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. For example, a stu­dent may only work on his thesis for a year, but he may use ideas and readings accumulated in the two preceding years, even though he initially did not know what would come from this preliminary research.

A thesis should take no more than three years because, if the student has failed to delimit his topic and find the nec­essary sources after this period, he has one of the following problems:

1. The student has chosen an overwhelming topic that is beyond his skill level.
2. The student is one of those insatiable persons who would like to write about everything, and who will con­tinue to work on his thesis for 20 years. (A clever scholar will instead set limits, however modest, and produce something definitive within those limits.)
3. The “thesis neurosis” has begun: the student aban­dons the thesis, returns to it, feels unfulfilled, loses focus, and uses his thesis as an alibi to avoid other challenges in his life that he is too cowardly to address. This student will never graduate.

A thesis should take no less than six months because, even if the student’s goal is a modest journal article of less than 60 typewritten pages, six months pass in a flash. This may not be sufficient time for the student to structure the work, research the bibliography, catalog the sources, and draft the text. Surely a more experienced scholar can compose an essay in less time, but only because he has years of reading behind him, complete with cataloged notes. The student must instead start from scratch.

Ideally the student will choose his thesis topic and thesis advisor toward the end of his sophomore year. By then the student has already become familiar with various subjects, and he even has a general understanding of disciplines he has not yet studied, their focus, and the difficulties they present. Such a timely choice is neither compromising nor irreversible. The student has an entire year to assess the choice, and if need be, to change the topic, the advisor, or even the discipline. Note that even if the student spends a year researching ancient Greek literature and later realizes that he prefers contemporary history, he has not wasted his time, as he will have learned how to create a prelimi­nary bibliography, how to take notes on a text, and how to organize a table of contents. Remember the point we made in section 1.3: first and foremost, a thesis teaches one to coordinate ideas, and the topic is secondary.

If the student chooses his topic toward the end of his sophomore year, he will have until the spring of the fourth year to graduate well within the time frame outlined above. He will have two complete years to finish his thesis and two summers to devote to research and, if he has the resources, to research trips. During this period, he can also choose courses and readings that are appropriate for his thesis. To be sure, if the student is writing a thesis on experimental psychology, he will still be required to take Latin or other unrelated courses. However, in courses related to philosophy and sociology, the student may be able to arrange with the professor to substi­tute texts related to the thesis for course texts (even required ones), as long as this is done without dialectical contortions or puerile tricks. In this case, an intelligent professor will prefer a motivated student taking his course purposefully to one taking his course without passion, randomly, or out of an obligation to fulfill a requirement.

In any case, nothing forbids the student from choosing a thesis topic earlier. And nothing forbids the student from choosing it later, if he is willing to take more than the pre­scribed four years to graduate. But the biggest mistake he can make is to fail to allow sufficient time for his thesis.

If the student is to write a good thesis, he must discuss his work incrementally with his advisor, at least within reason. This is not to put the professor on a pedestal. Instead, because writing a thesis is like writing a book, working incrementally with the professor is a communi­cation exercise that assumes the existence of an audience, and the advisor is the only competent audience available to the student during the course of his work. If the student completes the thesis hastily, the advisor will only have time to skim the text. Moreover, if the student presents the the­sis to his advisor at the last minute, and if the advisor is dissatisfied with the results, he will challenge the candidate at the defense. This will produce unpleasant results not only for the student but also for the advisor, who should never arrive at a defense with a thesis he does not support. In this case, the advisor shares in the defeat. Early in the process, if the advisor notices that the candidate is having trouble, he must immediately inform the candidate, and suggest either that the student pursue another topic or that he postpone his thesis until he is better prepared. If the student ignores this advice, and if he is in a rush to graduate or if he sim­ply believes that his advisor is wrong, he will again face a stormy defense, but he will do so deliberately.

Considering these risks, a six-month thesis is certainly not the optimum choice, even though it is within our range of acceptability. But as we have implied, it may prove suc­cessful if the topic, chosen in the last six months, builds on research and experience gained in the years before. Also, sometimes a student must complete a thesis in six months because of some external necessity. In these cases, the stu­dent must find a topic that he can research thoroughly and that will yield a decent product in that short period of time.

Here I do not want to sound too much like a salesman, as if I were selling an inexpensive “six-month thesis” and a pric­ier “three-year thesis,” a thesis to satisfy every kind of cus­tomer. Instead my point is that, without a doubt, a student can produce a decent thesis in as little as six months. There are three requirements for a six-month thesis:

1. The topic should be clearly defined.
2. The topic should be contemporary (notwithstanding the advice given in section 2.3), eliminating the need to explore a bibliography that goes back to the ancient Greeks. Alternatively, it should be a marginal subject on which little has been written.
3. The primary and secondary sources must be locally available and easily accessible.

Let us look at some examples. If I choose the topic “The Church of Santa Maria di Castello in Alessandria,” I can hope to find everything I need to reconstruct its history and the events of its restoration in the municipal library of Alessan­dria, and also in the city’s civic archives. I use the word “hope” because I am speaking hypothetically, and putting myself in the shoes of a student who hopes to complete a thesis in six months. Before I begin the project, I should test the validity of my hypothesis. First, I should verify that I will reside in or near Alessandria during the process; if I live 930 miles south in Caltanissetta, I have made a bad choice. Additionally, if some of the available sources are unpublished medieval man­uscripts, I should know something of paleography and have the skills necessary to decipher these manuscripts. Here you can see how a seemingly easy topic can quickly become diffi­cult. If I determine, instead, that all of the secondary sources have been published no earlier than the nineteenth century, I am safe to proceed on solid ground.

Here is another example: Raffaele La Capria is a contem­porary Italian writer who has written only three novels and a single book of essays, all published by the Italian publisher Bompiani. Let us imagine a thesis with the title “The For­tunes of Raffaele La Capria in Contemporary Italian Criti­cism.” Since publishers commonly archive all of the critical essays and articles written about their authors, I can hope to find almost all the texts I need in a series of visits to the pub­lisher in Milan. Since the author is living, I can write to him or interview him in person, ask him for other bibliographic suggestions, and probably even obtain photocopies of these relevant texts. Surely a certain critical essay will refer us to other authors to whom La Capria is compared or contrasted, widening the research field a bit, but in a manageable way. This project will pose no problem if I have chosen La Capria out of a more general interest in Italian contemporary litera­ture. If this is not the case, I have probably chosen cynically, coldly, and recklessly.

Here is another example of a six-month thesis: “The Interpretation of World War II in Middle School History Books Published in the Last Five Years.” The student may have some difficulty locating all of the Italian middle school history books in circulation, but in fact there are only a few scholastic presses. Once the student has acquired or photo­copied the texts, he will find that the treatments of World War II occupy a few pages in each, and that he can quickly do good comparative work. However, in order to judge a book’s treatment of World War II, the student must compare it to half a dozen reputable histories of the war, and also assess the book’s treatment of history in general. Thus he must widen his scope. Surely, without these forms of critical examination, the student could write the thesis in a week rather than in six months, but it would take the form of a newspaper article instead of a thesis. The article may even be sharp and brilliant, yet it would still be unfit to document the candidate’s research abilities.

Ultimately, if you want to write a six-month thesis but are only willing to commit an hour each day, there is no point in continuing our discussion. Please refer to the advice given in section 1.2: copy a thesis and call it quits.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.