Call us:
0151 522 5800
Call us:
0151 522 58002nd February 2026
It can be intimidating staring at a blank screen when you’ve got 10,000 words ahead of you. Writing a dissertation is a mammoth task that needs careful planning, but with our help, you can get yourself off to a good start.
Time management is key to completing your dissertation by the deadline, with plenty of time to proofread and fact-check your work.
If you’re looking for exactly where to start when it comes to your dissertation, we share some helpful tips to help you along the way.
It might sound easy, but picking a topic can play a huge role in whether you find it easy and enjoyable to write your dissertation.
Pick a subject that interests you and look at recent research within that subject area to see if there’s anything that piques your interest and makes you question something. Having an interest in the topic means that you’ll likely have some background knowledge of the topic, and you can enjoy the endless hours of work that you’ll be pouring into it.
Preliminary research can help you to refine and hone your topic and question. Take lots of notes that will help you to expand on research further down the line.
The type of research you conduct will depend on the field you’re studying. But it’s advisable to work closely with your faculty advisor, who can help hone your research and ensure that you get the most out of your time.
Create a full outline of the dissertation that you plan to write. This will help guide you as you move through the chapters and discussions to give your writing focus and intent.
You’ve done the research and taken all of the notes; it’s time to start writing. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself; just get going. It’s easy to delete and start again or read and make adjustments. Try not to leave the screen blank for too long; just write down some ideas. Otherwise, the pressure will become too much, and you’ll feel overwhelmed by what you need to do.
Starting from the beginning might mean you get stuck. Sometimes, it’s easier to begin with the body of the work and leave your introduction until the end.
An introduction to your dissertation is there to describe the scope of your project without giving everything away. You want to give just enough information to hook the reader, but not too much so that they no longer have to read everything else that you’ve written.
Writing your dissertation is just one aspect of completing it. First up, you’ll need to conduct plenty of research into the topic you’re covering.
The best advice you can take here is: Start writing once you’ve begun collecting data or research. That way, you’ll have some tidbits of information that can help bulk out your writing, you’ll have references ready to go, and you’ll have data that can be implemented seamlessly into your work.
A discussion in a dissertation is a section where you look at the meaning, importance and relevance of the results you’ve gathered.
You should spend time explaining and evaluating what you found and how it relates to your topic, making an argument that supports your conclusions. You should not use the discussion section as a second results section or introduce new results.
Writing your dissertation is likely to cause you a lot of stress, but our useful guide can help you get started with the right mindset and provide some tips on how to manage it. If you have any further tips on writing a dissertation, then let us know in the comments below what helped you.