1) Write an outline. That comic I linked above is mostly no joke. Seriously. Write it down on a piece of paper if you're so computer illiterate.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Background and Literature Review
Chapter 3: Specific Aims
Chapter 4: Methods
Chapter 5: Results
Chapter 6: Discussion
Chapter 7: Conclusions
2) Fill it in. Put in a short blurb under each telling yourself what stuff you're going to put in that section. (hint: change your text to red for this if you're writing inside Word. It'll make it easier to find and remind yourself to delete these "messages to yourself" statements later.)
Chapter 1: Introduction
Here I'm going to talk about the broader topic. If my research relates to a disease (in any vague way) then I'm going to maybe start with that - Autism / Alzheimer's / Cancer Type X affects this many people, and a lot of research has already gone into this aspect of studying the disease. But more needs to be done here. Blah blah.
Chapter 2: Background and Literature Review
Here's where you can really get a hefty chunk of pages out of the way. Go into as much or as little detail about other people's research as you like. Talk about what they did, where their shortcomings were, why it was successful or groundbreaking. If you're really hurting for pages, go back to the days of yore, when your field was invented, and talk about those guys. Cite everything with as many references as possible! Remember to use the long form of citation (Author's name, author name, et al., year) in order to get the maximum length out of citations. Don't use numbers! I don't know about your school, but mine actually preferred long form.
Chapter 3: Specific Aims
Subheading 1: Specific Aim 1
I'm going to develop this protocol.
Subheading 2: Specific Aim 2
I'm going to compare my new protocol against the established stuff
Be really specific. I thought this kind of outline was too obvious, but my advisor told me otherwise. As obvious and straightforward as possible. It makes it easier to read.
Chapter 4: Methods
As detailed as possible. Everything you did, with so much detail, any idiot could reproduce it.
Chapter 5: Results
The literal results that came out of your methods. No extra hand-waving necessary. Just tell people about unexpected things that came up during the course of the study, and throw up an actual list of results.
Chapter 6: Discussion
Here's where you start talking about what worked, what didn't, and whether or not you achieved your specific aims.
Here's where you start talking about what worked, what didn't, and whether or not you achieved your specific aims.
Chapter 7: Conclusions
Here's where you talk about what you did (again) and why it's relevant to that thing you talked about in the introduction. Also, what didn't work, and how one might fix it in future studies.
See? Wasn't that easy? Just keep adding details about what you're going to write about, and it will soon be good enough to give to your advisor and say: "Here's what it's going to look like. Any broad comments?" Because now's a good time to establish what will and won't be covered in your thesis. A good advisor (like mine) will be able to tell you when to put the brakes on, because he doesn't want to read a 500 page thesis, and you've gone TOO broad here or there and would have to do TOO much, so stick with this or that, thank you very much.
Besides, later you'll want to be able to say: "Hey. We talked about that, and it wasn't going to be put in this thesis. We agreed."
