Tip 1) Before you even begin, during the course of your Ph.D. development, try to keep track of your papers. Someday, somewhere, for some reason, you're going to want to make a statement, probably along the lines of "before I wrote this thesis, the usual method to do this thing was X," or "past studies on this topic yielded X and Y results," and you need to follow these statements with a TON of references. Best to just keep tabs on what you're reading now - you know, the papers you're reading to figure out what you want to do and where you want to improve things? Yeah, maybe just store them in neat folders, marked as whatever YOU categorize them as, with reference to your research. Later, you can easily reference things when you make statements, and when you give overviews of the established literature.
Tip 2) Just before you start writing, do some research into format requirements (should be on your school's website, or available to you somewhere. They DO want you to format it the way they want it, after all), and do some research into past theses that your advisor has signed off on. Do you know someone who's already graduated through your advisor? Get theirs. It doesn't matter if it's not the exact same topic, at least your advisor has signed this one - you can glean some information from their thesis, and while you're at it, get information from the person! How much emphasis on literature, on basic principles, on detailed methods - what got the thesis sent back, and what got through without much scrutiny.
Here's an example. I downloaded a thesis that my advisor was on the board for (they're all public domain, you know?) and one glance was daunting - it was over 200 pages! My advisor is well-known for being super detail-oriented, so I dismayed for a bit. My experiment really didn't merit 200 pages of content. But, I looked closer. There were easily 20-something pages before text even began, 40-odd pages of references, and nearly 60 pages of figures (only 1 figure per page)! He had only actually written 80 double-spaced pages, most of which were blank space and large headers! ALSO, he laid out his specific aims in super-simple format, and repeated them at every opportunity (i.e. at the beginning of every chapter: methods, results, discussion) literally verbatim.
So what have we learned? My advisor, despite being a stickler for the details, actually preferred the specific aims laid out in a clear and straightforward way as possible, and preferred me to repeat them at the start of every chapter. It's not cheating, it's just being clear!
Here's another example: Another thesis I downloaded had nearly 200 pages, but her table of contents, acknowledgements, and figure list was SO long, writing didn't start until at least page 30. And then, perusing her results and discussion, she had (amazingly) almost NO analysis of her results. Just pages and pages and pages of images. I guess the committee was supposed to draw their own conclusions from the hundreds of pictures? Whatever the case was, she basically had shown that she had done a lot of work, and despite having no tangible results or conclusions, she got a Ph.D.!
So perk up! It's not as bad as it looks! You can do it!
