The College Student Union organied the seventh Seminar on Dissertation Writing on Haidian Campus on the morning of 2 Dec, 2024. Professor Liu Wenjie was invited to the event as a guest speaker.
Based on his own research experience, Liu Wenjie shared in detail the writing methods of dissertation from the following aspects: topic determination, data collection, the theory, argumentation, logic, creativity and excavation of the thesis and the research methods of the thesis.
Liu Wenjie first stressed that students need to choose the topics they are really interested in when writing papers and that it should be from a small point of view to a specific problem. He said, before start writing, students need to refine and accurately describe the problem to be solved in order to test the feasibility of the paper and ensure that there is sufficient material to support the writing of the paper, including the academic literature and factual information about the subject of the study.
He further pointed out that academic papers must be theoretical, argumentative and logical. According to Liu, the theory requires the thesis to solve general problems rather than specific ones, so it cannot be written as a judgment in a certain kind of case. Argumentation requires the authors to state their position and prove their point in the paper. The logicality is embodied in the arrangement of the thesis structure, which should be advanced step by step and deepened step by step. He also proposed the creativeness and exploitability of the thesis research. He said, creativeness refers to the creative contribution of the author in the paper and the most common creative studies are proposing new systems for a certain phenomenon, analysing different interpretations of existing systems, and studying the conflicts between different legal norms, which provided the students with a new guiding ideology on their thesis topics. In addition to creative research, he suggests that students can also do exploratory research, constantly digging deeper into the issues studied in the thesis.
Finally, Liu recommended some research methods, including historical research methods, system logic methods, comparative research methods and empirical research methods, which can be adopted in the writing process.
