many consider the masterpiece of contemporary philosophy, happened to have Ravel write for him a concerto for the left hand, since he had lost the right one in the war.

Write instead,

The pianist Paul Wittgenstein was the brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Since Paul was maimed of his right hand, the composer Maurice Ravel wrote a concerto for him that required only the left hand.

The pianist Paul Wittgenstein was the brother of the famous philosopher, author of the Tractatus. The pianist had lost his right hand in the war. For this reason the composer Maurice Ravel wrote a concerto for him that required only the left hand.

Do not write,

The Irish writer had renounced family, country, and church, and stuck to his plans. It can hardly be said of him that he was a politically committed writer, even if some have mentioned Fabian and “socialist” inclinations with respect to him. When World War II erupted, he tended to deliberately ignore the tragedy that shook Europe, and he was preoccupied solely with the writing of his last work.

Rather write,

Joyce had renounced family, country, and church. He stuck to his plans. We cannot say that Joyce was a “politically committed” writer even if some have gone so far as describing a Fabian and “socialist” Joyce. When World War II erupted, Joyce deliberately ignored the tragedy that shook Europe. His sole preoccupation was the writing of Finnegans Wake.

Even if it seems “literary,” please do not write,

When Stockhausen speaks of “clusters,” he does not have in mind Schoenberg’s series, or Webern’s series. If confronted, the German musician would not accept the requirement to avoid repeating any of the twelve notes before the series has ended. The notion of the cluster itself is structurally more unconventional than that of the series. On the other hand Webern followed the strict principles of the author of A Survivor from Warsaw. Now, the author of Mantra goes well beyond. And as for the former, it is necessary to distinguish between the various phases of his oeuvre. Berio agrees: it is not possible to consider this author as a dogmatic serialist.

You will notice that, at some point, you can no longer tell who is who. In addition, defining an author through one of his works is logically incorrect. It is true that lesser critics refer to Alessandro Manzoni simply as “the author of the Betrothed,” perhaps for fear of repeating his name too many times. (This is something manuals on formal writing apparently advise against.) But the author of The Betrothed is not the biographical character Manzoni in his totality. In fact, in a certain context we could say that there is a notable difference between the author of The Betrothed and the author of Adelchi , even if they are one and the same biographically speaking and according to their birth certificate. For this reason, I would rewrite the above passage as follows:

When Stockhausen speaks of a “cluster,” he does not have in mind either the series of Schoenberg or that of Webern. If confronted, Stockhausen would not accept the requirement to avoid repeating any of the twelve notes before the end of the series. The notion of the cluster itself is structurally more unconventional than that of the series. Webern, by contrast, followed the strict principles of Schoenberg, but Stockhausen goes well beyond. And even for Webern, it is necessary to distinguish among the various phases of his oeuvre. Berio also asserts that it is not possible to think of Webern as a dogmatic serialist.

You are not e. e. cummings. Cummings was an American avant-garde poet who is known for having signed his name with lower-case initials. Naturally he used commas and periods with great thriftiness, he broke his lines into small pieces, and in short he did all the things that an avant-garde poet can and should do. But you are not an avant-garde poet. Not even if your thesis is on avant-garde poetry. If you write a thesis on Caravaggio, are you then a painter? And if you write a thesis on the style of the futurists, please do not write as a futurist writes. This is important advice because nowadays many tend to write “alternative” theses, in which the rules of critical discourse are not respected. But the language of the thesis is a metalanguage , that is, a language that speaks of other languages. A psychiatrist who describes the mentally ill does not express himself in the manner of his patients. I am not saying that it is wrong to express oneself in the manner of the so-called mentally ill. In fact, you could reasonably argue that they are the only ones who express themselves the way one should. But here you have two choices: either you do not write a thesis, and you manifest your desire to break with tradition by refusing to earn your degree, perhaps learning to play the guitar instead; or you write your thesis, but then you must explain to everyone why the language of the mentally ill is not a “crazy” language, and to do it you must use a metalanguage intelligible to all. The pseudo-poet who writes his thesis in poetry is a pitiful writer (and probably a bad poet). From Dante to Eliot and from Eliot to Sanguineti, when avant-garde poets wanted to talk about their poetry, they wrote in clear prose. And when Marx wanted to talk about workers, he did not write as a worker of his time, but as a philosopher. Then, when he wrote The Communist Manifesto with Engels in 1848, he used a fragmented journalistic style that was provocative and quite effective. Yet again, The Communist Manifesto is not written in the style of Capital, a text addressed to economists and politicians. Do not pretend to be Dante by saying that the poetic fury “dictates deep within,” and that you cannot surrender to the flat and pedestrian metalanguage of literary criticism. Are you a poet? Then do not pursue a university degree. Twentieth-century Italian poet Eugenio Montale does not have a degree, and he is a great poet nonetheless. His contemporary Carlo Emilio Gadda (who held a degree in engineering) wrote fiction in a unique style, full of dialects and stylistic idiosyncrasies; but when he wrote a manual for radio news writers, he wrote a clever, sharp, and lucid “recipe book” full of clear and accessible prose. And when Montale writes a critical article, he writes so that all can understand him, including those who do not understand his poems.

Begin new paragraphs often. Do so when logically necessary, and when the pace of the text requires it, but the more you do it, the better.

Write everything that comes into your head , but only in the first draft. You may notice that you get carried away with your inspiration, and you lose track of the center of your topic. In this case, you can remove the parenthetical sentences and the digressions, or you can put each in a note or an appendix. Your thesis exists to prove the hypothesis that you devised at the outset, not to show the breadth of your knowledge.

Use the advisor as a guinea pig. You must ensure that the advisor reads the first chapters (and eventually, all the chapters) far in advance of the deadline. His reactions may be useful to you. If the advisor is busy (or lazy), ask a friend. Ask if he understands what you are writing. Do not play the solitary genius.

Do not insist on beginning with the first chapter . Perhaps you have more documentation on chapter 4. Start there, with the nonchalance of someone who has already worked out the previous chapters. You will gain confidence. Naturally your working table of contents will anchor you, and will serve as a hypothesis that guides you.

Do not use ellipsis and exclamation points, and do not explain ironies . It is possible to use language that is referential or language that is figurative . By referential language, I mean a language that is recognized by all, in which all things are called by their most common name, and that does not lend itself to misunderstandings. “The Venice-Milan train” indicates in a referential way the same object that “The Arrow of the Lagoon” indicates figuratively. This example illustrates that “everyday” communication is possible with partially figurative language. Ideally, a critical essay or a scholarly text should be written referentially (with all terms well defined and univocal), but it can also be useful to use metaphor, irony, or litotes. Here is a referential text, followed by its transcription in figurative terms that are at least tolerable:

[ Referential version :] Krasnapolsky is not a very sharp critic of Danieli’s work. His interpretation draws meaning from the author’s text that the author probably did not intend. Consider the line, “in the evening gazing at the clouds.” Ritz interprets this as a normal geographical annotation, whereas Krasnapolsky sees a symbolic expression that alludes to poetic activity. One should not trust Ritz’s critical acumen, and one should also distrust Krasnapolsky. Hilton observes that, “if Ritz’s writing seems like a tourist brochure, Krasnapolsky’s criticism reads like a Lenten sermon.” And he adds, “Truly, two perfect critics.”

[ Figurative version :] We are not convinced that Krasnapolsky is the sharpest critic of Danieli’s work. In reading his author, Krasnapolsky gives the impression that he is putting words into Danieli’s mouth. Consider the line, “in the evening gazing at the clouds.” Ritz interprets it as a normal geographical annotation, whereas Krasnapolsky plays the symbolism card and sees an allusion to poetic activity. Ritz is not a prodigy of critical insight, but Krasnapolsky should also be handled with care. As Hilton observes, “if Ritz’s writing seems like a tourist brochure, Krasnapolsky’s criticism reads like a Lenten sermon. Truly, two perfect critics.”

You can see that the figurative version uses various rhetorical devices. First of all, the litotes: saying that you are not convinced that someone is a sharp critic means that you are convinced that he is not a sharp critic. Also, the statement “Ritz is not a prodigy of critical insight” means that he is a modest critic. Then there are the metaphors : putting words into someone’s mouth, and playing the symbolism card. The tourist brochure and the Lenten sermon are two similes , while the observation that the two authors are perfect critics is an example of irony : saying one thing to signify its opposite.

