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It may be that some students just don't want to do the thesis, and nothing you can do will help them write a better thesis. However, as an optimist, I have to believe that if there are such students, they occur at a rate far below 10%.

Another "off the wall" idea could be to have students read and critique chapters of each others' thesis. I took a course in grad school where everyone was a reviewer of everyone else's paper. This could create some positive peer pressure to create a good version of the draft. And, making someone give feedback on someone else's work, can make them think about what someone is looking for in their work.

It may be that some students just don't want to do the thesis, and nothing you can do will help them write a better thesis. However, as an optimist, I have to believe that if there are such students, they occur at a rate far below 10%.

• It's tempting to focus on major issues first and then move onto "easier" issues later, whereas at least I've found as I've gotten more experienced that it's actually better to fix the easy things first.
• A lot of work at the undergraduate and masters level is "personal", in that it only really affects the student (you are responsible for your own grade, for example). At higher levels, work is more collaborative. So, they may not be fully considering that by turning in messy work, they may only be thinking about how this affects their grade, and not thinking about how they are creating more work for you, or that this piece of work is meant to be read by someone and communicate information. I realize that might sound silly, but I think there is a mindset shift that has to occur in at least some students between "I am turning this paper in for a grade" and "I am writing this paper because I want to communicate ideas to others."
• Students have probably never written a document of the scale of a thesis before, nor one that will be read as carefully. Perhaps they have bad habits from skating by in courses with writing assignments. (Even talented students can develop poor writing habits that "work" for some courses but eventually do not). It is always difficult to change bad habits, and now they are in a relatively high-pressure situation to produce a thesis, which can only make it more difficult to change those habits.
• In computer programming, there is an idea called technical debt. If a programmer chooses an easy and fast, but ad hoc solution, they accrue some "technical debt" that must be repaid in the sense that eventually that code should be rewritten in a logical and coherent way. Eventually, if one waits too long to pay off the debt, the code becomes a disjointed mess that is difficult to maintain and costly to convert into something more streamlined. A student (especially one who wants to minimize the amount of time because of burnout or lack of motivation) may feel that the most important thing is to produce text, and accrue some "writing debt" by saying that they will fix "trivial" issues like typos and references later. They don't realize that this writing debt can quickly build into a lot of work -- for them, and for you. Perhaps they even intended to fix typos, but produced a lot of text accruing a lot of writing debt, that they did not have time to pay off before the deadline.

In terms of how to produce better behavior, as always there are "carrot" and "stick" options. The "stick" options are probably more obvious, and include things like

• It's tempting to focus on major issues first and then move onto "easier" issues later, whereas at least I've found as I've gotten more experienced that it's actually better to fix the easy things first.
• A lot of work at the undergraduate and masters level is "personal", in that it only really affects the student (you are responsible for your own grade, for example). At higher levels, work is more collaborative. So, when they turn in messy work, they may only be thinking about how this affects their grade, and not thinking about how they are creating more work for you, or that this piece of work is meant to be read by someone and communicate information. I realize that might sound silly, but I think there is a mindset shift that has to occur in at least some students between "I am turning this paper in for a grade" and "I am writing this paper because I want to communicate ideas to others."
• Students have probably never written a document of the scale of a thesis before, nor one that will be read as carefully. Perhaps they have bad habits from skating by in courses with writing assignments. (Even talented students can develop poor writing habits that "work" for some courses but eventually do not). It is always difficult to change bad habits, and now they are in a relatively high-pressure situation to produce a thesis, which can only make it more difficult to change those habits.
• In computer programming, there is an idea called technical debt. If a programmer chooses an easy and fast, but ad hoc solution, they accrue some "technical debt" that must be repaid in the sense that eventually that code should be rewritten in a logical and coherent way. Eventually, if one waits too long to pay off the debt, the code becomes a disjointed mess that is difficult to maintain and costly to convert into something more streamlined. A student (especially one who wants to minimize the amount of time because of burnout or lack of motivation) may feel that the most important thing is to produce text, and accrue some "writing debt" by saying that they will fix "trivial" issues like typos and references later. They don't realize that this writing debt can quickly build into a lot of work -- for them, and for you. Perhaps they even intended to fix typos, but produced a lot of text accruing a lot of writing debt, that they did not have time to pay off before the deadline.

