Category: Formatting

These tips are geared toward technical and planning aspects of the dissertation process that can make your life easier by the time you’re getting ready to submit.

These are things I wish I knew—or did more consistently—when I was in the process of writing my dissertation.   

1. Look at example dissertations

• Download previously published dissertations from your department. You can usually find them on the university library website, the graduate studies website, or a dedicated university research repository website.
• Take a look at a few examples and look for things like, How are they formatted? Where do they insert their figures? Do the ones with epilogues look interesting or would a proper conclusion suit your work better? What are their abstracts like? Who do they thank in their acknowledgements? 

2. Consult the thesis formatting guidelines

• It’s never too early to look at your university’s thesis formatting guidelines. What are your options when it comes to fonts and sizing? How should block quotes be indented? Should they be single- or double-spaced?
• It can be a headache to go through and convert all the formatting at the end of the writing process, so it’s helpful to keep formatting in mind as you write.
• Along these lines, pay attention to what happens to your formatting when you cut and paste content from other files or sources; the formatting is often imported along with the content. I’ve seen cases where line spacing or paragraph indents had to be checked and fixed paragraph-by-paragraph throughout the entire dissertation because, of course, if your block quotes are formatted differently than the rest of the document, you can’t simply select-all and apply a change to the entire document.
• If you have an eye to formatting as you go, you’ll be smooth sailing at the finish line. 

3. Wrangle your long-form manuscript

• Authors often use separate files to write their chapters. A benefit of using a single, long-form document is that you can more easily cut and paste and rearrange passages from one chapter to another. 
• But it can be unwieldy to work with a long document if you’re not taking advantage of Word’s navigation pane—which allows you to create a clickable table of contents.
• To learn how to create a long-form document that’s easy to navigate, click HERE. 
• Make use of the “find” function to move around your document by searching keywords.

4. Organize your research

• Fact: citations are frustrating. Reduce your pain by recording the full citation information of all your sources as you conduct your research, and by citing your sources as you write.
• If you find yourself missing information from your citations, use google books, google scholar, or perplexity to find the missing parts. To find a page number, put a passage word-for-word in quotation marks into google.
• When it comes to formatting your footnotes and bibliographic entries, the writing lab at Purdue University is an excellent resource.
• When you’re researching in an archive, don’t forget to record the archive box and file numbers and titles. If you’re using your phone to take photos of archival items (with the archive’s permission of course), then also snap a photo of the file and the box information.
• Use a scanning app on your phone to quickly create a PDFs.
• And maintain a file naming convention for your PDF sources, as well as when you’re versioning your work. Your future self will thank your present one!

5. Keep the juices flowing

• Writing is like a muscle. Many find it productive to keep that muscle strong by writing something—anything—every day.
• Some write journal entries each day that may or may not have anything to do with their research, as per Joan Bolker’s wonderful advice.
• Others keep a running file of their brainstorming. When I was writing my dissertation, I would often find myself sitting in front of my computer, thinking and thinking, trying to figure out what I wanted to say before I wrote it down. What I discovered was that it is much easier to figure out what I want to say when I free-write the thinking part. My free-writing might have sounded something like: “I don’t think this is an argument. Ok so then what would make it an argument? What if I connect this bit with the section in chapter 2…how would that change things?”
• Both techniques take away the pressure to produce usable writing, and in the process, often end up producing usable writing!

If you have questions or wish there were a blog post that illuminated some other aspect of dissertation preparation, please let me know!