Writing an MA thesis is in some ways more demanding than writing an RA, by virtue of the fact that it is longer. Experienced writers will know that having more space to deliver some message does have its benefits, nevertheless, with more space, the difficulty of signposting, that is, keeping the reader informed about where the discussion is headed becomes more cumbersome. Familiarity with RAs does not help the novice writer in this respect. RAs contain fewer sections than MA theses; the phrases used to point to the co-text will cause no interpretative difficulty (e.g., this section, the previous / next / following section: altogether 44 instances in the RA corpus). In MA theses novice writers tend to refer to sections as chapter (50 instances), part (23), section (207), subsection (3) with similar modifiers to what RA writers use. Often, due to the length of the text, in MA theses, these modifiers are not specific enough to determine what the referred text part is (whether the next part means the next section or several of the sections, for example). LTH4 shows an attempt to orient the reader. The six successive sentences from the introduction of the thesis seem to add more confusion than guidance to the text (only sentence extracts are shown to illustrate this point):

 

More successful thesis writers clarified the text part referred to by either providing the section title (e.g., in the Review of the literature section) or by indicating the number of the section (either without the definite article in section 6.1, or in brackets: in the next section (3.1) – of course, these latter instances did not appear in the RCA table, because they are not cohesive).