Question for anyone who’s written a thesis before
Should I hand-write or type my notes while I’m doing research? Usually, for “normal length” essays (2000-4000 words), I hand-write all of my notes. For my thesis, though, I’m concerned that it might all get a bit disorganised if I hand-write everything.
Thoughts? Past experience?
About how long for your thesis? And how long do you have?
If it’s, for example, a 6-month research project and a 20,000 word dissertation, I would say type your notes up. It’s much easier to organise and search and rearrange bits and pieces. In fact there’s even software for it - Evernote and the like. You could make up a wiki as well.
What I do is have a word processing document (or a Gmail draft) for each topic, and type everything to do with it in there. That way, if I feel like writing a bit for real (as opposed to just making notes) I can do it straight off, and it’s all in the same place.
Gmail’s great for this because of the autosave function, by the way.
At the end of the day, though, I think it’s about picking something and sticking to it, whether it’s a notebook or a Word document.