In terms of how to produce better behavior, as always there are "carrot" and "stick" options. The "stick" options are probably more obvious (but also likely to increase anxiety, which could be a factor, as another answerer pointed out), and include things like

• A lot of work at the undergraduate and masters level is "personal", in that it only really affects the student (you are responsible for your own grade, for example). At higher levels, work is more collaborative. So, they may not be fully considering that by turning in messy work, they may only be thinking about how this affects their grade, and not thinking about how they are creating more work for you, or that this piece of work is meant to be read by someone and communicate information. I realize that might sound silly, but I think there is a mindset shift that has to occur in at least some students between "I am turning this paper in for a grade" and "I am writing this paper because I want to communicate ideas to others."
• Students have probably never written a document of the scale of a thesis before, nor one that will be read as carefully. Perhaps they have bad habits from skating by in courses with writing assignments. (Even talented students can develop poor writing habits that "work" for some courses but eventually do not). It is always difficult to change bad habits, and now they are in a relatively high-pressure situation to produce a thesis, which can only make it more difficult to change those habits.
• In computer programming, there is an idea called technical debt. If a programmer chooses an easy and fast, but ad hoc solution, they accrue some "technical debt" that must be repaid in the sense that eventually that code should be rewritten in a logical and coherent way. Eventually, if one waits too long to pay off the debt, the code becomes a disjointed mess that is difficult to maintain and costly to convert into something more streamlined. A student (especially one who wants to minimize the amount of time because of burnout or lack of motivation) may feel that the most important thing is to produce text, and accrue some "writing debt" by saying that they will fix "trivial" issues like typos and references later. They don't realize that this writing debt can quickly build into a lot of work -- for them, and for you. Perhaps they even intended to fix typos, but produced a lot of text accruing a lot of writing debt, that they did not have time to pay off before the deadline.

The "carrot" options (which probably require more work on your part to be creative and to implement, and thus might not be practical) might be things like

It may be that some students just don't want to do the thesis, and nothing you can do will help them write a better thesis. However, an optimist, I have to believe that if there are such students, they occur at a rate far below 10%.

• It's tempting to focus on major issues first and then move onto "easier" issues later, whereas at least I've found as I've gotten more experienced that it's actually better to fix the easy things first.
• A lot of work at the undergraduate and masters level is "personal", in that it only really affects the student (you are responsible for your own grade, for example). At higher levels, work is more collaborative. So, they may not be fully considering that by turning in messy work, they may only be thinking about how this affects their grade, and not thinking about how they are creating more work for you, or that this piece of work is meant to be read by someone and communicate information. I realize that might sound silly, but I think there is a mindset shift that has to occur in at least some students between "I am turning this paper in for a grade" and "I am writing this paper because I want to communicate ideas to others."
• Students have probably never written a document of the scale of a thesis before, nor one that will be read as carefully. Perhaps they have bad habits from skating by in courses with writing assignments. (Even talented students can develop poor writing habits that "work" for some courses but eventually do not). It is always difficult to change bad habits, and now they are in a relatively high-pressure situation to produce a thesis, which can only make it more difficult to change those habits.
• In computer programming, there is an idea called technical debt. If a programmer chooses an easy and fast, but ad hoc solution, they accrue some "technical debt" that must be repaid in the sense that eventually that code should be rewritten in a logical and coherent way. Eventually, if one waits too long to pay off the debt, the code becomes a disjointed mess that is difficult to maintain and costly to convert into something more streamlined. A student (especially one who wants to minimize the amount of time because of burnout or lack of motivation) may feel that the most important thing is to produce text, and accrue some "writing debt" by saying that they will fix "trivial" issues like typos and references later. They don't realize that this writing debt can quickly build into a lot of work -- for them, and for you. Perhaps they even intended to fix typos, but produced a lot of text accruing a lot of writing debt, that they did not have time to pay off before the deadline.

The "carrot" options (which probably require more work on your part to be creative and to implement, and thus might not be practical, and might also be considered unnecessary coddling by some people) might be things like

It may be that some students just don't want to do the thesis, and nothing you can do will help them write a better thesis. However, as an optimist, I have to believe that if there are such students, they occur at a rate far below 10%.