Thanks

I thank successive cohorts of students I supervised since 2002, in writing their bachelor theses and master theses at Utrecht University and Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. They provided many of the questions I discuss here.

Also this website would not have been possible without Twitter. I’ve learned so much from questions that students raised with tags like #phdlife and the responses by countless scholars.

I found additional inspiration in writing guides from economics, psychology, and the humanities . “How to write a thesis”, the classic advice to students in the humanities by Umberto Eco (2015), originally from 1977, is hilariously outdated in some respects because of the advance of technology, but it is still helpful in many other ways.

Teaching courses such as Proposal Writing, Research Designs in the Social Sciences, and Research Integrity and Responsible Scholarship in the Graduate School for the Social Sciences at VU Amsterdam forced and allowed me to think further about the questions. Supervising Arjen de Wit, Claire van Teunenbroek, and Tjeerd Piersma as PhD students provided further opportunities to develop the text. Finally, I thank Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, Marieke Slootman, Boris Slijper and Rense Corten for helpful suggestions for the text to follow. The usual disclaimer applies: all errors are mine. If you find one, please let me know here.