How to Write a Thesis, Umberto Eco
CONTENTS
Foreword by Francesco Erspamer
Translators’ Foreword
Introduction to the Original 1977 Edition
Introduction to the 1985 Edition
1 THE DEFINITION AND PURPOSE OF THE THESIS
1.1 What Is a Thesis, and Why Is It Required?
1.2 For Whom Is This Book Written?
1.3 The Usefulness of a Thesis after Graduation
1.4 Four Obvious Rules for Choosing a Thesis Topic
2 CHOOSING THE TOPIC
2.1 Monograph or Survey?
2.2 Historical or Theoretical?
2.3 Ancient or Contemporary?
2.4 How Long Does It Take to Write a Thesis?
2.5 Is It Necessary to Know Foreign Languages?
2.6 “Scientific” or Political?
2.6.1 What Does It Mean to Be Scientific?
2.6.2 Writing about Direct Social Experience
2.6.3 Treating a “Journalistic” Topic with Scientific Accuracy
2.7 How to Avoid Being Exploited by Your Advisor
3 CONDUCTING RESEARCH
3.1 The Availability of Primary and Secondary Sources
3.1.1 What Are the Sources of a Scientific Work?
3.1.2 Direct and Indirect Sources
3.2 Bibliographical Research
3.2.1 How to Use the Library
3.2.2 Managing Your Sources with the Bibliographical Index Card File
3.2.3 Documentation Guidelines
3.2.4 An Experiment in the Library of Alessandria
3.2.5 Must You Read Books? If So, What Should You Read First?
4 THE WORK PLAN AND THE INDEX CARDS
4.1 The Table of Contents as a Working Hypothesis
4.2 Index Cards and Notes
4.2.1 Various Types of Index Cards and Their Purpose
4.2.2 Organizing the Primary Sources
4.2.3 The Importance of Readings Index Cards
4.2.4 Academic Humility
5 WRITING THE THESIS
5.1 The Audience
5.2 How to Write
5.3 Quotations
5.3.1 When and How to Quote: 10 Rules
5.3.2 Quotes, Paraphrases, and Plagiarism
5.4 Footnotes
5.4.1 The Purpose of Footnotes
5.4.2 The Notes and Bibliography System
5.4.3 The Author-Date System
5.5 Instructions, Traps, and Conventions
5.6 Academic Pride
6 THE FINAL DRAFT
6.1 Formatting the Thesis
6.1.1 Margins and Spaces
6.1.2 Underlining and Capitalizing
6.1.3 Sections
6.1.4 Quotation Marks and Other Signs
6.1.5 Transliterations and Diacritics
6.1.6 Punctuation, Foreign Accents, and Abbreviations
6.1.7 Some Miscellaneous Advice
6.2 The Final Bibliography
6.3 The Appendices
6.4 The Table of Contents
7 CONCLUSIONS
Notes
FOREWORD
How to Write a Thesis was first published in 1977 in Italy, where it has remained in print ever since. Not only has the book provided instruction and inspiration for generations of Italian students, but it has been translated into seventeen languages, including Persian (1996), Russian (2001), and Chinese (2003). Remarkably, given the book’s success, in an era when editorial facelifts, sequels, and new editions have become publishing norms, the book has not been revised or updated, apart from an augmented introduction that Umberto Eco wrote for the 1985 edition. Its durable rules and sound advice have remained constant, despite passing trends and changing technologies.
I am not sure whether this qualifies it as a classic. A classic, Italo Calvino wrote, is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum—but without rendering that hum inaudible. Indeed, at first glance, this book may seem incompatible with our present, considering that chapter 6 is typewritten rather than word-processed (with underlining to render italics!) and that chapter 4 includes reproductions of index cards with handwritten corrections and additions.
As unfamiliar as this way of taking notes may be to today’s students, it evokes nostalgic memories for those of us who attended college before the 1990s. The persistence of How to Write a Thesis is not due to nostalgia, however, nor do I think it is because it renders the noise of the present remote. I believe the book’s staying power has to do with the very essence of the humanities.
The humanities are not a body of texts, objects, and information that we inherited from the past—either a remote past or one so recent that we perceive it as our present, although as soon as we examine it we understand that it is irrevocably gone. The humanities are the process of preservation and appropriation of that pastness, a process that requires specific skills acquired through practice, as all skills are.
