Skip to content

How to write a thesis - Umberto Eco

Essay writing framework

This is a writing framework adapted from Umberto Eco’s ‘How to write a thesis’.

Choosing a topic

  • Reflect your previous studies and experience.
  • Sources should be accessible
  • Sources should be manageable
  • Be experienced with the methodological framework. (Know what you need to know)

Further choosing a topic

  1. Choose a topic that is not too broad.
  2. Decide if it will be historical or theoretical
  3. Ideally understand some of the foreign language when writing on a topic of foreign language

The pre-requisites of a scientific essay

  1. Research deals with a specific object that others can identify.
  2. Say something that has not been said about an object or revise previously said things in a new light
  3. Allow it to be useful to others
  4. Provide the elements that are needed to verify or disprove the hypothesis(falsifiability)

Sources

Eco stresses the importance of both the comprehensiveness of sources and the directness of the sources. Where possible try to get access to all the primary sources of the subject at hand. If you are studying a partcular author you need to be able to get access to the original documents. If you cannot find that, the consider doing an analysis of the critical sources and their interpretation.

Translations are not direct sources. → Why you should know the language.

Anthologies are not direct sources. → Perhaps useful for a first pass of the documents but not for a direct source.

Good photocopies of the original can be considered direct sources.

An edition by a historiographer can be considered direct if the historiographer in question is of very high rigour and has not been challenged on his documents before.

Never quote from a quote.

Never quote from an indirect source pretending to have read the original.

Quoting sources

Eco tries to get across the importance of precision when quoting documents. There are a few incorrect ways to reference an author of a book. Generally try to get these things right

  1. Author name is clearly distinguishable (First Name, Last Name)
  2. Book title is NOT in quotation marks
  3. Journals and chapters ARE in quotation marks
  4. The publisher can be easily distinguished NOT JUST the location
  5. Include the date of the first edition publishing or later dates.

The given examples are used in the translated version of Eco’s book.

Quoting Books

Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. 5th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. First published 1969.

or

Wilson, John. Philosophy and Religion: The Logic of Religious Belief. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Quoting Journals

Anceschi, Luciano. “Orizzonte della poesia” (Horizon of poetry). Il Veri, n.s., 1 (February 1962):6-21.

Article is in quotation marks. Journal in Italics. Allows us to understand that the article is a short text and not a book. n.s. means that the journal is a new series

For further guides on the following consult section 3.2 in the english translation of Eco’s book

  • Multiple authors and an editor
  • Multiple authors and no editor
  • The series in which a volume is included
  • Anonymous authors and pseudonyms
  • Reprints in collections or Anthologies
  • Citing Newspapers
  • Citing official documents or monumental works
  • Citing classic works
  • Citing unpublished works
  • Originals and translations

The translation of Eco’s book also contains a list of all the rules you must follow. Which I will copy here.

Books

  1. Last Name, first name of the author or editor [With information on pseudonyms and false attributions]
  2. Title: Subtitle of the work
  3. Edition: [if second or later]
  4. Volume number [or total number of volumes in a multi- volume work cited in its entirety].
  5. Series
  6. Place of publication (if missing, write "n.p." which means "no place")
  7. Publisher [omit if this information is missing from the book],
  8. Date of publication [If this information is missing from the book, write “n.d.” which means “no date”.
  9. Trans. If the original title was in a foreign language and there is an English translation, specify the translator's full name, the English title, the place of publication, the publisher, and the date of publication].

Journals

  1. Last name, first name of the author.
  2. Article Title”
  3. Journal Title
  4. Volume number, issue number (indicate if it is a new series),
  5. (Month and year):
  6. Inclusive page numbers.

Book chapters, conference proceedings, and essays from a multi author volume

  1. Last name, first name of the author.
  2. "Chapter or Essay Title."
  3. In
  4. Title of the multi author volume,
  5. First name and last name of the editor.
  6. Volume number (if it is in a multivolume work].
  7. Chapter or essay's inclusive page numbers.
  8. Place of publication:
  9. Publisher,
  10. Date of publication.

Beginning

Eco stresses that the revision of the written piece will be necessary. But starting off with a scaffold would be the best way to operate. This is because he believes it is better to adjust a framework than to adjust no framework. The way that he suggests that you do this is the following.

  1. Title and subtitle.
  2. Table of contents
  3. Introduction

The title and subtitle are there to steer you in the general direction of an object. But you can of course adjust this as you go.

