The College organised an online lecture on the Dissertation Guidance in order to strengthen the supervision of graduating students’ dissertation writing on the afternoon of 6 March, 2021.
The lecture was given by Zhu Mingzhe, an associate professor and supervisor to doctorate students of the College, with the active participation of graduating students of the year and students from other entering year.
Zhu Mingzhe first emphasized the importance of writing attitude. As a reviewer of paper and judge of thesis defense, he pointed out that time has to be invested in the writing of dissertation and this effort should be presented in the paper effectively. Next, Zhu gives a detailed explanation in common problems in dissertation writing, research methods, paths of legal research, good examples and writing experiences.
According to Zhu, first of all, there are three common form problems and three bad writing styles. The form problems include punctuation errors, punctuation formatting errors, and the confusing use of Chinese and western fonts. In the style of writing, he suggested that students reduce the use of clauses to avoid passive sentences and too much usage of the word "nature".
Zhu then gave a detailed introduction to the three methods of norm comparison, function comparison and culture comparison, which are most closely related to student's writing of dissertation at the College.
After that, he introduced two different approaches to writing, namely, dogmatic interpretation and phenomenological reflection, and explained in depth the commonly used dogmatic interpretation approaches, focusing on the method of system construction. He pointed out that the vertical construction is to achieve coherence within the rules through interpretation, and that the horizontal construction is to integrate different sources of norms.
Finally, Zhu showed the students several high-quality papers, thus illustrating the importance of academic norms. He stressed that during the writing process students should use more authoritative references, attach importance on legislative texts, judicial precedents and doctrine, and ensure the format of notes is standard.
During the Q&A session, the students actively raised their questions. Student Gao Yifan, the first student to speak, asked a question about the writing method of the abstract. Zhu then talked about how to write the title, abstract, introduction, and conclusion of a dissertation. Zhang Jiachen put forward an issue that it is difficult for his thesis to fully show the characteristics of law and comparison. Zhu used the research path mentioned in the lecture to sort out ideas for Zhang's dissertation.
The two-hour online lecture was well received by the students. The lecture was rich and practical in content. Zhu Mingzhe specifically helped to solve the students’ writing problems, providing them with timely and effective guidance during the critical period of dissertation writing.
