Capstone Writing: Tips & Tricks

[rachel83az]

On a whim, I picked up the book How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco. Despite the name, it's definitely geared toward the kind of writing that one has to do as a capstone project at one of the Big 3 and not toward a doctoral thesis. It's also aimed at students who haven't had to do any serious academic writing before. I haven't finished it yet, but it seems super helpful in spite of its age. Though, I'm not sure how helpful it is for students who have a Business capstone. 

What's your favorite resource for capstone writing?

[quigongene]

What's your favorite resource for capstone writing?

The rubric :-D

[rachel83az]

The rubric is good, but it doesn't really tell you how to choose what to write about!

[studyingfortests]

The recommended textbook for the TESU capstone class is a decent text, but honestly, I didn't find a whole lot in it that I didn't already know. I think it's geared for folks who haven't done a lot of academic writing, so if one is entering into the capstone without much familiarity with the style, structure, and formatting of academic writing, it seems like an excellent reference.

I didn't actually read it very much during the semester, and when I did have a question, I found that it often didn't have enough detail to really be of enough help.

I agree that the rubric, at least the one that TESU uses, is a good overall guideline, provided that you know what constitutes the sort of writing they are after.

And in my case, my mentor (Dr. Black) was absolutely amazing. Incredibly generous with his time; he encouraged everyone to call him for help with anything and I took him up on that, probably called him every week or two, and each time he spent 10-30 minutes with me. The feedback that came back with grading of each section was very detailed and really helped make me a better writer. Additionally, he was pretty much without ego; when he commented about frequency of citations of the same work within a paragraph citations and suggested more citation, I responded and said that I was having difficulty because I'd gone back to the actual APA manual. His response was that he tended to be overly conservative, and I might be correct... and that he and I were probably among the only people on the planet that actually read the APA guidebook for the sake of reading it, not as a citation reference.

As far as choosing what to write about, my advice is to choose something you already have some knowledge about, but want to dive deeper into, and something for which there's plenty of good references to choose from. My topic had, literally, thousands of references to choose from, most of which were high quality studies, making it easy to choose. Also, if you have a good mentor, they'll help you refine the topic so it isn't overly broad. 25 pages really isn't all that much to get into depth about most topics.

[sarahmac]

On a whim, I picked up the book How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco. Despite the name, it's definitely geared toward the kind of writing that one has to do as a capstone project at one of the Big 3 and not toward a doctoral thesis. It's also aimed at students who haven't had to do any serious academic writing before. I haven't finished it yet, but it seems super helpful in spite of its age. Though, I'm not sure how helpful it is for students who have a Business capstone. 

What's your favorite resource for capstone writing?

"Despite the name, it's definitely geared toward the kind of writing that one has to do as a capstone project at one of the Big 3 and not toward a doctoral thesis."

Umberto Eco was Italian, in much of Europe you have to write a thesis at the bachelor level and master's level as well as the doctoral level. This is why. I had never heard of a 'capstone' before interacting with American's, other than in the context of a capstone project for engineering students.

If you would like to find more guides, aides, advice on choosing a topic etc., search Google for "bachelor thesis topic advice" or "bachelor thesis advice [field of study]" etc. Its mandatory to write a thesis to recieve a degree where I am at, so there are thousands of resources available to help students narrow the scope of their topic, find a question to focus on, resource guides etc.

[bjcheung77]

Cool! I would recommend skimming through the required textbook for the areas that you know and understand, but for areas that are still a little hard to grasp, take your time... learning something you want and retaining that information is part of the plan. I would stick to the rubic and required texts, you can add to that with whatever resources you want to read/review.

[rachel83az]

"Despite the name, it's definitely geared toward the kind of writing that one has to do as a capstone project at one of the Big 3 and not toward a doctoral thesis."

Umberto Eco was Italian, in much of Europe you have to write a thesis at the bachelor level and master's level as well as the doctoral level. This is why. I had never heard of a 'capstone' before interacting with American's, other than in the context of a capstone project for engineering students.

If you would like to find more  guides, aides, advice on choosing a topic etc., search Google for "bachelor thesis topic advice" or "bachelor thesis advice [field of study]" etc. Its mandatory to write a thesis to recieve a degree where I am at, so there are thousands of resources available to help students narrow the scope of their topic, find a question to focus on, resource guides etc.

Yep, the book is mostly aimed at writing a tesi di laurea. This was, at the time of first publication, for the only level of degree that Italian universities offered. (Now considered a Master's degree, AFAIK.) In particular, the book is about writing a tesi di laurea for humanities students. He calls it a "literature review" (at least, the translation does) and the description is pretty much identical to TESU's capstone paper and the capstones required for Excelsior and COSC. 

The whole idea of writing a "thesis" for a 4-year degree is foreign to me. I vaguely maybe remember hearing about it being a thing in other countries, but I don't think I heard of it as an American thing until TESU introduced their capstone requirement a couple of years ago.

[P226mem]

Took TESU LIB 495 in 2021.
My tips/tricks for capstone: the textbook had an early chapter with helps on how to develop a question for research with some structure in how to phrase the question. Found that helpful in the first week especially in discussion board where others were struggling. This kind of writing was new to me.

Next, read the "recommended readings" in each module. I'm guessing those recommendations are standard across the course with all mentors (instructors). Those recommended readings often went to websites with samples to glean information and model structure. I also just put in search engine "samples of literature review" to look at various writing centers in other universities to get an idea of what was expected when the recommended readings, or the samples in the textbook just didn't seem like enough (but were). The literature review was the biggest part of the capstone paper.

In LIB 495 Capstone, each module had a section to write that was the draft for the final capstone. Those sections had multiple questions to guide. If you struggle about what to write, look at the assignment and see that as "answer in multiple complete sentences each one of those questions and put into paragraphs".

Final tip? work with your mentor: ask questions. ask for samples (some do, some don't. when they don't, really look at the assignment and think about answering each and every part as if it says "write 3 paragraphs to answer that not-so-rhetorical question in the assignment, then write 3 more paragraphs on the next phrase in the assignment" (that should make more sense as one sees the modules).

By the end of the capstone, I felt like it was going "meta" on itself and repeating things but in different ways. In the days just before the course opened, I still did not have an exact idea what to research or write about. Just a vague notion of what were problems and solutions to common issue in a specific area of work I was interested in.

[LevelUP]

P226mem's advice is on point.

I had a similar experience as P226mem.  I didn't know what I was doing when I started the Liberal Arts capstone, and the book they gave you didn't spell out the instructions of what to do step by step.

At first, I thought I was doing great on the capstone.  I had turned in my first assignment and did the first post.  At the same time, I was working on the hardest of the CS  Study.com courses.  Then I got a C on my first paper, didn't get 100% on my forum post (not sure why), and realized my thesis was a mess.

With less than a week before assignment 2 was due, I reached out to the professor, and we had some long conversations on the phone.  I ended up completely changing my thesis to a new topic.

I had trouble with the assignments and the powerpoint presentation when they asked you to describe your topic and how you came to a conclusion.  Those were all great questions I wanted to know the answers to as well because at the time, other than my outline, I had not written one word about my topic, lol. 

In the end, by some miracle, I still ended up with an A in the course.  (This is a story about a girl named lucky)

[Asylum7830]

I'm taking the capstone now and someone asked to see the syllabus for the class. This is a link to the syllabus in case anyone else is interested.

Capstone Syllabus https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Awb4...sp=sharing