Master’s degree brings new challenges and possibilities to those who decide to pursue this goal. It further narrows the topics one has to deal with, brings more uniqueness and originality in the work you have to perform, makes your way yet more distinct from those taken by your neighbors.
In most cases, your writing will have to meet certain requirements in a number of fields:
- Style. It should correspond to the academic level of the author and follow the rules of the style of scientific prose.
- Formatting. You should use the formatting style appropriate for the discipline you have to write on. Study the manual carefully, and consult it in the course of writing, for it generally explains all or almost all examples. Some useful guidelines are also presented in the Formatting styles section.
- Content and organization. In addition to being formatted correctly, your paper is supposed to be organized in the way usual for your discipline and genre. Not only the ideas you represent should be of interest, but they should be presented in a perfect way.
By that time, you are supposed to have appropriate knowledge of conventions, accepted by the scientific community, in terms of style and formatting. They may not be considered as grave mistakes in case you make them, but they will influence the overall mark you finally get.
The main requirements to the style generally correspond to the ones necessary for the work written as scientific prose:
- Abstracts of generalized discussion and reasoning should be interposed by concrete information: statistics, reports on experiments, graphs and so on.
- Extensive use of connectives in order to make logical connections between the sentences and other meaningful units of the text.
- Sentences generally range from 10 to 50 words; the writer tries to make them as clear as possible.
- Frequent use of passive voice in order to ensure the smooth flow of speech.
You can find more information in any scientific style manual. As you see, the work at the Master’s level grows ever more complicated and ever more related to some narrow topic or idea, and you are supposed to spend considerable amount of time working on it.
Don’t forget that what is mentioned above is only a set of most general recommendations, and more distinct guidelines should be received from the employees of the higher educational institution you deal with, for they vary greatly in accordance to both a university and discipline.
