Introduction

This article is a set of reflections I organized after reading the introduction to Training in Thesis Writing for Chinese Studies, edited by Professor Wen Rumin. I have little experience in writing theses, so I may not be able to offer others correct guidance. If there are any problems, please correct them in the comments below.

Emphasize the Core Concept

Usually, a thesis should be no less than ten thousand words. Given this, many classmates (including me) easily go off track with the topic they are researching, and often in the end cannot even make their argument self-consistent, let alone establish a school of their own. Professor Wen Rumin provides us with an approach in the book—“emphasizing the core concept”—which I think is very important.

Emphasizing the core concept, as the term suggests, means emphasizing the central argument of the thesis. I believe that in the process of writing a thesis, one should distinguish primary from secondary and understand that the viewpoints and examples presented in the thesis all revolve around the core concept.

Collect Materials

Collecting materials is one of the most important steps in writing a thesis. When writing a thesis, there must be materials of certain authority to serve as supporting evidence for the thesis author's arguments. Otherwise, the views put forward in the thesis will lack support from reliable sources, and it would be hard to say that the thesis itself has academic value.

Regarding collecting materials, Professor Wen Rumin offers the following suggestions¹:

Note: Here I summarize and generalize the suggestions Professor Wen put forward in the book. My original intention was to remind myself; the reason I write in such detail is ultimately to exercise my own writing and thinking abilities by writing this article.
If readers find grammatical ambiguities or inappropriate wording in this article, please feel free to correct me in the comments below.

1. Comprehensive scope. When collecting materials, one must be comprehensive and not decide what to keep or discard based on subjective likes and dislikes; do not start with preconceptions and seek only the materials one considers useful with a preset viewpoint.
2. Follow the trail. One can seek relevant clues in the literature, books, or special topics involved in existing research findings, and start from there.
3. Ask your advisor for help. Seeking your advisor's guidance can help you avoid many detours when collecting materials.
4. Excerpt Cards. For details, see the second-level heading belowExcerpt Cards.

Excerpt Cards

Professor Wen Rumin proposes the method of “Excerpt Cards” in the book. I believe we should learn the key point behind the method he proposes—accumulating source material. The reason Professor Wen Rumin proposes the “Excerpt Cards” method is that cards havefragmented,core-focusedcharacteristics. The process of making excerpt cards is itself an act of conceiving.

Professor Wen Rumin offers several suggestions for excerpt cards:

1. Excerpt immediately. Upon discovering material, immediately excerpt its core meaning and indicate the source for later retrieval.
2. Record your opinions. If your first reaction is that the material is very important, you should immediately write down your preliminary opinions on using it, or the thoughts and inspirations it triggers.
3. Classify properly. The collected materials are of many kinds and mostly exist in the form of cards. This means the materials will be scattered. At this point, you should classify the materials well to ensure that when you use them later, you can cite them immediately.
4. Abandon the notion of uselessness. The material cards you collect may number hundreds or thousands, and in the end only about a hundred may be usable, but this does not mean the rest are useless. After all, eating four steamed buns makes you full, but that does not mean you can just eat the fourth bun; the first three buns are also important.

Write More

Practice writing is the prerequisite and preparatory work for writing an article; this should have been placed at the end of the article. The author places it afterCollecting Materialsin order to remind myself that when collecting materials, I should pay more attention to reading.

Professor Wen Rumin said in the introduction of the book², writing is the embodiment of comprehensive ability; it cannot be learned through a few crash-course sessions or by learning a few tricks. The author believes that writing is a process from quantitative change to qualitative change—in short, it requires more practice. When one initially does not understand how to write a certain genre, one can find some authoritative articles and imitate their style in writing. After that, one can further cultivate a sense of language through writing.

Framework Construction and Refinement

To initially construct a paper framework, one needs to includeargumentsandevidenceas its two parts, whereas refining the paper framework requiresmaking an outline.

Arguments and Evidence

Professor Wen Rumin mentioned, “Argumentis the soul of an article and the core of its content.” Therefore, after the material collection and organization work is completed, one should begin to extract the basic argument from it and preliminarily set the relevant evidence.

Argument

• Establishing and developing an argument requires demonstration, so one should consider in advance which evidence to use.
• An argument must use reliable, sufficient, and typical evidence such as facts and scientific theories generally recognized by the academic community.

Evidence

• Reliable: it has a source, is not used to serve one's own purpose, and is not taken out of context;
• Sufficient: fully persuasive;

• Typical: it is sufficiently representative, does not rely on an isolated example, and is not an arbitrary illustration.

  Approaches to using evidence that must be handled with caution

  • The simple “viewpoint plus example” approach. Whether establishing or refuting a viewpoint, there must be sufficient examples.
  • Citing certain fashionable Western theories. Certain Western theories, if their sufficiency and correctness have not been demonstrated, must never be used as the basis for an argument.

Outline

After a preliminary framework has been established, one also needs to make an outline to help conceive the specific structure of the paper, further sort out the materials and main viewpoints, open up the line of thinking, and make the original writing plan concrete.

The structure of an outline can be roughly divided into the following points:

1. Title. It should reflect the core content and research characteristics. Avoid using fashionable, distinctive, or poetically vague sentences as the title. The title of an academic paper is best kept concise, clear, and substantive.
2. Clarify the structure. It should be well-layered and clearly structured. Before putting pen to paper, first organize the positions and lengths required by your paper's central argument and sub-arguments; there needs to bea sequence and thread by which the line of thinking gradually unfolds.

3. Describe the research approach. Simplify the complex; grasp the key link and everything falls into place.

   Grasping the key link means that by seizing the main link of a matter, one can set everything in motion.

   • First, describe your research approach in the simplest few paragraphs.
   • Describe this research approach to others in the simplest language,
   • Clarify the thread of the approach and the several 'points' that make up the thread, and continuously enrich and demonstrate the existence (or truth) of these points and their connection to the central argument; simplify the complex and turn the scattered into a whole—only in this way can a complete article be formed.
4. Basis for arguments. Carefully list what evidence supports each argument; whether it is required or backup material evidence, it should first be marked in the outline so that it can be used in formal writing.

Main body structure

1. Introduction. Give a relatively simple summary, explaining the motivation for choosing the paper topic and the academic significance of the subject. Previous related research,the main content and core concepts of this paperetc.
2. Main discussion. The main part of the paper, which will not be elaborated here.
3. Conclusion. A summary of the full text, which may also extend to certain issues that remain to be further explored.