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I finished my thesis today and the title page must contain the starting-date and the finishing date of my work on the thesis. What is this time frame called? It should not only include the time I spent with the actual writing but also the time I spent preparing the thesis, so all time I spent working. All templates I received from university are in German, it's "Bearbeitungszeit" there.

I came up with the following possibilities

  • Work time: April 1, 2011 till May 21, 2011
  • Work duration: April 1, 2011 till May 21, 2011
  • Writing time: April 1, 2011 till May 21, 2011
  • Writing duration: April 1, 2011 till May 21, 2011

By the way: Is the date format correct for American English?

theomega
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    Nervous breakdown? Living hell? (Can you tell I finished my thesis quite recently?) – PLL May 21 '11 at 17:20
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    By the way, the title should be “What is the time you spend on a thesis called?”, now “How…”; see this question for explanation/discussion. – PLL May 21 '11 at 17:29
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    @theomega: Brevity is nearly always a virtue. Why call it anything at all? Just put the range itself on the title page, with a dash between the two dates. In US you could use 04/01/11 - 05/21/11, but UK and others use the dd/mm/yy format. To avoid confusion I'd go for 1 Apr 2011 - 21 May 2011 unless the recipient establishment has its own published standard format. – FumbleFingers May 21 '11 at 17:33
  • @PPL: We could do with a special button on EL&U to auto-generate the text of your post from relevant question titles! – FumbleFingers May 21 '11 at 17:36
  • What country university system is this for? In American universities, I don't think there is a required such field. For countries, you should either have a template, or see another submission to see how they write it in English. – Mitch May 21 '11 at 17:54
  • I used to use 'thesing' a lot. "Can't go out tonight...thesing..." – Alex Feinman Jun 07 '11 at 16:44
  • I would use to rather than till in that context. – TRiG Jul 03 '11 at 19:59
  • from April 1, 2011 to May 21, 2011. – GEdgar Aug 08 '11 at 20:55

3 Answers3

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The best literal translation I can find of "Bearbeitungszeit" is "processing time", which really sounds odd here. I think I would use "Thesis period:"

Your dates are correct for American English, but I would use "through" instead of "till", or perhaps an em dash.

So:

Thesis period: April 1, 2011 through May 21, 2011

or

Thesis period: April 1, 2011–May 21, 2011

psmears
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MT_Head
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  • ...and of course that comes out as an en dash instead of an em. Ah well. – MT_Head May 21 '11 at 17:37
  • I think maybe you might have meant it came out as a hyphen instead of an en dash? I've edited it to be an en dash, which looks better to me - but you can edit to an em dash if that works better for you... – psmears May 21 '11 at 17:41
  • @psmears - you're right; I should have either said "hyphen" or used the HTML character. – MT_Head May 21 '11 at 18:18
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I think the best way is:

       "Thesis writing duration: 1 April 2011 - 21 May 2011"

As I found something about the correct date format.

And The following date formats are not acceptable:

*31/8/2007

*31-8-2007

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I would go for Research timespan I guess.

Shouldn't you write April the 1st? or 1st of April? And of course : use until instead of till. I'm not sure till is in the dictionnary.

Edit

Got more precision see: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/till for usages.

M'vy
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