Can you summarise each page in your thesis in ten words or less?
You have plenty of white space at the top of each page, so you can if you want to. It wouldn’t take long, assuming you’d read your thesis since submission, and were generally familiar with it. A minute to think and capture the flow of your research.
300+ words, maybe tables, a diagram, ideas, all compressed into a few words to help you when you return to the page again in your prep or the viva.
Taken together, all of these words would create a director’s commentary for your thesis. A DVD extra for your research. You help yourself when you write the commentary – reflecting, thinking – and help yourself later when you come back to it. A little helpful commentary for you.
There’s plenty of white space at the bottom of each page too. If the top of the page summarises the flow of your work, maybe there’s something useful you could put at the bottom as well. Highlight a key reference? An idea that’s important? What you think of it all?
You don’t have to fill the margins of every page to prepare well for the viva, but a little thought and a few words can be really helpful.
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[…] I need to re-read the thesis as part of reacquainting myself with what I wrote over the course of a year. But rather than a passive,bland exercise, I’ll firstly be checking for and noting any remaining errors which might have escaped the proof-reading. Different sources of advice recommend making summary notes as you go along, for example using the white space at the top of each page to add a ten-ish word summary of the contents. […]