The Audience of the thesis

To whom do you speak when you write your thesis? To your advisor? To all the students or scholars who will have the chance to consult the work in the future? To the general public of nonspecialists? Should you conceive the thesis as a book that will find its way into the hands of thousands of readers, or as a learned report to an academic institution? These are important questions because they concern first and foremost the expository form that you will give to your work, but they also concern the level of internal clarity that you hope to achieve.

Let us immediately eliminate a misunderstanding: it is a common belief that a popular work, where the topic is explained so that anyone can understand it, requires less skill than a specialized scientific report that expresses itself through formulas intelligible only to a few privileged read­ers. This is not completely true. Certainly the discovery of Einstein’s equation E = mc² required much more ingenuity than, for example, even the most brilliant physics textbook. But usually works that do not affably explain the terms they use (and that rely instead on winks and nods) reveal authors who are more insecure than those who make every reference and every step explicit. If you read the great scientists or the great critics you will see that, with a few exceptions, they are quite clear and are not ashamed of explaining things well.

Let us then say that a thesis is a work that, for pragmatic reasons, you should address to your advisor, but that is also meant to be read and consulted by others, even scholars who are not well versed in that particular discipline. So, in a phi­losophy thesis, it will certainly not be necessary to begin by explaining what philosophy is, and similarly it will not be necessary to explain what a volcano is in a thesis on volca­nology. But immediately below this level of obvious knowl­edge, you should provide the readers with all the informa­tion they need to understand your thesis.

First of all, it is necessary to define your terms, unless they are irrefutable canonical terms of the discipline. In a thesis on formal logic, I will not have to define the term “impli­cation,” but in a thesis on the philosopher Clarence Irving Lewis’s notion of “strict implication,” I will have to define the difference between this term and “material implication.” In a thesis in linguistics, I will not have to define the notion of “phoneme,” unless my topic is the definition of the term as used by the linguist Roman Jakobson. Yet if I use the word “sign” in this same thesis in linguistics, it might not be a bad idea to define this term, because different authors use it to define different entities. Therefore, as a general rule, define all the technical terms used as key categories in your argument.

Secondly, we must not necessarily presume that the read­ers have done the work that we have done. If we have written a thesis on Cavour, one of the major figures in the unification of Italy, our readers may already be familiar with him. But if our thesis is on a less widely known patriot like Felice Caval- lotti, it may not be a bad idea to remind the readers, if only succinctly, when he lived, when he was born, and how he died. As I write, I have in front of me two theses in the humanities: one on Giovanni Battista Andreini and the other on Pierre Remond de Sainte-Albine. I would be willing to wager that, in a group of 100 university professors that includes many experts in the humanities, only a small percentage would be familiar with these two minor authors. Now, the first thesis gets off to a bad start with the following sentence:

The history of studies on Giovan Battista Andreini begins with a list of his works compiled by Leone Allacci, theologian and scholar of Greek origin (Chios 1586-Rome 1669) who contributed to the history of theater. …

You can imagine the disappointment of readers expecting an introduction to Andreini, and who instead must wade through biographical information about Allacci. But the author of the thesis may respond, “Andreini is the hero of my thesis!” Exactly, and if he is your hero, hurry up and intro­duce him to your readers, and do not trust the fact that the advisor knows who he is. This is not simply a private letter to the advisor, it is potentially a book meant for humanity. The second thesis begins more appropriately:

The object of our thesis is a text that appeared in France in 1747, written by an author who left very few other traces of himself, Pierre Remond de Sainte-Albine. …

It then proceeds to introduce the text and its importance. To me, this seems like the correct way to begin. I know that Sainte-Albine lived in the eighteenth century and that, if I don’t know much about him, I am excused by the fact that he left few traces of his life.

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