After seeing “lolmythesis.com” come through my Twitter feed twice in one day, I knew this was a site I had to check out.  The website is very simple, “summing up years of work in one sentence.”  The About page states that the site was started by an undergraduate student looking for a way to distract herself from her own thesis.  The site contains a collection of one-sentence summaries from undergraduate and graduate-level theses – and some are pretty good!  Take, for example, this contribution (below) and other posts that list the discipline as geology:

And there are plenty of other submissions posted on the Lol My Thesis website.  Clearly, the site is popular with all that are completing or have completed a thesis – since the site started in early December (the first tweet is dated December 10), there are 662 tweets of one-sentence thesis summaries and over 450 followers on the @lolmythesis Twitter account (as of 12/28/13).

The site reminds me of the Up-Goer Five text editor on which I did a past blog post.  Using non-jargon terms to communicate the purpose of research is another fun way to “boil down” the essence of your work and to keep it simple.  But although students and professionals have fun with these sites, there is still nothing like a well-written title and abstract to communicate one’s work (in my opinion!).

And yet, I can’t help myself…. I will now go to Lol My Thesis and submit a one-sentence summary of my dissertation!