The table of contents is an exercise of clearly writing out your ideas, even in the most abstract sense. It give you a structure of what you will likely write about. It is a route that you think you will take. But there is no problem in changing the route and doing something different. But you update the table of contents as you go.

The Introduction then is almost a summary of what you think will be the completed work. It should allow the reader to get a quick and brief synopsis of your work and then be satisfied with it from there. At the outset, it is fine to be ambitious and ‘go too far’ as you will revise the introduction as you go on.

Bibliography

Eco suggests in his book that your bibliography be prepared but not static during the course of writing. You want to be able to get a full set of all the important texts for your topic. But at the beginning you may neglect to add some important topics.

He makes a suggestion that on the outset you read just one book. And through the citations in that book or piece that you can begin to compose your bibliography. This then grows as you read more and add more to your central piece.

Note Taking

Eco was writing from a different time. Much of the suggestions he makes on notes may now seem outdated. But however there is some relevance in a modern context.

Firstly he talks about making notes more as part of an elaborate system of thinking. This system of thinking can be used just simply over the duration of the writing, or in this context the duration of the college student's thesis. However he proposes a system of notes that, when considered in totality is an extension of one’s reading and thoughts over a long period of time, or ones whole life.

He first defines the ‘perfect’ system. When writing on some topic and having some fixed table of contents you can begin to connect the ideas in your contents with where you found them in the book. Which would be simply

  1. Write the connecting idea in the margin of the book
  2. Write the book and chapter in some index connected to the idea.

However the issues he describes are to do with cases where you do not have the books, or a fixed table of contents etc. How do you construct a system of notes? Eco goes in to some detail about index cards, of different kinds and different color. With connections to other cards and books etc. You then have this elaborate and almost magnificent system of notes that will aid you through your life.

The question remains as to how to best structure a system of notes in order to fit the modern world. This comes with some assumptions about the nature of doing research.

  1. Massive quantities of books have become digitised
  2. Books are likely cheaper. Or at the very least we are much wealthier.
  3. The ways that we can take notes are digitised
  4. Capabilities of term search has expanded

The questions remains as to how best to organise notes. There was probably some wisdom in Eco’s system. A man who read so much would probably know what he was talking about.

Composing a bibliography

Quick access to a list of books would seem to be an easy thing to do. But however there is almost too much information to sift through. The ease of production and thus publication and the growing demand for books has made finding books slightly more difficult but not impossible. Eco suggests consulting a university library for their bibliographies on certain topics. The issues here are 1) you may not be in a university and 2) even if you are, the bibliographies may be limited, non-existent for some topics and dated.

Eco designates reading some general book about a topic and building your bibliography from that. And until there is some intelligent and quick way to compose a bibliography using the wealth of data available to us then this is often a good enough method. If you have a university library, then you may have access to such topic bibliographies.

For example, for an essay or thesis ‘Geophysical methods for exploration of Titanium’ You could start with searching your university bibliography for terms related to the title. Eg.

  1. Geophysics
  2. Mineral exploration
  3. Titanium(or in this context ‘Brookite’, ‘anatase’ etc)

On a first search I receive a research starter with a bibliography which contains certain references.

  • Gadallah, Mamdouh R., and Ray L. Fisher. Exploration Geophysics. Berlin: Springer, 2008. Print.
  • Kirsch, Reinhard. Groundwater Geophysics: A Tool for Hydrogeology. 2d ed. Berlin: Springer, 2010. Print.
  • Lowrie, William. Fundamentals of Geophysics. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.
  • Milsom, John, and Asger Eriksen. Field Geophysics. 4th ed. Chichester: Wiley, 2013. Print.
  • Reynolds, John M. An Introduction to Applied and Environmental Geophysics. 2d ed. Chichester: Wiley, 2011. Print.
  • Svetov, B. S. “Self-Consistent Problems of Geophysics: A Review.” Izvestiya Physics of the Solid Earth 51.6 (2015): 910+. Print.

From here we might have to look at further information on each book to gather whether the item is relevant. I can begin to start adding these books to a bibliography. Apps such as notion can then easily allow us to start categorising this bibliography however we like. We may begin with ‘geophysics’ and add our books here. Here I believe is where we can start to leverage some of the beautiful aspects of technology, especially Notion.

How you organise the bibliographies is then up to you. You could start with ‘geophysics’ but later find that the amount of material is too much to understand and gain context from. Notion can allow you to create subsections within pages. You are also free to connect certain pages to other pages. As you begin to grow a bibliography you can create a rich tapestry of books on many different topics.