As part of the corrections process, the examiners will provide you with a report that details the corrections you are expected to make. This report can be lengthy, so it’s worth considering how you’ll tackle the process of incorporating its suggestions. First, make sure that you’re working with a new copy of your thesis: rather than editing the same version of the thesis that you submitted, create a copy of it, name it something along the lines of ‘Corrections’, and work with that. This will allow you to make comparisons between the ‘corrected’ thesis and the original; since making amendments often causes page numbers to change, keeping a copy of the original will also allow you to refer back to specific points in the examiners’ report according to the original numbering system.
You’ll also need to decide how to indicate – to yourself and to the examiners – that you’ve addressed each individual recommendation. One strategy is to copy the elements of the examiners’ report into an Excel spreadsheet, and check each one off as you address it, as shown in the following example:
In the image above, which shows a small fraction of one such spreadsheet, each individual comment has been copied onto a different line, and classified either as ‘minor amendment’ (‘MA’, meaning a change that needed to be made in order for the thesis to pass) or as ‘comment’ (‘C’, meaning that it was more of a long-term suggestion). Generally, ‘comments’ (as opposed to ‘minor corrections’) have been ignored, unless they were easily fixable; I have also taken care to acknowledge how each change has been made (in the ‘details’ column). Click here to download a (very basic!) template for a similar Excel file, which you can modify as you see fit.
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