The thesis outline is basically the very rough first draft of your thesis. The goal is for you to formalize your plan and set it down somewhere concrete. Before you dive in, make sure that you have read through the guidelines and the writing advice first.

Please start with the latex template. Fill in the various variables to set up the title, your name, the date, etc...

You should then sketch out your thesis. You will find that it already has a bit of an outline in it. You are welcome to follow this basic structure, or deviate where appropriate. One of the writing guides suggests, for example, not leading off with a big block of prior work. Sometimes it makes sense for you to talk about what you did, and then compare it to the related work in your discussion. The important thing is that you should tell the reader a story that tells them what you did, why you did, how it fits into other work, and why what you did was important or interesting. The ordering needs to lead the user towards understanding.

While I describe this as a narrative, it is not a novel. Foreshadowing and twists are not literary tools that you should use. Long ago, I was taught a formula that essentially goes: tell me what you are going to tell me, tell me, tell me what you told me. This goes for the paragraph level, the section level, and the thesis level. You don't need to adhere to this obsessively, but keep it in the back of your mind as you write.

What I expect

Bear in mind how I suggested you skim papers. Your thesis should support this. That means that someone just reading the section headings should be able to get a pretty good idea what your thesis is about and how you did it. This is what I would like to see in your outline. I don't want to just see the major sections: Introduction, Related Work, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion. You could have done that on the first day without a topic idea. Get into sub-sections and sub-sub-sections. Be explicit. In each little section, write a short summary of what a reader should expect to find in the section. In the introduction, you can use some text from your proposal to fill it in. For your related work, use what you know from the literature to break it down. Name names. Someone reading your outline should be able to get a good sense of what your thesis is about and what specifically you are doing. (I'll be using these to recruit extra readers, so this isn't an idle exercise).

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