Now, we either use rhetorical figures effectively, or we do not use them at all. If we use them it is because we presume our reader is capable of catching them, and because we believe that we will appear more incisive and convincing. In this case, we should not be ashamed of them, and we should not explain them . If we think that our reader is an idiot, we should not use rhetorical figures, but if we use them and feel the need to explain them, we are essentially calling the reader an idiot. In turn, he will take revenge by calling the author an idiot. Here is how a timid writer might intervene to neutralize and excuse the rhetorical figures he uses:

[ Figurative version with reservations :] We are not convinced that Krasnapolsky is the “sharpest” critic of Danieli’s work. In reading his author, Krasnapolsky gives the impression that he is “putting words into Danieli’s mouth.” Consider Danieli’s line, “in the evening gazing at the clouds.” Ritz interprets this as a normal geographical annotation, whereas Krasnapolsky “plays the symbolism card” and sees an allusion to poetic activity. Ritz is not a “prodigy of critical insight,” but Krasnapolsky should also be “handled with care”! As Hilton ironically observes, “if Ritz’s writing seems like a vacation brochure, Krasnapolsky’s criticism reads like a Lenten sermon.” And he defines them (again with irony!) as two models of critical perfection. But all joking aside …

I am convinced that nobody could be so intellectually petit bourgeois as to conceive a passage so studded with shyness and apologetic little smiles. Of course I exaggerated in this example, and here I say that I exaggerated because it is didactically important that the parody be understood as such. In fact, many bad habits of the amateur writer are condensed into this third example. First of all, the use of quotation marks to warn the reader, “Pay attention because I am about to say something big!” Puerile. Quotation marks are generally only used to designate a direct quotation or the title of an essay or short work; to indicate that a term is jargon or slang; or that a term is being discussed in the text as a word, rather than used functionally within the sentence. Secondly, the use of the exclamation point to emphasize a statement. This is not appropriate in a critical essay. If you check the book you are reading, you will notice that I have used the exclamation mark only once or twice. It is allowed once or twice, if the purpose is to make the reader jump in his seat and call his attention to a vehement statement like, “Pay attention, never make this mistake!” But it is a good rule to speak softly. The effect will be stronger if you simply say important things. Finally, the author of the third passage draws attention to the ironies, and apologizes for using them (even if they are someone else’s). Surely, if you think that Hilton’s irony is too subtle, you can write, “Hilton states with subtle irony that we are in the presence of two perfect critics.” But the irony must be really subtle to merit such a statement. In the quoted text, after Hilton has mentioned the vacation brochure and the Lenten sermon, the irony was already evident and needed no further explanation. The same applies to the statement, “But all joking aside.” Sometimes a statement like this can be useful to abruptly change the tone of the argument, but only if you were really joking before. In this case, the author was not joking. He was attempting to use irony and metaphor, but these are serious rhetorical devices and not jokes.

You may observe that, more than once in this book, I have expressed a paradox and then warned that it was a paradox. For example, in section 2.6.1, I proposed the existence of the mythical centaur for the purpose of explaining the concept of scientific research. But I warned you of this paradox not because I thought you would have believed this proposition. On the contrary, I warned you because I was afraid that you would have doubted too much, and hence dismissed the paradox. Therefore I insisted that, despite its paradoxical form, my statement contained an important truth: that research must clearly define its object so that others can identify it, even if this object is mythical. And I made this absolutely clear because this is a didactic book in which I care more that everyone understands what I want to say than about a beautiful literary style. Had I been writing an essay, I would have pronounced the paradox without denouncing it later.

Always define a term when you introduce it for the first time . If you do not know the definition of a term, avoid using it. If it is one of the principal terms of your thesis and you are not able to define it, call it quits. You have chosen the wrong thesis (or, if you were planning to pursue further research, the wrong career).

Umberto Eco was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor. This article is excerpted from his book “ How to Write a Thesis .”

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How To Write a Thesis : A Witty, Irreverent & Highly Practical Guide Now Out in English">Umberto Eco’s How To Write a Thesis : A Witty, Irreverent & Highly Practical Guide Now Out in English

in Books , Education , Writing | March 23rd, 2015 5 Comments

Image by Uni­ver­sità Reg­gio Cal­abria, released under a C BY-SA 3.0 license.

In gen­er­al, the how-to book—whether on bee­keep­ing, piano-play­ing, or wilder­ness survival—is a dubi­ous object, always run­ning the risk of bor­ing read­ers into despair­ing apa­thy or hope­less­ly per­plex­ing them with com­plex­i­ty. Instruc­tion­al books abound, but few suc­ceed in their mis­sion of impart­ing the­o­ret­i­cal wis­dom or keen, prac­ti­cal skill. The best few I’ve encoun­tered in my var­i­ous roles have most­ly done the for­mer. In my days as an edu­ca­tor, I found abstract, dis­cur­sive books like Robert Scholes’  Tex­tu­al Pow­er or poet and teacher Marie Ponsot’s lyri­cal Beat Not the Poor Desk infi­nite­ly more salu­tary than more down-to-earth books on the art of teach­ing. As a some­time writer of fic­tion, I’ve found Milan Kundera’s idio­syn­crat­ic The Art of the Nov­el —a book that might have been titled The Art of Kun­dera —a great deal more inspir­ing than any num­ber of oth­er well-mean­ing MFA-lite pub­li­ca­tions. And as a self-taught audio engi­neer, I’ve found a book called Zen and the Art of Mix­ing —a clas­sic of the genre, even short­er on tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions than its name­sake is on motor­cy­cle maintenance—better than any oth­er dense, dia­gram-filled man­u­al.

How I wish, then, that as a one­time (long­time) grad stu­dent, I had had access to the Eng­lish trans­la­tion, just pub­lished this month, of Umber­to Eco’s How to Write a The­sis , a guide to the pro­duc­tion of schol­ar­ly work worth the name by the high­ly cel­e­brat­ed Ital­ian nov­el­ist and intel­lec­tu­al. Writ­ten orig­i­nal­ly in Ital­ian in 1977, before Eco’s name was well-known for such works of fic­tion as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pen­du­lum , How to Write The­sis is appro­pri­ate­ly described by MIT Press as read­ing: “like a nov­el”: “opin­ion­at­ed… fre­quent­ly irrev­er­ent, some­times polem­i­cal, and often hilar­i­ous.”

For exam­ple, in the sec­ond part of his intro­duc­tion, after a rather dry def­i­n­i­tion of the aca­d­e­m­ic “the­sis,” Eco dis­suades a cer­tain type of pos­si­ble read­er from his book, those stu­dents “who are forced to write a the­sis so that they may grad­u­ate quick­ly and obtain the career advance­ment that orig­i­nal­ly moti­vat­ed their uni­ver­si­ty enroll­ment.” These stu­dents, he writes, some of whom “may be as old as 40” (gasp), “will ask for instruc­tions on how to write a the­sis in a month .” To them, he rec­om­mends two pieces of advice, in full knowl­edge that both are clear­ly “ ille­gal ”:

(a) Invest a rea­son­able amount of mon­ey in hav­ing a the­sis writ­ten by a sec­ond par­ty. (b) Copy a the­sis that was writ­ten a few years pri­or for anoth­er insti­tu­tion. (It is bet­ter not to copy a book cur­rent­ly in print, even if it was writ­ten in a for­eign lan­guage. If the pro­fes­sor is even min­i­mal­ly informed on the top­ic, he will be aware of the book’s exis­tence.

Eco goes on to say that “even pla­gia­riz­ing a the­sis requires an intel­li­gent research effort,” a caveat, I sup­pose, for those too thought­less or lazy even to put the required effort into aca­d­e­m­ic dis­hon­esty.

