1. Hedging language gone wild

Humility in thesis writing is appropriate; verbal paralysis is not. Phrases like “it could perhaps be argued that it might possibly suggest” pile on the qualifications until the writer appears to have no actual position or is merely fudging the issue.

Fix it: Good hedging is precise—for example, “the data suggest” rather than “the data prove”.

 

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3. Overuse of the passive voice

Irish thesis writing culture has long favoured the passive voice as a marker of scholarly objectivity. The result is prose so distanced from its own findings that it becomes unreadable. Phrases like “it was found that” and “data were collected by the researcher” drain energy and conviction from arguments that deserve to be made clearly and directly. While the passive is appropriate in the Methodology section of your thesis, it should never dominate an entire chapter.

Switching between APA, Harvard, and Chicago within the same project is far more common in thesis writing than you might expect. Inconsistencies also appear in punctuation, the treatment of page numbers, and how academic texts are cited. Irish universities typically specify a house style, but students often pull references from different sources and fail to standardise them before submitting their work.

A literature review that drifts between present and past tense – sometimes within the same paragraph – signals a lack of thesis-writing focus and editorial control. The convention is straightforward: use the present tense to discuss what scholars argue and the past tense to describe what your study found.

Complex academic ideas often encourage writers to keep adding clauses when writing a thesis. The result is sentences that run far beyond the reader’s ability to track them. Comma splices — joining two independent clauses with only a comma — are particularly frequent in Irish postgraduate theses and are rarely caught by spell-checkers.

One of the most common mistakes I encounter in Irish thesis writing is the misuse of reporting verbs. A sentence like “Smith (2021) acknowledges that cognitive behavioural therapy is not the only treatment for depression” wrongly implies that Smith was admitting something when the writer simply meant that Smith noted or stated it. Choosing the right verb matters far more than most students realise.

A term introduced as “cognitive load theory” in Chapter Two that later reappears throughout the thesis as other terms, such as “CLT”, then “cognitive load”, then simply “the theory”, creates unnecessary confusion due to its sheer inconsistency. Abbreviations should be defined once on first use and then applied consistently. The same concept should use the same name throughout the entire document.

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Never start a sentence with the word “This” without specifying what you are referring to. When you use a pronoun without an antecedent, the reader is left guessing.

The Irish have a conversational habit of speaking in the conditional tense where the indicative is required. This habit frequently creeps into thesis writing. “The data would suggest…” or “It would appear that…” are weaker than “The data suggest…” and “It appears that…” Write what is, not what would be.