Most of the books and booklets in research methodology focus on how the researcher conducts an academic piece of writing. How he can collect data, organize them, and proceed with the interpretation. Through the Ultimate Guide to Thesis Writing, The researchers seek to provide an in-depth look at how an EFL learner can write a thesis starting from formulating the title until data collection. Graduate students find themselves lost when it comes to thesis writing since they have no project at their undergraduate level.

Putting this in view, the current guide has been written for two central folds: to help EFL Master’s students in different fields of research, mainly literature, didactics, and civilization to write an academic thesis and provide the appropriate structure. The second aim is to raise their awareness about the importance of organizing a small piece of academic work or a whole thesis through employing the art of many techniques and methodologies that suit the above-mentioned fields. To this vein, this guide aims primarily at helping students to discover the most important elements in a thesis through learning how to design the research problem, research questions, research objectives, literature review, general introduction, and conclusion. Hence, this booklet is then a summary of an outgrowth of the researcher’s experience as a teacher of research methodology i.e. it is a sum of lectures in practice.

Admittedly, the selected lectures in this booklet are designed to address the problem that learners are suffering from which is how to write a thesis, which elements can be included in each section, and what format to follow. Thereby, it focuses on the smallest details including types of research questions and objectives, the basic components of a general introduction and conclusion, types of abstracts, how to write the literature, different types of sources, and how to organize the third chapter. The guide also sheds light on other details like, size, font of the whole text, formatting tables and figures, organizing abbreviations and acronyms, and listing appendices.

When it comes to its organization, the booklet contains twelve chapters. The first chapter gives an overview of how to select and structure a thesis title in case the student chooses the area of research. The second chapter guides the student on how to write the abstract, its different types, and the main structure that researchers are using in writing academic abstracts. The third chapter is devoted to general introduction writing. Through this part, the student will be introduced in detail to terms including the research problem, rationale, research questions, research objectives, and research hypotheses. Writing the literature review and different techniques used in reading and note-taking are also present in the booklet. The remaining chapters provide an overview of how to write the third chapter, general conclusion, referencing principles, how to format tables and figures, and how to write the statement of originality, dedication, and acknowledgements. Thereby, this abridged guide helps learners to distinguish between how to write a thesis and other types of writing they used to conduct during their undergraduate studies i.e. it raises their awareness towards the importance of thesis writing as an important form of academic achievement that is needed to carry on their research. Furthermore, each chapter consists of a set of activities to test the learners’ knowledge and strengthen their information on academic writing in general. The materials being selected for the textbook are taken from various fields of research so that students from other disciplines can also find the booklet useful and, therefore they will share the same objectives and difficulties in thesis writing. Besides, checking lists and direct questions are also present in the booklet.

In a nutshell, this guide calls for more scholarship to unify some points between supervisors on how to write and structure a Master’s thesis; for this reason, it welcomes further suggestions from teachers and experts in the field of academic writing. What this guidebook has provided is just some guidelines for students and our colleagues for a real departure to conduct a whole book that can guide researchers in thesis writing and formatting.