Instead, he writes for “stu­dents who want to do rig­or­ous work” and “want to write a the­sis that will pro­vide a cer­tain intel­lec­tu­al sat­is­fac­tion.” Eco doesn’t allow for the fact that these groups may not be mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, but no mat­ter. His style is loose and con­ver­sa­tion­al, and the unse­ri­ous­ness of his dog­mat­ic asser­tions belies the lib­er­at­ing tenor of his advice. For all of the fun Eco has dis­cussing the whys and where­for­es of aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing, he also dis­pens­es a wealth of prac­ti­cal hows, mak­ing his book a rar­i­ty among the small pool of read­able How-tos. For exam­ple, Eco offers us “Four Obvi­ous Rules for Choos­ing a The­sis Top­ic,” the very bedrock of a doc­tor­al (or mas­ters) project, on which said project tru­ly stands or falls:

1. The top­ic should reflect your pre­vi­ous stud­ies and expe­ri­ence. It should be relat­ed to your com­plet­ed cours­es; your oth­er research; and your polit­i­cal, cul­tur­al, or reli­gious expe­ri­ence. 2. The nec­es­sary sources should be mate­ri­al­ly acces­si­ble. You should be near enough to the sources for con­ve­nient access, and you should have the per­mis­sion you need to access them. 3. The nec­es­sary sources should be man­age­able. In oth­er words, you should have the abil­i­ty, expe­ri­ence, and back­ground knowl­edge need­ed to under­stand the sources. 4. You should have some expe­ri­ence with the method­olog­i­cal frame­work that you will use in the the­sis. For exam­ple, if your the­sis top­ic requires you to ana­lyze a Bach vio­lin sonata, you should be versed in music the­o­ry and analy­sis.

Hav­ing suf­fered the throes of propos­ing, then actu­al­ly writ­ing, an aca­d­e­m­ic the­sis, I can say with­out reser­va­tion that, unlike Eco’s encour­age­ment to pla­gia­rism, these four rules are not only help­ful, but nec­es­sary, and not near­ly as obvi­ous as they appear. Eco goes on in the fol­low­ing chap­ter, “Choos­ing the Top­ic,” to present many exam­ples, gen­er­al and spe­cif­ic, of how this is so.

Much of the remain­der of Eco’s book—though writ­ten in as live­ly a style and shot through with wit­ti­cisms and profundity—is grave­ly out­dat­ed in its minute descrip­tions of research meth­ods and for­mat­ting and style guides. This is pre-inter­net, and tech­nol­o­gy has—sadly in many cases—made redun­dant much of the foot­work he dis­cuss­es. That said, his star­tling takes on such top­ics as “Must You Read Books?,” “Aca­d­e­m­ic Humil­i­ty,” “The Audi­ence,” and “How to Write” again offer indis­pens­able ways of think­ing about schol­ar­ly work that one gen­er­al­ly arrives at only, if at all, at the com­ple­tion of a long, painful, and most­ly bewil­der­ing course of writ­ing and research.

FYI: You can down­load Eco’s book,  How to Write a The­sis, as a free audio­book if you want to try out Audible.com’s no-risk, 30-day free tri­al pro­gram. Find details here .

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Books You Think Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read: Crime and Pun­ish­ment, Moby-Dick & Beyond (Many Free Online)

“Lol My The­sis” Show­cas­es Painful­ly Hilar­i­ous Attempts to Sum up Years of Aca­d­e­m­ic Work in One Sen­tence

Steven Pinker Uses The­o­ries from Evo­lu­tion­ary Biol­o­gy to Explain Why Aca­d­e­m­ic Writ­ing is So Bad

Wern­er Herzog’s Rogue Film School: Apply & Learn the Art of Gueril­la Film­mak­ing & Lock-Pick­ing

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (5) |

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Comments (5), 5 comments so far.

Wish I’d had this when I was writ­ing my dis­ser­ta­tion.

Wow, it took 38 years… Sec­ond-hand paper­back copies were avail­able when I wrote my MA dis­ser­ta­tion…

One remark: the “the­sis” Eco is writ­ing about in this book was­n’t the actu­al PhD the­sis. In Italy in the late sev­en­ties you only had four-years all inclu­sive “Bachelor’s/Master’s/Phd’s” pro­grams, end­ing with a the­sis (“Tesi di lau­rea”). This pre­sup­posed that the final research work (prod­uct of about a year of labor) was poten­tial­ly pub­lish­able… and in fact Eco pub­lished his the­sis on Thomas’ aes­thet­ics. This did­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean less qual­i­ty, quite the oppo­site: try to think at the sen­tence “If the pro­fes­sor is even min­i­mal­ly informed on the top­ic, he will be aware of the book’s exis­tence.” today!

So, the burn­ing ques­tion — is the book avail­able online, in Eng­lish?

Patent­ly a pri­ori knowl­edge. That Eco invest­ed time and effort in pro­duc­ing is a state­ment of his dire thoughts about the future of the human intel­lect in the digital/ nascent AI age.

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Summary: "How to write a thesis" by Umberto Eco

This post is part of my "research" series.

Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis . MIT Press, 2015. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. Original publication: Come si fa una tesi di laurea: le materie umanistiche . Bompiani, 1977.

In one paragraph

Table of contents, an alternative outline, rigor and scope, an experiment in the library of alessandria, academic pride, why you have to annotate, structure of the bibliography, general commentary.

Mainly, because it was there. I read it years ago, and it stuck with me. I also respect Eco. I've enjoyed several of his novels, and I know he is well regarded as an academic.

Eco's advices how to write a rigorous (read "exhaustive") piece of original research in 6 months to 3 years, depending on ambition. Main skills taught: selecting a topic, using a library, organizing material, producing an italian-university-standard thesis manuscript. Note that Eco does not explain how to actually come up with or prove the thesis, he just focuses on support skills.

Broadly, how this book reads from my perspective.

The good, the bad, and the extremely revealing. Direct quotations in no particular order. Some of these ideas may not be discussed at length, but it still seemed worthwile to put them here.

[…] the rigor of a thesis is more important than it's scope […] it is better to build a serious trading card collection from 1960 to the present than to create a cursory art collection. The thesis shares this same criterion.

At the very least, writing a thesis is like training the memory. […] If a student works rigorously, no topic is truly foolish, and the student can draw useful conclusions even from a remote or peripheral topic.

[…] realistically I would not choose a topic unless I already knew: (a) where I could find the sources, (b) whether they were easily accessible, and (c) whether I was capable of fully understanding them.

(s3.1, p47)

This is my main beef with this work. As Natalie Wynn (of ContraPoints fame) puts it "[…] you end up having to narrow in on a research topic that’s really specialized. So specialized, in fact, that it strains the human ability to give a shit."

Now that we have imagined this hypothetical picture, I will try to put myself in this student’s shoes. In fact, I am writing these very lines in a small town in southern Monferrato, 14.5 miles away from Alessandria, a city with 90,000 inhabitants, a public library, an art gallery, and a museum. The closest university is one hour away in Genoa, and in an hour and a half I can travel to Turin or Pavia, and in three to Bologna. This location already puts me in a privileged situation, but for this experiment I will not take advantage of the university libraries. I will work only in Alessandria.

(s3.2.4, p80)

This entire section is a gem. Eco grabs you by the arm and shows you how he does it, step by step.

On your specific topic, you are humanity’s functionary who speaks in the collective voice. Be humble and prudent before opening your mouth, but once you open it, be dignified and proud. […] on the topic you have chosen […] you must be the utmost living authority.

(s5.6, p184)

[How long does it take to write a thesis?] Let us state from the outset: no longer than three years and no less than six months. This period includes not just the time necessary to write the final draft, which may take only a month or two weeks, depending on the student’s work habits. Instead, this period begins at the genesis of the first idea and ends at the delivery of the final work.

(s2.4, p17)

A good researcher can enter a library without having the faintest idea about scholarship on a particular topic, and exit knowing more about it, if only a little more.

(s3.2.1, p54)

Readings index cards are useful for organizing critical literature. I would not use index cards, or at least not the same kind of index cards, to organize primary sources.

(s4.2.2, p123)

[Filing references to primary sources] would require a huge effort, because you would have to practically catalog the texts page by page.

(s4.2.2, p125)

As you can see, the format [of the final bibliography] will change according to the thesis type, and the goal is to organize your bibliography so that it allows readers to identify and distinguish between primary and secondary sources, rigorous critical studies and less reliable secondary sources, etc.

(s6.2, 209-210)

This fits into a more general theme of academic transparency and fair play. You write your Table of Contents to help your reader navigate. You write your bibliography to give your reader access to all your sources; to either reinterpret them, or criticize your choice of material.

Advice on topic selection is entirely irrelevant to me. Sometimes, you face a problem and just have to give it your best.

The index-card files that Eco describes in this book are very similar to the Zettelkasten system 1 2 . Eco is a bit abstract about how to apply his system applies to stuff that isn't books, but he shows a few example cards from his own research. Worth looking over.

s3.2.4 "An Experiment in the Library of Alessandria" is Eco picking a topic and showing you how he puts together a bibliography . Very instructive and very welcome. Abstract advice is all well and good, but I'll take commentated examples over them any day.

