Economical Writing
Has your supervisor ever asked you to cut back on your writing? Here are some hints from an examiner:
"From a presentation viewpoint, the thesis is also around twice as long as it needs to be, for two main reasons. Firstly, the writing style is seriously uneconomical, with extensive use of passive sentence constructions, redundant padding and meaningless cliches. By the time I reached the end, I was ready to kill if I encountered "It is speculated that ..." as a construction again. Judging by the prominence of citation (several times per page), some person called "Studies" (be they recent or previous or numerous) seems to have carried out almost all previous work in the field. Just one example of a combination of these issues; "Previous studies demonstrate that X plays a key role ...". This would be marginally less painful if the entire same sentence did not reappear in multiple chapters. Which is the second point. The entire thesis could have been collapsed into a single introduction, methods, results, discussion chapter format to avoid large scale repetition."