The Blue Danube is a waltz. So is Once upon a Dream. Ode to Joy and Waltzing Matilda are not. The fact of being a waltz depends not on the composer or period or style of the music, but on its time-signature. This is an example of form.
Your dissertation may be about forecasting wheat prices, modelling electronic commerce, marketing teacups or motivation in the Bolivian Navy. The content will be very different for each of these, but the form will be largely the same. All will start with an abstract and table of contents. All will end with a list of references. And all will have sandwiched between them chapters describing the research work in some structured order. A good dissertation is not just about writing about your project, but writing about it in the required form. This does not mean that there is only one way to write about your project. But one of the skills you develop in your work is the ability to write in a prescribed form.
Fortunately, there is a great deal of flexibility in how you use the form (just as there is a great deal of flexibility in how you compose a waltz!). You can choose the order and structure of the chapters in many different ways. There is no best way to write the dissertation, though there are many bad ways. A good rule of thumb is that when you’ve got the structure right the dissertation will largely write itself.
The order of elements given below gives a typical structure for a dissertation and few will depart much from it. Some elements, like acknowledgements and appendices are optional. Others, like the title page, abstract and references are not.
The main body of the dissertation is flexible, but tends to follow an ordered structure. Typically, the first chapter introduce the work and provide a reader map: that is, explain to the reader what will be covered in each of the future chapters of the dissertation. Then the following chapters describe the research methodology and data collection. Then comes the analysis and conclusions.
As you write your dissertation, you should check any guidelines given to you for your programme or module. Just as there are different rules for driving in different countries, there are different rules for different dissertations and you ignore them at your peril.
Notice that the form of the dissertation actually makes much of the writing easier because it takes away from you many of the decisions you could make about the structure and presentation of your work. Nonetheless, you should plan carefully how you will structure the dissertation within that form. And your structure and presentation should reflect the purpose of the dissertation: to explain as clearly as possible to a peer the nature and content of your project.
Once you have chosen the structure of your dissertation, you want to make that structure plain to your readers. You also want to make the dissertation attractive to look at. It will help if your chapter and section headings all have the same font in the same size, shape and weight. You’ll also want all your paragraphs to look much the same. In other words, you’ll want to set the style of your document to make it more perspicuous to your reader. There are several elements of style to consider.
Check the guidelines for your dissertation when choosing these.