Eco never defines rigor, and I don't quite understand what he means by it. He claims that thesis work must be rigorous, and he claims that thesis work must be honest, transparent, exhaustive, and original. But he doesn't explain which attributes are parts of rigor, and which are other things a thesis must have. The only exception is exhaustiveness 3 .

"Zettelkasten" or "Slip-box" is a system of note-taking in which index cards are inserted at arbitrary positions in a collection through the use of a system of branching codes (if you want to add a note between 1 and 2 , you can always mark it 1a ). This is mean to allow related ideas to cluster with minimal friction.  ↩

Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking: For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers . North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2017.  ↩

"[…] the rigor of a thesis is more important than it's scope […] it is better to build a serious trading card collection from 1960 to the present than to create a cursory art collection. The thesis shares this same criterion." s1.3, p5  ↩

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How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco review – offering hope to harried slackers

Who better to help with essay neurosis than a venerable public intellectual and author?

A s a young scholar, Umberto Eco trained himself to complete everyday and academic tasks at speed; he quickened his pace between appointments, devoured pages at a glance, treated each tiny interstice of the working day as a chance to judge, reflect or compose. One imagines even his beard was a timesaving outgrowth of impatient ambition. Such deliberate habits in a writer suggest a sort of performance, and Eco has enjoyed showing interviewers around the three studies where he works: one each devoted to reading, typing and writing by hand. Such is his finicky pleasure in his own process that belated Anglophone readers should not be surprised that Eco once published a guide to researching and writing a dissertation. How to Write a Thesis has been in print in Italy, almost unchanged, since 1977. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina, it is at once an eminently wise and useful manual, and a museum of dying or obsolete skills. Not to mention ancient office products.

How to Write a Thesis appeared when Eco was already established as semiotician, pop-culture analyst and author of books about the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas and the medievalism of James Joyce . Three years later The Name of the Rose turned the public intellectual into a purveyor of ingenious if turgid fiction. Eco’s first novel and his student-writing guide have this in common: they imagine a hasty unlearned youth being led around the library by a middle-aged scholar-sleuth who may himself be on the wrong track. Eco sets out to instruct a student on the edge of panic, and he is more than a little sarcastic about how the tyro scholar may have arrived at this state of emergency: “Let us try to imagine the extreme situation of a working Italian student who has attended the university very little during his first three years of study.”

Many readers may recognise themselves – and teachers their students – in the harried slacker to whom How to Write a Thesis offers practical advice. Eco was writing in the context of an old and anomalous academic culture, faced in the 1970s with conflicting bureaucratic demands and potentially crippling (for students, for knowledge) economic circumstances. The laurea was then the terminal degree – how that phrase haunts the young researcher – at Italian universities, and involved a thesis which took the student several months, at worst years, of extra labour. Many candidates had written little or nothing as undergraduates, so balked at extended prose composition, let alone the rigours of a dissertation. Some simply could not afford the time, books or travel required to complete an ambitious piece of research. Others, distracted by the student militancy of the decade, found out too late that the radical’s skills of debate, polemic or protest were not exactly those required for dogged scholarship, or by a state system. To all these students, Eco’s little book offered some hope.

One of the admirable impulses behind How to Write a Thesis is this sense that Eco fully understands the many reasons for academic failure: from student poverty, through institutional obtuseness to the crushing “thesis neurosis” that afflicts the type – mea maxima culpa , as it happens – who “uses his thesis as an alibi to avoid other challenges in his life”. Eco is a generous and genial teacher, but he demands some strict choices at the outset. The student must commit to six months at least of sustained work, must give up the egotism that lights on madly ambitious thesis topics and arrogantly “creative” methods, and must practise instead a form of “academic humility”. Any subject, no matter how modest, may yield real knowledge; any writer (Eco is mostly discussing humanities research), however unfashionable or obscure, could turn out to hold the key. Much of How to Write a Thesis is consequently concerned with lowering expectations and limiting the amount of material the student will have to wrangle: “It is better to build a serious trading card collection from 1960 to the present day than to create a cursory art collection.”

That might sound a less than enthralling invitation to the vaulting Borgesian precincts of research and writing. But Eco is working on the principle, which almost every writer must learn, that the best intellectual fun is to be had getting lost with a map in your pocket. In 1977 that map was made of paper, and the editors of this new English edition have not disguised the complex analogue methods Eco recommends for marshalling notes and bibliographic entries. (This does happen to venerable writing manuals, with awkward results: I’ve seen an incompletely updated edition of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style , from the 1990s, that has the novice writer moving oddly between typewriter and computer.) At the heart of Eco’s process is the humble index card, on which the student is enjoined to record all the details of books and articles read, but also quotations, summaries and even initial forays into writing proper. Multiple stacks of index cards – Eco imagines the student hefting them around between libraries – form the substrate on which thought and composition are built. In what is surely a vastly optimistic aside, Eco remarks: “You will have an organised system to hand to someone who is working on a similar topic.”

Who knows how effective such advice can ever really be. As I write this, I can still put my hand to a pack of large white index cards I bought 20 years ago, in a fit of nearly fatal PhD anxiety, and never once used. Although the texture of the lost world Eco captures is almost moving now – the scribbled cards, the photocopies, the endless retyping of drafts – it is the state of mind he prescribes that matters, not the moraine of vintage technology that supports it. “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing,” Nabokov said about his own Bristol index cards and Blackwing pencils. You could subtract the last two words from the title of Eco’s book, because at its best it’s a primer in the architectural pleasures of any writing that aspires “to build an object that in principle will serve others”. If Eco is a less inspiring guide to the shape and finish of actual sentences – there are huffy passages about scholars who aspire to prose experiment – that is to be expected in a critic whose style is forever outshone by the likes of Barthes and Calvino . But all three are in love with plans and schemes, which are half of writing, and How to Write a Thesis is a schemer’s dream.

• Umberto Eco

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Dr Vanessa Longden

March 31st, 2015, book review: how to write a thesis by umberto eco.

7 comments | 4 shares

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Now in its twenty-third edition in Italy and translated into seventeen languages,  How to Write a Thesis  has become a classic. This is its first, long overdue publication in English.  Vanessa Longden thinks that in addition to its witty one-liners, Eco’s book contains the bare bones on which to build research. 

How to Write a Thesis . Umberto Eco (trans. by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina).  MIT Press. March 2015.

This book will not tell you what to write and Eco is more than frank about this: if you are after a ‘quick fix’ then you should not undertake a PhD, as you would be pursuing it for the wrong motivations. What Eco provides, in addition to witty one-liners – “You are not Proust. Do not write long sentences”; and “You are not e.e. cummings…you are not an avant garde poet” – are the bare bones on which to build research. Eco highlights different avenues of investigation and presents the demands and commitments – ranging from financial motivations to more personal attributes like the candidate’s age and maturity – which may affect students and their research as they embark on their academic careers.

Undertaking independent research should be an adventure: “If you write your thesis with gusto, you will be inspired to continue,” says Eco. Your thesis will not be an easy journey, nor should it be. The publication acts as a methodical guide which clarifies ‘The Definition and Purpose of a Thesis’; choosing a respective topic (be it a Monograph or Survey, Historical or Theoretical, Ancient or Contemporary); and through to conducting research and writing the final piece. Your thesis should ultimately “activate your intellectual metabolism” and leave you hungry for more.

Eco does not disappoint, he wrote this book for a hypothetical student without any experience and this is important to remember. It is all too easy to be swept along by Eco’s dynamic thought process. For instance, he demonstrates in An Experiment in the Library of Alessandria that students are still able to construct a preliminary bibliography using limited library resources and within a narrow timeframe (nine hours to be exact). Here, reading the rapidity of Eco’s thinking can at times be a little intimidating and students must remember that research should be taken in its stride. Reading another’s thoughts in linear progression is different to actual contemplation which can often be erratic and unexpected; but no less valuable. To put it a different way, early researchers must not be discouraged if their revelations do not appear as prompt as Eco’s. Their approach to inquiry will develop over time with critical reflection and would be partially dependent “on the researcher’s psychological structure”.

