For many people a Thesis will often be the longest document they have ever produced
It will include many of the features normally associated with a book...
...and so the approach you will need must of necessity draw from best practices in this sphere
Most of the time you’re working on your thesis, it will be a collection of resources -
- separate chapters, successive versions...
...and perhaps images, diagrams or materials for an appendix
This means that organisation is very important...
...and we’d recommend that you create a folder that will contain all your material...
...organised into further sub-folders as appropriate
There’s no ‘right way’ to do this
Some users may need to include large numbers of illustrations...
...so an image folder per chapter might be a useful idea
The other tip is to use helpful file names
And although PCs and Macs are more forgiving than they used to be...
...to avoid any possibility of confusion I wouldn’t include full stops or slashes in the names
The University Thesis guidelines include some fairly detailed descriptions of requirements
The most effective way of ensuring all your chapters adhere to these and are consistent...
...is to create a template as a starting point for each chapter
The template needs to have the pages configured correctly -
- things like Paper size, Margins and page numbers
A thesis can be printed on one or both sides of the paper...
...but double-sided printing requires a different page setup to keep margins correct
Unless your thesis is too thick for binding, it’s simpler to stick to single-sided printing
To make the best use of the features in Word, you also need to work with styles
These help control the appearance of text but, more importantly...
...they provide Word with information on the structure of your content
If you don’t use styles, you will not be able to generate a table of contents, number chapters or headings automatically...
...and consistency will be harder to achieve
It’s important to make one thing very clear, however
You cannot take a document that has been developed using direct formatting and ‘apply’ a template or styles...
...as Word will have no way of ‘understanding’ the structure of your content
Ideally, you should prepare and use a template when you start writing...
...or many of the time-saving features will not be available to you
The next section will show how to develop the page layout and styles for the template...
...and how to use these when writing
