My supervisors have advised me to be more bold in my thesis. Where I was using non-committal phrases such as: "This chapter will document..." I am supposed to be more specific and say it will "analyse" or "reflect" etc. However, I've run out of descriptive words and I'm probably relying on trusty old "analyse" a bit too much... any suggestions?

how about suggest, consider, note, reflect upon, contrast, reveal... I often run out of things like this, so I just put down whatever seems to be the one sticking in my brain whilst I'm in full flow, and then alter it later :$.

"explore" is my favourite,
but that might just be because I'm a geographer and so an adventurer at heart....

Hi Betty maybe this might be of some help... somebody posted this link here about a year ago or possibly more! It is a "phrasebank" of academic phrases... so there might be more alternatives you could use in there!

http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/

I find the thesaurus in MS Word is fine for eliminating repetition. As long as it's not tedious to read and the meaning's right, and realistically, how many variations are there when you're discussing the same thing for an 80,000 word thesis...

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Yep, it's true Ruby... there's only so many alternatives. I live by the Word thesaurus and the "define:" function in Google. It sometimes comes up with some weird but useful definitions that include alternative words.

Thanks for the link Rosy - it looks really useful and I'll be sure to have a proper look when I'm not pulling a pre-deadline all-nighter *sigh*

Thanks also to the others for your suggestions.

Loving the phrase bank!

'Interrogate' always sounds pretty gutsy - also 'consider' 'examine' 'explore'. I'm going to check out that phrasebank!

Interrogate is my favourite!