Good writing vital for thesis

RECENTLY, I conducted a workshop titled “Towards an Error-Free Thesis” for PhD candidates from a local university. The workshop was titled as such because an error-free thesis is most likely yet to be written. None of us is perfect but this does not mean glaring errors in PhD theses should be tolerated.

To prepare for the workshop, I went through a number of PhD theses (from both local and foreign universities based in Malaysia) and was shocked by numerous factual and glaring grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors in them. For example, one particular thesis (2015) had several factual errors, including Malaysia attaining independence in 1957 and the duration of Japanese Occupation in Malaya being 1941 to 1945 (actually 1942 to 1945).