This might be a silly question but why are theses so long (200+ pages)? Someone just told me that they finished their 213 pages-long bachelor’s thesis, but I‘m confused about who the audience would be. Who would spend so much time reading a 213 thesis of a bachelor student? Do people actually read them? What is the purpose of some theses being so long. Also, on a Masters level, does the long length not make important information inaccessible, because it‘s buried deep down in those hundreds of pages?
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Any thesis is serving two primary purposes: for the student to learn through the process of research and writing, and for their professors to evaluate whether they have shown adequate mastery of the knowledge and techniques of their field. Any audience beyond that very small readership is icing on the cake. In the case of a bachelor’s thesis, the expected number of future readers is 0. Nobody expects an undergraduate to produce genuinely new and interesting work (although once in a long while they may do so). In rare cases, a master’s thesis may be read by one other person (in my forthcoming academic book, out of hundreds of sources, one is a master’s thesis, the only extant prior work on a particular architect). A PhD dissertation is categorically different, and it’s reasonably common for them to be read by dozens, possibly hundreds, of other scholars. A dissertation is also functionally the first draft of a future professor’s first book, in book-based disciplines.
As for length, there could be different reasons, but apart from the obvious ones (the author needed that much space to make their arguments, or else they just got self-indulgent), you’re thinking about it the wrong way. The point of a thesis is not to present new facts that can be distilled into a few sentences, but to make an argument, often a complex one. That can require space. My dissertation was about 100,000 words, spread over six chapters, an intro, and a conclusion. That’s because it’s, as I said, a draft of a book.
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