Caveat
I've noticed many theses seem to include some kind of caveat in the preface or elsewhere early on. I've found I don't quite know where I sit with them, so here is a loose rambling on about exceptions and clauses...
- "Such-and-such is beyond the scope of this study" aka "please don't mark me down for theorist X's absence in the lit review."
That's just sensible, I think. Although, would it be better if the scope of the study were made clear in a way that wouldn't require an effective apology at the start? I'm not sure.
- "Thank you to all the wonderful people who supported me during my descent into academic hermitdom over the past X years, and Girfriend and Grandma for proofreading the thesis. However, all the mistakes that remain are all my own."
Is that final sentence really necessary? Until I read a couple of these it hadn't occurred to me that by thanking someone for their help in bringing ideas together or checking through your work you might be implying any errors in the text meant other people hadn't done their job properly. These ones have, from memory, been mainly in American theses.
- "I do not have any political affiliations"
I've come across a couple of these, and they result in a double take. Again, it's a caveat I never expected would be necessary, except maybe in theses dealing with particularly pertinent contemporary political issues. So far this sort of caveat has been a Finnish phenomenon.
- "I have limited myself to the study of novels A, B and C. I have excluded novel D as it has not yet been translated into English."
I would personally feel uneasy about using as primary sources (in a thesis, at least) texts that I could not personally access in the original language. However, I do know there are a couple of books related to my topic out there in languages I can't even read, so unless I pay for the professional translation myself this is a type of caveat I may need to use. What's the general consensus - is this acceptable or a sign of laziness?
- "just before I submitted my thesis Famous Author published a book on more or less exactly the same topic"
This would be an awkward situation to be in, but it does also show you're at the cutting edge of research - in this particular case the (UWA) author was able to show there were some key differences between Famous Author's and their own work (points to them for being able to do that!) so that despite the similarities the research was still original. I've seen similar caveats in footnotes of journal articles: "after the original submission of this article Person X published the article/book Y that provides a contrasting view to the argument presented here..." I wonder, how would you react to being 'scooped' in different stages of your thesis? A year in, two years in, six months before submission...?
Have you noticed exceptions and clauses that you either felt would be necessary for you to use, or alternatively ones you you couldn't imagine ever needing?