Style and Stylistics
What is a thesis?
Your thesis is not your dissertation. Neither is it a one liner about what you are doing. Your thesis is "a position or proposition that a person (as a candidate for scholastic honors) advances and offers to maintain by argument." [Webster's 7th New Collegiate Dictionary]. "I looked at how people play chess" is not a thesis; " people adapt memories of old games to play new games" is. Similarly, "I wrote a program to play chess" is not a thesis; "playing chess requires a database of actual games" is. A thesis has to claim something.
There are many kinds of theses, especially in computer science, but most of them can be lumped into one of the following classes: 1. process X is a feasible way to do task Y 2. process X is a better way to do task Y than any previously known method 3. task Y requires process X 4. people use process X to do task Y 5. process X is a terrible way to do Y 6. people don't use process X
Feel free to substitute "process X" with "memory organization X" or what ever else might make one theory different from another. Make sure you clearly specify the class of tasks Y to which your thesis applies.Besides being a proposition, a thesis has to have another property: it must say something new. "Understanding natural language requires context" is not a thesis (except maybe in a linguistics department); "process X is a feasible mechanism for adding context sensitivity to natural language understanders" is, as is "context is not required for visual understanding.
What is a defense?
A defense presents evidence for a thesis. What kind of evidence is apprpropriate depends on what kind of thesis is being defended.
Thesis: process X is a feasible way to do task Y
One defense for this kind of claim is an analysis of the complexity, or completeness, or whatever, of the theoretical algorithm. In computer science, the more common defense is based on empirical results from running an experiment. A good defense
Your thesis is not your dissertation. Neither is it a one liner about what you are doing. Your thesis is "a position or proposition that a person (as a candidate for scholastic honors) advances and offers to maintain by argument." [Webster's 7th New Collegiate Dictionary]. "I looked at how people play chess" is not a thesis; " people adapt memories of old games to play new games" is. Similarly, "I wrote a program to play chess" is not a thesis; "playing chess requires a database of actual games" is. A thesis has to claim something.
There are many kinds of theses, especially in computer science, but most of them can be lumped into one of the following classes: 1. process X is a feasible way to do task Y 2. process X is a better way to do task Y than any previously known method 3. task Y requires process X 4. people use process X to do task Y 5. process X is a terrible way to do Y 6. people don't use process X
Feel free to substitute "process X" with "memory organization X" or what ever else might make one theory different from another. Make sure you clearly specify the class of tasks Y to which your thesis applies.Besides being a proposition, a thesis has to have another property: it must say something new. "Understanding natural language requires context" is not a thesis (except maybe in a linguistics department); "process X is a feasible mechanism for adding context sensitivity to natural language understanders" is, as is "context is not required for visual understanding.
What is a defense?
A defense presents evidence for a thesis. What kind of evidence is apprpropriate depends on what kind of thesis is being defended.
Thesis: process X is a feasible way to do task Y
One defense for this kind of claim is an analysis of the complexity, or completeness, or whatever, of the theoretical algorithm. In computer science, the more common defense is based on empirical results from running an experiment. A good defense