Pages

Monday 26 September 2011

General Steps for Formatting a Dissertation

A dissertation project, or treatise or also known as thesis could be written by undergraduate degree students or by master's degree students. But the basic or general steps or guidelines in formatting the treatise would still be the same regardless if the student is taking up a bachelor's degree or a master's degree. The formatting of dissertations would be based on the style guide or style manual that is specified by the lecturer or the supervisor of the project. The style guide is the written set of standards to follow for the design and writing of academic documents, including dissertations.

For example, a particular style manual could have the specific dissertation formatting guidelines for the paper of the document. The guidelines would include the type of paper such as an A4 paper, using double-sided printing for the soft-bound or hard-bound documents of the dissertations, font size of 11 to 12 for the text and 10 for the footnotes, and font type of Arial or New Times Roman. The other technical aspects for the formatting of the document would include the typing font and font size, in-text citations, quotations, referencing, listing of sources and the details of sources, the margins of the paper, and the style of presentation of figures, tables, graphs, images and other visuals.



An example of the format of the listing of sources would be the information that should be included in the list. The information should include: the title of the book, case study, article, research report; name of the author; date of access and publication; and name of the publishing company, institution or organisation.

However, there are several dissertation format guidelines that are the same and applicable for the students regardless of their courses and the style manuals they would use for the dissertations. The common or general formatting guidelines would involve the structure of the dissertation. Regardless of the specific degrees of the students and the specified style guides they would use, the formatting of the structure consists of: the abstract; table of contents; introduction; literature review; methodology; analysis of data; discussion of results or findings; conclusion; bibliography; citation section or references; and appendices.

No comments:

Post a Comment