Despite developments in technology, digital word processing, and online archival and cataloguing systems, Chapter 4 appears somewhat novel in that it features reproductions of Eco’s index cards supported by his handwritten annotations, colour coding and cross-references. What he presents is a comprehensive and systematic mode of organisation, the index cards are compiled into numerous categories: bibliographic information, summary of books or articles, ideas files, and quotations to which you wish to return. This method remains beneficial as it enables students to reacquaint themselves with the tactility of their source material. Instead of becoming distanced digitally through computer screens, students’ physical interaction with their source-base plays an intrinsic relationship in the formulation of new ideas.

The best ideas may not come from major authors

This is just one of Eco’s poignant and important acknowledgements, that inspiration can be found in the most unlikely of places and may even arise from those whose ideologies and thoughts are very different from our own. Eco says, “Even the sternest opponent can suggest some ideas to us. It may depend on the weather, the season, and the hour of the day”. Such inspiration and interpretations are largely subjective; recognising this and learning to listen to others is a valuable skill to possess and should be developed as one embarks on their research. Similarly, Eco writes about ‘Academic Pride’ at the end of Chapter 5. This section concerns confidence in writing and feeling accomplished in one’s efforts and diligence.

When you speak, you are the expert…you are humanity’s functionary who speaks in the collective voice. Be humble and prudent before opening your mouth, but once you open it, be dignified and proud.

For Eco, intellectual satisfaction and stimulation, in addition to genuine interest, should be the motivators of academic research. This book is accessible enough to benefit students at various stages of their academic careers, whether at undergraduate, masters or doctoral level. It will also serve as a valuable teaching resource as Eco makes readers aware of the skills that are required in order to perform thorough and quality research. In most cases, How to Write a Thesis serves as a reminder and a token of reassurance; proposing that many readers will already possess the techniques which Eco describes. Thus this book bestows more than guidance, it makes the reader aware of their own capabilities.

Research is and remains, in Eco’s words, “a mysterious adventure that inspires passion and holds many surprises”. I could not agree more. Research can be elusive and it can bestow extraordinary clarity. People are united and divided by research. Writing is just as much a “social act” as an individual endeavour. We continue to collaborate with the texts of the past, shaping and elaborating others’ perspectives in order to expand the borders of a collective culture. Ideas coordinate, they “travel freely, migrate, disappear and reappear”. If for a time researchers are “lost in the woods” they can take solace in the fact that their surroundings will no longer appear as daunting.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.

About the author

Vanessa Longden completed her doctorate in Visual Culture, funded by The Leverhulme Trust, at Durham University in 2019. Her thesis, ‘Sensual Sites, Dust and Displacement: The Photographic Spaces of Francesca Woodman’, examines Woodman's self-representational photography to expose the complex relationship between body and place. She is currently a Board Member for the Doctoral and Early Career Research Network (DECR) with the Association for Art History.

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How to Write a Thesis, by Umberto Eco

This guide gets right to the heart of the virtues that make a scholar, robert eaglestone discovers.

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These seem to be very bad times for graduate research students in the arts and humanities, the intended audience for this book. The job market is not great; funding is scarce; casualisation, which might appear to serve grad students but actually exploits them, proceeds apace; the smooth, high walls of the ivory tower seem ever more exclusive and imposing; the groves of academe (odd, I’ve always thought, to have groves inside a tower) ever more remote. Even from the pages of Times Higher Education , our little world’s local paper, opinion pieces declare that, to prevent them getting “exalted notions of themselves” (forfend!), researchers in the arts and humanities should realise that they are simply “trainspotters in their field” about whom no one cares (wait: trainspotters in a…field?). Instead of doing research, it’s argued, they should simply teach, concentrating, as Jorge of Burgos demands, in Umberto Eco’s bestselling 1980 novel The Name of the Rose , on “the preservation of knowledge” or at best “a continuous and sublime recapitulation” of what is known.

Into this bleak picture comes the first English translation of Eco’s How to Write a Thesis , continuously in print in Italy since 1977. That was a long time ago in academia, and, at first sight, lots of this book looks just useless, rooted in its historic and specific Italian context. Who uses index cards any more? (I mean, I used to, but I wrote my PhD on a computer with no hard drive, using 5¼-inch diskettes, when the internet was still for swapping equations at Cern or firing nukes at Russia.) Who has typists copy up their thesis? The sections on using libraries and research sources sound like an account of a lost, antediluvian culture.

Just before we throw this book away, or donate it to some dusty museum of intellectual life along with the doctoral theses and career hopes of our graduate students, let’s do what it is that we humanists are trained by our research to do: not just recapitulate what “we all know”, but – you remember – go a little slower, read a bit closer, look deeper, think more. It’s then that we can see the reasons for the publication of this book, in this clear and easily read translation by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. Indeed, once some of the dust has been gently blown from the pages (and this itself is a useful research exercise), we realise that How to Write a Thesis is full of friendly, no-bullshit, entry-level advice on what to do and how to do it, illustrated with lucid examples and – significantly – explanations of why , by one of the great researchers and writers in the post-war humanities.

Most of the advice is gloriously practical: how to organise your primary resources; lists of common academic abbreviations (of course, some are easily fig. ed. out: others are harder; cf., passim , etc); how to and why to narrow down a topic (because “the rigour of a thesis is more important than its scope”); why it’s not only normal but productive to keep revising the contents and structure of your thesis; how to avoid being exploited by your advisers; how to reference; why you should check the sources of other people’s quotations. More, too, in this dense book. Eco explores common traps: for example, the “alibi of photocopies” (and, we can add, scans, PDFs and so on) (“there are many things I do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxed as if I had read it”). He stresses how “the capacity to identify problems, confront them methodically, and articulate them systematically in expository detail” in a thesis is vital for employment outside universities (“transparency about transferable skills”, ugh, we might say). And while index cards themselves may be antiquated, the idea behind having files for bibliography, quotations, what to read and ideas that strike you is not. Best of all, the absolutely superb chapter on how to write is worth triple the price of admission on its own. Do not photocopy or scan this section (it’s pp. 145-184, by the way).

While lots of the advice is hands-on (“begin new paragraphs often”), some is more metaphysical. Writing a thesis involves learning academic humility, the “knowledge that anyone can teach us something”. Eco illustrates this with a beautiful story of how a chance remark in a century-old book, badly written and full of preconceived ideas, by Vallet, an abbot, gave him a vital insight for his own thesis. And then, demonstrating the complex ways that work and intellectual inspiration are related, he tells of discovering years later, on returning to the book, that while the insight was not there on the page at all, somehow, as a student, he had himself taken it from the book: “is this not also what we ask from a teacher, to provoke us to invent ideas?” Conversely, Eco suggests that in writing, one should have a degree of pride: on “your specific topic, you are humanity’s functionary who speaks in the collective voice. Be humble and prudent before opening your mouth, but once you open it, be dignified and proud” (or, if this is too much, at least “do not whine and be complex-ridden, because it is annoying”). Most of all, undertake a thesis, he says, with gusto, with enjoyment: it is not a “meaningless ritual” but something more.

The “something more”, without Eco ever declaring it, is the true subject of the book: learning, through the concrete practicalities of writing a thesis, the virtues that research teaches us. The philosopher Bernard Williams argued that the “authority of academics” must be rooted in the virtues of accuracy and sincerity: academics “take care, and they do not lie”. It’s true that understanding how these virtues apply in the arts and humanities is more complicated than in some areas of university research, in part because, in our constant dialogue about humanity’s ever-changing self-understanding, terms such as “truth”, “sincerity” and “virtue” are part of the dialogue and not fixed points. But the virtues are there, and one way – one very good way – to learn them is by writing a thesis. So, How to Write a Thesis is really: how to be an academic.

This is part of the answer to those who think that focusing on research makes us bad teachers: at their very deepest roots, both research and teaching in universities rely not only on subject knowledge but on the virtues of sincerity and accuracy, taught through research. But there’s more: the paradox – brought into sharp focus by How to Write a Thesis – that even with a PhD, you never properly qualify. Even eminent professors remain, in a way, students for ever, with more to research, more to explore just over there . And the surprising fact is that the people who remember daily the experience of doing research, who know that despite their degrees, titles and fancy hats, they, too, are really only students: these are the best people to teach other students. Whisper it – it’s not politic to say it aloud – but that’s what makes universities special places. Our graduate students intuit this, so help them scale the tower’s walls (so as to toil in the incongruously situated groves) by giving them this book.

Robert Eaglestone is professor of contemporary literature and thought, Royal Holloway, University of London . In 2014 he won a National Teaching Fellowship Award.

