"The aim of this chapter is to act as the foundation for the overall dissertation"
This sentence is probably the worst sentence I have ever read, in all the years I have read the English language. Having read, written, and spoken some pure shite, I am delighted to say that the sentence at the start of this page is, without doubt, a disaster of pretentious, verbose, and inelegant English. If whoever originally wrote this sentence wants me to credit him, or her, with it, I will freely do so.
As a TEFL teacher of elementary school, middle school, and adult students in Korea, I have heard the English language suffer some mangling, but in the context in which it was written, the sentence I am discussing is atrocious. Written as part of a master's dissertation (I think), it was produced by a person who should know better, given the level to which he or she was educated.
Let's examine this sentence. All the words are spelled correctly, but in a master's dissertation, one should expect to find correctly spelt words. (As an aside, 'spelt' is correct English. I once got in to a huge argument with an American over this point, and researched the use of the word. 'Spelled' is high English in origin, while 'spelt' is derived from gutter English, that is the language as spoken by people who use double negatives, for instance. Oh, I'm such a pedantic freak!)
The sentence uses the normal subject, verb, object structure, and while this is grammatically correct, many people regard a varied structure as a sign of one's ability to speak at a high level. Still, this is but one sentence, and variety in the use of structure requires the production of many sentences. There is just one adjective, and only one piece of punctuation, so the sentence should not suffer from verbosity (usually caused by excess use of adjectives) or inconsistency in the components used. After all, in a sentence written in the simple present, with no clauses per se, and no pronouns, it's not hard to make the subject, object and verb agree. I know that 'this' is, technically, a pronoun by implication, so I will say that there are no explicit pronouns referring to an antecedent in another sentence. It's not hard to produce a good sentence of this type, yet whoever wrote the sentence under discussion really did mess up.
I said that adjectives are the culprits in as much as a sentence is verbose, and here the only adjective used in a perfect point in case. If the sentence was reworded to read 'The aim of this chapter is to act as the foundation for the dissertation', one would not believe that the chapter is the foundation for part of the research, as opposed to the entire work. Thus, the word 'overall' is verbose. Also, it's incorrectly used. The word 'overall' is a noun, referring to a one-piece suit worn by painters, decorators, factory workers, and people of that kind. It is not an adjective meaning 'in its entirety', 'total', 'all of this', or 'in summary'.
I think that using 'overall' in this manner is a symptom of pretentiousness and sophistry on the part of the writer. While trying to sound impressive, he or she has shown a snobbish streak that is, sadly, very common in academic writing. Other common signs of this pretentious holier-than-thou attitude are the overuse of the hyphen to produce words like 'non-normal' as opposed to abnormal, and the use of words such as personally, actually, and specifically. As Sir Ernst Gowers commented in The complete plain words, 'Personally, my actual opinion is that when people actually say personally, everything else they say is actually a personal lie' (paraphrased).
As Irish people say, such people need to fuck off and take a good long shit for themselves. Excuse the vulgarity. In fact, don't; I love being crude and vulgar.
Let's turn our attention to the start of the sentence I'm discussing: 'The aim of this chapter is to act as...'. Aim??? AIM??????? Fuck me pink, but I can go out on a Friday night with the 'aim' of getting laid, but it might not happen. A football player can aim a shot at the goal, but he might be off-target. The word 'aim' implies an intention without certainty of achievement, not a purpose, which would be a much better word in this context. In a dissertation, the writer should know what he or she did, so why is this writer implying that he or she is unsure as to whether the chapter does what it is supposed to? My opinion, founded on nothing other than my attitudes, is that people who use the word aim in place of purpose are unprofessional morons with the brain capacity of a fly one second after it has hit the front of a car.
Now look at the words 'to act as'. This part of the sentence is so deeply flawed that I can't see any justification for its existence. It adds another verb to the sentence, and creates an indirect object, by relegating the verb 'to be' to an auxiliary role, and applying the main verb 'to act as' to the noun 'foundation', rather than to the noun 'dissertation', which becomes an indirect object. There is no reason for this structure to be used. Also, the verb 'to act as' is utterly incorrect in this context.
The verb 'to act as' is a phrasal verb taken from dramatics, where it was originally a reference to an actor's ability to appear to be something he, or she, was not. That interpretation would change the meaning of the sentence in a very dramatic manner. Of course, the verb 'to act as' can also mean something like 'to serve the purpose of', as in 'Israel's security barrier acts as a deterrent to Arab terrorism'. Using the verb in that context is fine, except that the sentence already includes the word 'aim', which should be replaced with 'purpose', as I've already said.
I would reword 'The aim of this chapter is to act as the foundation for ...' as 'The purpose of this chapter is to be the foundation for ...', or even 'This chapter is the foundation for ...'. Rewording the sentence is such a way raises a few prickly issues, not the least of which is the use of the word foundation.
A foundation is a support for something that is distinct from whatever the foundation is supporting. A house has a foundation, which supports the weight of the house above it. The sentence I'm ripping to shreds is obviously using 'foundation' in this metaphorical context. The dissertation is 'supported' by the work done in this particular chapter. Really? This sentence was written at the start of a literature review, in which one examines existing work in an area of research. A review of the existing work allows one to add to that knowledge by doing new research. The author seems to think that the new research is founded in the literature review. It is, but the dissertation, in its entirety, rests on the research question, which is discussed in chapter one.
I'm not finished lambasting this sentence. 'Enough already', they cry. Well, not really. As anyone who reads this site will know, I tend to produce diatribes that are long, if nothing else.
The sentence is very hard to read. Read it out loud and see what I mean. It's hard to explain, but it sounds bland, boring, and awkward. 'The aim of this chapter is to act as the foundation for the overall dissertation.' For such a technically simple sentence, there are many problems, as I've already said. The last of these problems is that the sentence doesn't seem to say anything. I read it, and feel inclined to say 'So?'. The next sentence in the dissertation is going to have to pick up on some point in this one, and there is no point. It's just a sentence that seems to me to be a statement that sits there.
So, I'd reword 'The aim of this chapter is to act as the foundation for the overall dissertation' as 'This chapter reviews existing theory, which will be used to define the nature and scope of the research question'. In the context of what the sentence does, my version is far more helpful, and describes what is going on, rather than just making a bland, pretentious, statement.