Chapter 4 Describing the Current Situation

1. Effects Approach

In the case of thesis proposal, the effects approach tend to be heavily used, since the primary readers, the committee members, will be pretty clear about the causes of the phenomena to study. But they didn't conduct the research by themselves. And it is similar to readers in academia, such as the program director, the adviser, MAPC peers, the journal editors and potential readers from research institutions.

Therefore, the thesis proposal can be fairly direct. We can introduce the current research findings and build up the exigence of further research in the beginning.

2. Literature Review

This chapter emphasize about a significant function of literature review, that is, to "highlight the knowledge gaps and/or inconsistencies that exist in the published work" (68). It is especially important for me to keep that in mind when doing the lit review part. I used to consider it to be a part to show off the author's rich "knowledge" about the research topic. So sometime I tended to put everything in mind there.

However, to identify the gaps in previous research, and to establish the exigence of deeper research, it requires to state "need-to-know" information only, instead of providing "want-to-tell" information from the writer's prospective.

3. Assuming your readers don't know anything about the topic?

In the classes of TV program planning in college, the professor told us to treat the audience as "idiots," assuming that they have difficulties understanding the even easiest things.By doing so, we tend to produce a lot of idiot-proof TV programs which probably look somehow stupid as the experts see them.

That is actually a tendency of "reader-centered" composition. The professional writers explain things as clearly as possible, in order to make the audience understand and get attracted in a few minutes.

Since the primary readers of the thesis proposal are experts in that field, we don't have to write in idiot-proof way. But it is necessary to organize all "need-to-know" information in proper orders.