How to Write a Thesis

By Umberto Eco Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina MIT Press, 256pp, £13.95 ISBN 9780262527132 Published 24 April 2015

First published in 1977, linguist and philosopher Umberto Eco’s Come si fa una tesi di laurea: le materie umanistiche is now in its 23rd edition in the original Italian. It has been translated into 17 languages, including Farsi, Russian and Chinese, and now finally into English as How to Write a Thesis .

Eco, who is president of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici at the University of Bologna , was born in 1932 in Alessandria in Piedmont, northern Italy. He studied medieval philosophy and literature at the University of Turin , where he would later lecture. His first book, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso (1956), drew on his own doctoral thesis.

In addition to the acclaim that has greeted his scholarly work, Eco’s fiction has brought him widespread popular recognition, most notably with The Name of the Rose (1980) and Foucault’s Pendulum (1988). His latest novel, Numero Zero , will be published in English in November.

He observed to the Harvard Crimson that he “started by considering myself a scholar who worked six days a week and wrote novels on Sundays. And I thought at the beginning that there was no relationship between my novels and my academic work. Then, reading critics, [I saw that] they found connections.”

Asked in a recent New York Times interview about his legacy, Eco said: “Every writer, every artist, every musician, scientist is profoundly interested in the survival of his or her work after their death. Otherwise they would be idiots.

“Do you believe that Raphael was not interested in what happened to his paintings after his death? It’s another side of the normal human desire to survive personally in some way…[it] is essential if you work on something creative to have this hope. Otherwise you are only a person doing something to make money, to have women and champagne.”

Eco’s dry wit has supplied countless well-loved quips. A number of them, in a variety of languages, have been obligingly assembled on the author’s own website .

Karen Shook

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How to Write a Thesis (Mit Press) Paperback – March 6, 2015

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 256 pages
• Language English
• Publisher The MIT Press
• Publication date March 6, 2015
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.55 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0262527138
• ISBN-13 978-0262527132
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Editorial Reviews

How to Write a Thesis is full of friendly, no-bullshit, entry-level advice on what to do and how to do it, illustrated with lucid examples and—significantly—explanations of why, by one of the great researchers and writers in the post-war humanities … Best of all, the absolutely superb chapter on how to write is worth triple the price of admission on its own.

How to Write a Thesis remains valuable after all this time largely thanks to the spirit of Eco's advice. It is witty but sober, genial but demanding—and remarkably uncynical about the rewards of the thesis, both for the person writing it and for the enterprise of scholarship itself.... Some of Eco's advice is, if anything, even more valuable now, given the ubiquity and seeming omniscience of our digital tools.... Eco's humor never detracts from his serious intent. And anyway, even the sardonic pointers on cheating are instructive in their way.

Eco is a first-rate storyteller and unpretentious instructor who thrives on describing the twists and turns of research projects as well as how to avoid accusations of plagiarism.

The book's enduring appeal—the reason it might interest someone whose life no longer demands the writing of anything longer than an e-mail—has little to do with the rigors of undergraduate honors requirements. Instead, it's about what, in Eco's rhapsodic and often funny book, the thesis represents: a magical process of self-realization, a kind of careful, curious engagement with the world that need not end in one's early twenties. 'Your thesis,' Eco foretells, 'is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget.' By mastering the demands and protocols of the fusty old thesis, Eco passionately demonstrates, we become equipped for a world outside ourselves—a world of ideas, philosophies, and debates.

Well beyond the completion of the thesis, Eco's manual makes for pleasant reading and is deserving of a place on the desks of scholars and professional writers. Even sections such as that recommending the combinatory system of handwritten index cards, while outdated in the digital age, can propose a helpful exercise in critical thinking, and add a certain vintage appeal to the book.

How to Write a Thesis has become a classic.

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press; Translation edition (March 6, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262527138
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262527132
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• #31 in Education Research (Books)
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About the author

Umberto eco.

Umberto Eco (born 5 January 1932) is an Italian novelist, medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, and literary critic.

He is the author of several bestselling novels, The Name of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of The Day Before, and Baudolino. His collections of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays.

He has also written academic texts and children's books.

Photography (c) Università Reggio Calabria

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Book Notes, Summary and Review: How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco

Summary notes.

I've been playing around with the idea of publishing long-form articles, or essays, onto this website. Mainly because I felt that one of my greatest struggles in writing was organizing and structuring what I've written.

My ideas are often scattered. Writing longer articles, in my view, will help me train this muscle of writing more coherently. I was researching on books that may help me with this problem, and came across Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis .

While this book wasn't what I was exactly looking for, it did offer me new insights on academic writing, as well as made me consider how I might approach my Honors Project in University.

What Is a Thesis?

According to Eco, a thesis is a "typewritten manuscript, usually 100 to 400 pages in length, in which the student addresses a particular problem in his chosen field". A student ideally will spend a minimum of 6 months to a maximum of 3 years on his thesis.

There are generally two directions a student can take his or her thesis towards:

• A paper that offers new insights through unique research on a particular topic. He or she may discuss relevant literature on their thesis topic, but the overall emphasis of the paper is still on the results of their individual research.
• A paper that consolidates the majority of the existing critical literature on a particular topic. He or she will explain the literature, link various perspectives together, and offer an intelligent review.

The purpose of theses is not to show that the student did his or her homework. That's not it. Instead students write a thesis to demonstrate that they can create something out of their education.

The Usefulness of a Thesis

Writing a thesis develops valuable research skills that will stay with you forever. For example:

• Collect documents on a topic.
• Define a precise topic to write on.
• Improve reading skills when navigating through unfamiliar, and often complicated, literature.
• Sharpen thinking skills. You'll make new connections between various points of views, as well as dispel unconvincing arguments.
• Strengthen writing skills, so you can communicate to your readers and make it easier for them to understand you.
• Provide necessary documentation so your readers may also reexamine the topic you're writing on through your sources.

To add, if you intend to pursue research in academia, your thesis may become the foundation of a broader research project that will continue in the future.

Wrapping Up

Eco originally published How to Write a Thesis in 1977. Nonetheless, most of the writing advice that Eco outlines still stands the test of time.

Albeit, I disagree with what Eco advocates on how we hone in on our thesis topic. Eco seems to advocate the idea of writing our thesis using a bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down approach. He integrates this idea into his overall writing process in which where he figures out what he wants to write, then look up the relevant literature.

The problem with this, however, is that most students don't know what to write on. Instead, I'm more supportive of the idea that we should review the relevant literature of a topic of interest, then search for possible areas to write on.

Putting our different preferences aside, Eco's guide on writing a thesis is worth reading, especially if you're someone who wants to do rigorous work and develop professional skills that will remain useful after graduation.

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A Guide to Thesis Writing That Is a Guide to Life

“How to Write a Thesis,” by Umberto Eco, first appeared on Italian bookshelves in 1977. For Eco, the playful philosopher and novelist best known for his work on semiotics, there was a practical reason for writing it. Up until 1999, a thesis of original research was required of every student pursuing the Italian equivalent of a bachelor’s degree. Collecting his thoughts on the thesis process would save him the trouble of reciting the same advice to students each year. Since its publication, “How to Write a Thesis” has gone through twenty-three editions in Italy and has been translated into at least seventeen languages. Its first English edition is only now available, in a translation by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina.

We in the English-speaking world have survived thirty-seven years without “How to Write a Thesis.” Why bother with it now? After all, Eco wrote his thesis-writing manual before the advent of widespread word processing and the Internet. There are long passages devoted to quaint technologies such as note cards and address books, careful strategies for how to overcome the limitations of your local library. But the book’s enduring appeal—the reason it might interest someone whose life no longer demands the writing of anything longer than an e-mail—has little to do with the rigors of undergraduate honors requirements. Instead, it’s about what, in Eco’s rhapsodic and often funny book, the thesis represents: a magical process of self-realization, a kind of careful, curious engagement with the world that need not end in one’s early twenties. “Your thesis,” Eco foretells, “is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget.” By mastering the demands and protocols of the fusty old thesis, Eco passionately demonstrates, we become equipped for a world outside ourselves—a world of ideas, philosophies, and debates.

