Research Guides: Thesis and Dissertation Formatting in MS Word: General Formatting Guidance

Introduction to This Guide

This guide is a work in progress, designed to provide online assistance to graduate students in formatting their theses and dissertations using Microsoft Word. If there is content you would like to see added to this guide, contact Krista White, the Digital Humanities Librarian at RU-Newark.

Rutgers Electronic Theses and Dissertations (RUetd) Submission

Information for submitting and uploading your finished thesis or dissertation to the Rutgers University Community Repository

Rutgers Electronic Theses & Dissertations (RUetd)

Graduate School Thesis/Dissertation Guidelines

Each graduate school has guidelines for formatting and submitting theses and dissertations. If your graduate school or program is not listed here, check with them to obtain specific information about your program's formatting requirements for theses and dissertations.

NEW BRUNSWICK

Graduate School of New Brunswick Style Guide for Electronic Theses and Dissertations

NEWARK

Graduate School of Newark Style Guide for Electronic Masters Theses

This information is found at the Graduate School of Newark web site under Current Students > Masters Candidate Information

Graduate School of Newark Style Guide for Electronic Dissertations

This information is found at the Graduate School of Newark web site under Current Students > Doctoral Candidate Information

CAMDEN

Graduate School of Camden Style Guide for Electronic Masters Theses

Graudate School of Camden Style Guide for Electronic Ph.D. Dissertations

Specific programs in Camden may have their own style guides. Check with your department to insure you are using the correct guide for your degree program.

Dissertation Style Guide: Center for Computational & Integrative Biology - Camden

General Advice on Formatting

MS Word embeds formatting into documents. When you copy/paste text from one document to the next, it also copies and pastes the formatting. This can cause serious problems when you are trying to implement complex formatting in a document - formatting from one document may conflict with and alter formatting in the next document you paste into. For this reason, I recommend these strategies to prevent trouble with formatting.

Do all of the formatting for your dissertation AFTER you have written everything and your committee has approved the content.
Have one, long master file with your manuscript if your committee and advisor will allow it. This single, long document will be the one you format at the end of your dissertation process.
If your committee members want you to submit individual chapters, copy and paste individual chapters into another Word document and send those individually to your dissertation committee, but make all suggested changes in your single, master file.
Allow yourself two weeks to just to format your dissertation. Providing yourself with this generous amount of time for the task of formatting will save you stress and give you plenty of time to seek help when you need it.

General Advice on Versions During Writing

Do all of your writing and editing in the single, long document and save versions in case you need to go back and recover something you wrote previously.

BACK UP YOUR FILES REGULARLY

Save all of your documents in 3 different places. For instance, save one copy on your computer hard drive, one identical copy on a thumb drive or external hard drive and, preferably, a third identical copy in a cloud storage service like Google Drive or Dropbox. Save your files frequently and update to all 3 of your saved locations every time you save.