Recently I have spent a lot of time looking over and reviewing thesis drafts that students will submit in January. Today I was giving some advice to a student that I wanted to save here for later.
I was telling this student about the idea of "Leitmotifs".
In music, Leitmotif is a small melodie that is repeated, with variations, over the length of the song. If there is a song that you like, but you can only hum a small, easily recognizable part of it, chances are that the thing you are humming is the leitmotif of the song. They are specially easy to find and recognize in older classical pieces.
So, as music has a leitmotif that is a repeated, recognizable part of it, a thesis should have the same. The leitmotif of a thesis is a core idea that is present throught the text in different ways, is easily recognizable and memorable. In short, it is the "message" of the thesis(1). If you can recognize what this "research leitmotif" of your thesis is, and use it well, your text will become easier to read, and more memorable.
This discussion came in the context of me suggesting the student to repeat some information from the experimentation chapter of his thesis into the introduction chapter. The student protested that he didn't want to repeat the text from the later chapter, and I used this metaphor to explain why it was not bad to repeat ideas in this kind of text.
There are other metaphors that I use often when giving writing advice, such as "A scientific text should start with the spoilers!", but that is a story to be told another time.
- PS (1): At this point, I started to consider if the "research leitmotif" that I was thinking of was not simply the "Thesis/Hypothesis/Scientific Question". But I am not sure this is the case, I think it is something related, but a bit different. I feel that this "leitmotif" is a more vague "direction of thought", a subjective thought pattern that can be expressed in different ways, as opposed to the more clear and objective Thesis. But I could be wrong.