Eco’s career has been defined by a desire to share the rarefied concerns of academia with a broader reading public. He wrote a novel that enacted literary theory (“The Name of the Rose”) and a children’s book about atoms conscientiously objecting to their fate as war machines (“The Bomb and the General”). “How to Write a Thesis” is sparked by the wish to give any student with the desire and a respect for the process the tools for producing a rigorous and meaningful piece of writing. “A more just society,” Eco writes at the book’s outset, would be one where anyone with “true aspirations” would be supported by the state, regardless of their background or resources. Our society does not quite work that way. It is the students of privilege, the beneficiaries of the best training available, who tend to initiate and then breeze through the thesis process.

Eco walks students through the craft and rewards of sustained research, the nuances of outlining, different systems for collating one’s research notes, what to do if—per Eco’s invocation of thesis-as-first-love—you fear that someone’s made all these moves before. There are broad strategies for laying out the project’s “center” and “periphery” as well as philosophical asides about originality and attribution. “Work on a contemporary author as if he were ancient, and an ancient one as if he were contemporary,” Eco wisely advises. “You will have more fun and write a better thesis.” Other suggestions may strike the modern student as anachronistic, such as the novel idea of using an address book to keep a log of one’s sources.

But there are also old-fashioned approaches that seem more useful than ever: he recommends, for instance, a system of sortable index cards to explore a project’s potential trajectories. Moments like these make “How to Write a Thesis” feel like an instruction manual for finding one’s center in a dizzying era of information overload. Consider Eco’s caution against “the alibi of photocopies”: “A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many.” Many of us suffer from an accelerated version of this nowadays, as we effortlessly bookmark links or save articles to Instapaper, satisfied with our aspiration to hoard all this new information, unsure if we will ever get around to actually dealing with it. (Eco’s not-entirely-helpful solution: read everything as soon as possible.)

But the most alluring aspect of Eco’s book is the way he imagines the community that results from any honest intellectual endeavor—the conversations you enter into across time and space, across age or hierarchy, in the spirit of free-flowing, democratic conversation. He cautions students against losing themselves down a narcissistic rabbit hole: you are not a “defrauded genius” simply because someone else has happened upon the same set of research questions. “You must overcome any shyness and have a conversation with the librarian,” he writes, “because he can offer you reliable advice that will save you much time. You must consider that the librarian (if not overworked or neurotic) is happy when he can demonstrate two things: the quality of his memory and erudition and the richness of his library, especially if it is small. The more isolated and disregarded the library, the more the librarian is consumed with sorrow for its underestimation.”

Eco captures a basic set of experiences and anxieties familiar to anyone who has written a thesis, from finding a mentor (“How to Avoid Being Exploited By Your Advisor”) to fighting through episodes of self-doubt. Ultimately, it’s the process and struggle that make a thesis a formative experience. When everything else you learned in college is marooned in the past—when you happen upon an old notebook and wonder what you spent all your time doing, since you have no recollection whatsoever of a senior-year postmodernism seminar—it is the thesis that remains, providing the once-mastered scholarly foundation that continues to authorize, decades-later, barroom observations about the late-career works of William Faulker or the Hotelling effect. (Full disclosure: I doubt that anyone on Earth can rival my mastery of John Travolta’s White Man’s Burden, owing to an idyllic Berkeley spring spent studying awful movies about race.)

In his foreword to Eco’s book, the scholar Francesco Erspamer contends that “How to Write a Thesis” continues to resonate with readers because it gets at “the very essence of the humanities.” There are certainly reasons to believe that the current crisis of the humanities owes partly to the poor job they do of explaining and justifying themselves. As critics continue to assail the prohibitive cost and possible uselessness of college—and at a time when anything that takes more than a few minutes to skim is called a “longread”—it’s understandable that devoting a small chunk of one’s frisky twenties to writing a thesis can seem a waste of time, outlandishly quaint, maybe even selfish. And, as higher education continues to bend to the logic of consumption and marketable skills, platitudes about pursuing knowledge for its own sake can seem certifiably bananas. Even from the perspective of the collegiate bureaucracy, the thesis is useful primarily as another mode of assessment, a benchmark of student achievement that’s legible and quantifiable. It’s also a great parting reminder to parents that your senior learned and achieved something.

But “How to Write a Thesis” is ultimately about much more than the leisurely pursuits of college students. Writing and research manuals such as “The Elements of Style,” “The Craft of Research,” and Turabian offer a vision of our best selves. They are exacting and exhaustive, full of protocols and standards that might seem pretentious, even strange. Acknowledging these rules, Eco would argue, allows the average person entry into a veritable universe of argument and discussion. “How to Write a Thesis,” then, isn’t just about fulfilling a degree requirement. It’s also about engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with “the knowledge that anyone can teach us something.” It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of one’s own voice.

A thesis represents an investment with an uncertain return, mostly because its life-changing aspects have to do with process. Maybe it’s the last time your most harebrained ideas will be taken seriously. Everyone deserves to feel this way. This is especially true given the stories from many college campuses about the comparatively lower number of women, first-generation students, and students of color who pursue optional thesis work. For these students, part of the challenge involves taking oneself seriously enough to ask for an unfamiliar and potentially path-altering kind of mentorship.

It’s worth thinking through Eco’s evocation of a “just society.” We might even think of the thesis, as Eco envisions it, as a formal version of the open-mindedness, care, rigor, and gusto with which we should greet every new day. It’s about committing oneself to a task that seems big and impossible. In the end, you won’t remember much beyond those final all-nighters, the gauche inside joke that sullies an acknowledgments page that only four human beings will ever read, the awkward photograph with your advisor at graduation. All that remains might be the sensation of handing your thesis to someone in the departmental office and then walking into a possibility-rich, almost-summer afternoon. It will be difficult to forget.

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Book review: how to write a thesis by Umberto Eco

Now in its twenty-third edition in Italy and translated into seventeen languages, How to Write a Thesis has become a classic. This is its first, long overdue publication in English. Vanessa Longden thinks that in addition to its witty one-liners, Eco’s book contains the bare bones on which to build research.

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This paper delves into an erudite interpretation of Umberto Eco&#39;s acclaimed text entitled How to Write a Thesis. This work was originally published in Italy in 1977, and later translated into English and other languages across the globe. This literary contribution of Eco has proved to be of colossal value for students and teachers worldwide. Researchers of varying subjects can benefit from the wisdom of this book, but it is exceptionally useful for the scholars of humanities. This book offers a spectrum of practical ideas and suggestions to guide the students who believe research to be a challenging and mammoth venture. Eco&#39;s practical suggestions, remarkable motivation and his occasionally hilarious tone make this work a literary masterpiece. With magnanimous technological advancements and ultra-modern gadgets the process of conducting research has undergone a significant transformation, but the basic guidelines and suggestions still serve as milestones. Eco amicably commun...

Otolaryngology online

Balasubramanian Thiagarajan

This book has been authored with PhD scholars in mind. The author believes that this would be a good starting point for these scholars. The following chapters have been included: Chapters: 1. Introduction to Thesis Writing 2. Choosing a Topic and Developing a Thesis Statement 3. Conducting Literature Review 4. Methodology and Data Collection 5. Writing the Introduction and Background of Your Thesis 6. Presenting Your Findings and Analysis 7. Writing the Discussion and Conclusion of Your Thesis 8. Formatting and Structuring Your Thesis 9. Referencing and Citations 10. Defending Your Thesis: Preparing for the Viva Voce 11. Revising and Editing Your Thesis 12. Time Management and Staying on Track 13. Overcoming Writer's Block and Staying Motivated 14. Using Technology and Tools to Enhance Your Thesis Writing Process 15. Publishing Your Thesis and Next Steps. 16. Data visualization 17. Statistical tools This book also contains tips about choosing an ideal thesis topic. It also warns the student about the various pitfalls involved in choosing a research topic. The topic on referencing citations would be very useful for even a novice researcher. This book also introduces the researcher to the myriad of software tools that are available to the scholar. Using these software tools would make the life of the researcher that much easier.

English for Specific Purposes

Arianne Esguerra

Warsaw University of Technology Digital Library

Jacek Wytrębowicz

This short document is addressed to students of technology universities. It provides some advice that could be helpful in writing a diploma thesis. The hints are related to general content of a thesis, its composition, language style and edition issues. Most of the remarks are also applicable to the writing of technical reports, conference papers and articles to scientific journals.

Dr. Ibrahim Suliman

Journal of Academic Writing

Kristin Solli

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How to write a thesis

By umberto eco , geoff farina , francesco erspamer , caterina mongiat farina , and sean pratt.