This book teaches a techne, in the Greek sense of applied and context-related knowledge—a sort of craftsmanship. This is why its title is not, say, What Is a Thesis?, an ontological question. Its avowed objective, the thesis, is actually less important than the occurrence of writing it, of “making” it: how to write a thesis. Umberto Eco takes us back to the original purpose of theses and dissertations as defining events that conclude a program of study. They are not a test or an exam, nor should they be. They are not meant to prove that the student did his or her homework. Rather, they prove that students can make something out of their education.
This is particularly important today, when we are more accustomed to thinking in compliance with the software of our laptop or doing research according to the logic of a tablet than to thinking and researching in a personal and independent way. Written in the age of typewriters, card catalogs, and writing pads, How to Write a Thesis is less about the final outcome than about the path and method of arriving there.
For Aristotle, knowledge was pursued for its own sake, and such a pursuit could be justified only by an instinctive drive and the intellectual pleasure generated by the fulfillment of that instinct. For Kant, aesthetics and judgment were based on disinterestedness: they could not be programmed, only experienced. The humanities are intrinsically creative and innovative. They are about originality and invention, not discovery. This is precisely Eco’s testimony; even more than a technical manual, this book is an invitation to ingenuity, a tribute to imagination.
By exposing twenty-first-century students to long-established practices of scholarly research, this book will introduce them to the core skills that constitute the writing of a thesis: finding an important and intriguing topic, being thorough, taking pride in one’s work, giving thoughts time to develop, identifying with a subject, and being resourceful in locating information about it.
That is exactly what this book did for me, as a student and young scholar. How to Write a Thesis was first published just as I was beginning to think about writing my own thesis, and it was from the Italian edition of this book (Come si fa una tesi di laurea) that I learned how to choose a topic, how to look for sources and prepare a bibliography, how to use my library’s research systems, how to organize and prioritize information, and finally how to write a captivating and professional dissertation.
It remained an indispensable reference source to me for years, long after I had defended and published my thesis. When I began working at the University of Rome, I recommended it to my own students. Many professors in Italy today still refer their students to it, and many university websites in other countries quote long passages from the book as part of the protocol for students to become familiar with before they write a thesis.
And yet, when I moved to the United States in 1993, I was not sure whether it made sense to bring How to Write a Thesis with me. Moving one’s library to a new place always involves questions about one’s future priorities: I distinctly remember taking up the book, turning over a few pages, balancing it in my hand, and hesitating.
Things were changing quickly. Eco’s methods of organizing and filing information were still effective, but word processors and the Internet were beginning to offer exciting alternatives to long-established research and writing techniques. “Use colors,” Eco insisted, when marking a passage. “Use abbreviations to emphasize the relevance of information,” “Use abbreviations to designate the passages you must reread,” “Supplement the underlining with adhesive page markers”—did this kind of advice still make sense? Moreover, the country in which I was going to live was the one where the standardization of research methodology and citation style had been codified as early as 1906 with the publication of the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.
Eco himself may have been inspired by the profoundly renovated 12th edition of that manual; published in 1969, it sold more copies than the first eleven editions combined. This was a time, in the United States as well as in Europe, when higher education was undergoing significant expansion. How to Write a Thesis sanctioned an extensive diffusion of the humanities into society.
It was a momentous transformation, as Eco recognized in his introduction to the book: “Today the Italian university is a university for the masses. Students of all social classes arrive from a variety of high schools.” An unprecedented number of young people were enrolling in universities to pursue the study of literature, history, and philosophy—often lacking and failing to acquire the cultural background necessary for careers as teachers, professors, editors, and journalists.
Eco was aware of this predicament. As a university professor, he knew that the majority of students in Italian universities seldom attended classes, that very few of them would continue to write and do research, and that the degree they eventually earned would not necessarily improve their social conditions. It would have been easy to call for the system to be reformed so as not to require a thesis from students ill-equipped to write one, and for whom the benefit of spending several months working on a thesis might be difficult to justify in cold economic terms.
But Eco did not believe that education belonged to an elite, or that it should lower its standards in including the non-elite. He understood that the writing of a thesis forced many students outside of their cultural comfort zone, and that if the shock was too sudden
