General Suggestions For Writing An Undergraduate Dissertation In Marketing
If you are setting out to write an undergraduate dissertation in marketing, there are a few general suggestions that you ought to keep in mind throughout the process:
- Choose a narrow enough topic
- Choose a topic with good sources available
- Keep track of your sources from the beginning
- Outline your paper first
One of the challenges of choosing a topic for a project like this is choosing one that is narrow enough so that you can do a very thorough analysis of it in the allowed time and space. Many students choose a topic that they would really need a whole book to delve into. But by narrowing it down to only cover a certain part, time period, or geographic area for your original topic, you’ll be setting yourself up for success.
Another common mistake when it comes to choosing a topic is picking one that you won’t be able to find good academic sources on. While blogs and websites like Wikipedia may be good jumping off points for your research, they aren’t acceptable sources for your paper. Instead, you should be using academic articles, conference proceedings, and in some cases news articles. Sometimes students choose a topic that is too obscure or too recent that they aren’t able to find these sources on it. So before you settle on a final topic, to a quick search to ensure that there are adequate sources for it.
You’ll likely rack up dozens of sources while writing your undergraduate dissertation in marketing. So it can be helpful to keep track of them from the beginning—begin forming your bibliography as you’re researching. And as you begin writing, use the correct in text citations from the start so that you aren’t left reformatting citations at the end. There are some great source managing software and websites, like Zotero that can help you to keep track of your sources, keep notes on them, and even export citations into your word document.
When tying together lots of information from many different sources, it is very important that you outline first. One of the things that stands between an okay paper and an excellent paper is how well the information is synthesized. So to keep your paper from reading like a list of facts, you should use the outlining process to organize your topics, thoughts, and data or information.