• ★ ★ ★ 3.00 ·
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"Eco's approach is anything but dry and academic. He not only offers practical advice but also considers larger questions about the value of the thesis-writing exercise. How to Write a Thesis is unlike any other writing manual. It reads like a novel. It is opinionated. It is frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious. Eco advises students how to avoid "thesis neurosis" and he answers the important question "Must You Read Books?" He reminds students "You are not Proust" and "Write everything that comes into your head, but only in the first draft." Of course, there was no Internet in 1977, but Eco's index card research system offers important lessons about critical thinking and information curating for students of today who may be burdened by Big Data." -- Publisher's description.

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A Novice Guide to How to Write a Thesis

• Quick Tips on How to Finish Your Thesis or Dissertation

By: Sharaf Mutahar Alkibsi

• Narrated by: Allen Wayne Logue
• Length: 3 hrs and 29 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 28
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 25
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 25

The book would be most useful to students looking to start and finish their thesis or dissertation. Advisors may recommend this book for their students at the early stage of their research project or if they struggle at any stage. The book addresses the big picture of the research journey, and provides advice on how to manage the entire process. I have seen the best students get stuck. All they needed to triumph was a piece of advice.

great easy read for the novice!

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As Constantinople is being pillaged and burned in April 1204, a young man, Baudolino, manages to save a historian and a high court official from certain death at the hands of crusading warriors. Born a simple peasant, Baudolino has two gifts: his ability to learn languages and to lie. A young man, he is adopted by a foreign commander who sends him to university in Paris. After he allies with a group of fearless and adventurous fellow students, they go in search of a vast kingdom to the East.

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One Colonel Ardenti, who has unnaturally black, brilliantined hair, a carefully groomed mustache, wears maroon socks, and who once served in the Foreign Legion, starts it all. He tells three Milan book editors that he has discovered a coded message about a Templar Plan, centuries old and involving Stonehenge, a plan to tap a mystic source of power far greater than atomic energy.

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too much missing

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How to Write a Lot (2nd Edition)

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By: Paul J. Silvia PhD

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All academics need to write, but many struggle to finish their dissertations, articles, books, or grant proposals. Writing is hard work and can be difficult to wedge into a frenetic academic schedule. How can we write it all while still having a life? In this second edition of his popular guidebook, Paul Silvia offers fresh advice to help you overcome barriers to writing and use your time more productively.

Grad students read this book

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In this exhilarating book, we accompany Umberto Eco as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Using examples ranging from fairy tales and Flaubert, Poe and Mickey Spillane, Eco draws us in by means of a novelist's techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms.

big ideas presented simply

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By: Guy Debord

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This is the "Das Kapital" of the 20th century - an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the 21st century. This is the original translation by Fredy Perlman, kept in print continuously for the last 50 years, keeping the flame of personal and collective autonomy alive.

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The key to good and efficient writing lies in the intelligent organization of ideas and notes. This book helps students, academics, and nonfiction writers to get more done, write intelligent texts, and learn for the long run. It teaches you how to take smart notes and ensure they bring you and your projects forward.

A mindblowing book everyone should read

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On the Shoulders of Giants is a collection of essays based on lectures Eco famously delivered at the Milanesiana Festival in Milan over the last 15 years of his life. Previously unpublished, the essays explore themes he returned to again and again in his writing: the roots of Western culture and the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the potency of conspiracies, the lure of mysteries, and the imperfections of art.

Accessible and Entertaining about Big Ideas

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Stylish Academic Writing showcases a range of scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master. 

This is inspirational

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In this dynamic and engaging biography, Anthony Everitt plunges us into the fascinating, scandal-ridden world of ancient Rome in its most glorious heyday. Accessible to us through his legendary speeches but also through an unrivaled collection of unguarded letters to his close friend Atticus, Cicero comes to life here as a witty and cunning political operator.

An eloquent man, and a patriot

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A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful

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• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 24
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In A Philosophical Enquiry , Edmund Burke sets out to define the nature of beauty and sublimity, and establish an objective criterion for discussing aesthetics. His definition of beauty as rooted in pleasure and sexuality, and the sublime in pain and survival, aligned him with the empiricists John Locke and David Hume, as he replaced the metaphysics of Plato's aesthetics with a psychological and physiological perspective.

Ought to be read more

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Originally published in 1940, this book is a rare phenomenon, a living classic that introduces and elucidates the various levels of reading and how to achieve them - from elementary reading, through systematic skimming and inspectional reading, to speed reading. Audiences will learn when and how to “judge a book by its cover,” and also how to X-ray it, read critically, and extract the author’s message from the text.

An excellent book.

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By: Mortimer J. Adler , and others

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Mixed Feelings

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Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their PhDs. And each year only a small percentage of them will land jobs that justify and reward their investments. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts and many more who simply give up in frustration. Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help job seekers join the select few who get the most out of their PhDs.

Mostly useless and potentially harmful

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With growing academic responsibilities, family commitments, and inboxes, scholars are struggling to fulfill their writing goals. A finished book - or even steady journal articles - may seem like an impossible dream. But, as Joli Jensen proves, it really is possible to write happily and productively in academe. Jensen begins by busting the myth that universities are supportive writing environments. She points out that academia, an arena dedicated to scholarship, offers pressures that actually prevent scholarly writing.

Excellent advice for researchers

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Illuminations

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• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 27
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 23
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Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his theses on the philosophy of history.

• By Anonymous User on 12-08-21

By: Walter Benjamin , and others

• A Very Short Introduction

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• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Hegel is regarded as one of the most influential figures on modern political and intellectual development. After painting Hegel's life and times in broad strokes, Peter Singer goes on to tackle some of the more challenging aspects of Hegel's philosophy. Offering a broad discussion of Hegel's ideas and an account of his major works, Singer explains what have often been considered abstruse and obscure ideas in a clear and inviting manner.

Great introduction

• By I'm all ears on 02-17-22

Publisher's summary

By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose , he was one of Italy's most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his students, How to Write a Thesis , in which he offered useful advice on all the steps involved in researching and writing a thesis - from choosing a topic to organizing a work schedule to writing the final draft. Now in its 23rd edition in Italy and translated into 17 languages, How to Write a Thesis has become a classic. Remarkably, this is its first, long overdue publication in English.

Eco's approach is anything but dry and academic. He not only offers practical advice, but also considers larger questions about the value of the thesis-writing exercise. How to Write a Thesis is unlike any other writing manual. It sounds like a novel. It is opinionated. It is frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious. Eco advises students how to avoid "thesis neurosis", and he answers the important question "Must You Read Books?" He reminds students "You are not Proust" and "Write everything that comes into your head, but only in the first draft". Of course, there was no Internet in 1977, but Eco's index card research system offers important lessons about critical thinking and information curating for students of today who may be burdened by Big Data.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

• Unabridged Audiobook
• Categories: Education & Learning

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A popular & much-needed intro to the Septuagint

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• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 113
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 94
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 94

In his own day the dominant personality of the Western Church, Augustine of Hippo today stands as perhaps the greatest thinker of Christian antiquity, and his Confessions is one of the great works of Western literature. Now modern listeners will have easier access to St. Augustine's deeply personal meditations. Chadwick's lucid translation and helpful introduction clear the way for a new experience of this classic.

best translation

• By Calvin Bryant on 11-27-21

By: St. Augustine , and others

What listeners say about How to Write a Thesis

• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.3 out of 5.0
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.5 out of 5.0

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Audible.com reviews, amazon reviews.

• Overall 5 out of 5 stars
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars
• Story 5 out of 5 stars

Practical and funny

“How to write a thesis” is filled with practical advice. The pacing of the book is easy to follow and the content is easy to grasp. I definitely recommend it. The physical book is useful for referring to the many examples so I ended up buying that as well though this audio version does come with a PDF of those images.

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1 person found this helpful

• Performance 4 out of 5 stars
• Story 4 out of 5 stars

• Marco Piccirilli

very nice work from Eco.

very nice work from Umberto Eco. A must for everybody posting a degree. good commentator

• Overall 4 out of 5 stars

• Xheladin Hoxha

The narrator should not read books anymore. I've complained enough of him. There is no emotion when reading from his part

• Overall 2 out of 5 stars
• Performance 1 out of 5 stars
• Story 1 out of 5 stars

Not applicable

Very old tricks Didn't cover the big picture Rather bragged about Italian history knowledge Maybe good for humanities topics. Much info not applicable to 21st century

9 people found this helpful

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