The University of East Anglia has regulations for the appearance of a research thesis or dissertation. This module will refer to these regulations for a number of activities. Although there is some choice around formatting, you should ensure that your work complies with requirements in Research Degree Policy Document 3 (RDPD 3).
One long document can be difficult to navigate, slow to search and save, and prone to corruption, particularly if it includes images and diagram. Many students prefer to work in separate files and combine these later in the process. This is the process that we will follow on this module.
It is inevitable that you will produce different versions of sections of your thesis or dissertation. When you are working on versions of Word files, we recommend deciding on a naming convention for them. The simplest example is simply the name of the file followed by today's date. For example, 'lit_review_20231113.docx'. Using the date format of year, month an day will make the name of document easier to sort chronologically. However, if date is more important than the document name, then you can place date before the name. For example, '20231113_lit_review.docx'.
Version control is helpful, but it does not prevent you losing data. This will depend on the storage location. It is useful to store the versions of files in multiple locations rather than on the hard drive of your device or in one medium, such as a memory stick or external hard drive. The most secure option is the University's OneDrive, which you can access on different devices. This often allows you to autosave your work as you make changes. Periodically, however, you may wish to take a snapshot of files using the Windows backup feature or the Mac OS Time Machine feature and save this backup to another location, such as an external hard drive.
This module contains several sample files to practice with. These have been created specifically for this module using the Google Bard generative AI tool (now Google Gemini) and are not examples of work submitted for a research degree. They may contain inaccurate information. The quality of the writing and the academic content of these files is not the focus of this module. Their purpose is solely to demonstrate formatting and design features of Microsoft Word.
Let's start with our first sample file 'bard_thesis.docx'. Download this to your device and open the file using your Microsoft Word desktop application rather than the web application. You may need to save a copy of this file to edit it.
When the file is opened, you will see that that it contains some basic formatting which makes it legible, such as lines between the paragraphs. However, Word only displays certain characters - those that will be appear on the printed page. If you want to check the structure of the document more closely, you will need to switch on the 'non-printing characters', which include symbols that indicate how spaces are used.
To switch on the non-printing characters, navigate to 'File', 'Options' and 'Display', and select 'Show all formatting marks', then click 'OK'. You should now see symbols for tab characters, spaces, and paragraph marks. If you just want to view paragraph marks, you can also click on the pilcrow icon in the 'Paragraph' section of the toolbar. Fun fact: the pilcrow is an obscure name for the paragraph mark, and was used to indicate a change in thought in medieval manuscripts.
As you can see from the document, the text has been produced in the Arial font, 11 point. Some of the text has been formatted in bold to indicate titles and headings for sections. It is possible to edit a document using the basic options in the toolbar, such as bold, italic and underline. This is known as direct formatting. It is possible to make these changes to the document manually, but there are a number of reasons why you might want to take a different approach.
The first is that a long document is likely to include a lot of direct formatting, so changing the appearance of headings and titles individually is very time consuming. The second is that this type of formatting is not necessarily semantic, which means that it carries more information about the text than just a presentational difference. Word's styles are a way of adding more information about the structure of the document. When we use a Heading 1 style in Word, not only does the text look different, but that text is also encoded as a heading. This becomes important later on when we want to create a list of sections in a document, to summarise its structure. It also makes a Word document more accessible if someone is using screen reading software to read aloud the text.
It is possible to change the appearance of the styles that Word offers by opening the style pane and right-clicking on the style you would like to change, then selecting 'Modify'. Using the Formatting section, you can choose the font, colour, size and alignment or indentation of the text that you prefer. Saving this as an existing style, or a new style, will allow you to apply this to the current document or to future documents.
The navigation pane is a useful feature in Word that works using styles to show the different sections of a document, which can be switched on from the View tab in the toolbar. This feature also allows the author to move the sections of a document around. It is also possible to change the level of a heading by promoting or demoting it. For example, if I want to make a sub-heading into a new section, then I might promote that sub-heading from Heading 2 to Heading 1.
In a dissertation or thesis, it is likely that you will use several headings. Word has two default levels of headings to start with, but you can create more to indicate a section hierarchy. For example, Heading 1, Heading 2 and Heading 3. As a general rule, it is worth limiting the hierarchy to three levels. Any more than this is likely to become confusing for both the author and any reader. There are also other ways to signal changes in levels.
Although heading styles are numbered, it is the appearance of the heading and not the number that indicates its position in the hierarchy. Using the Multilevel List function in the Paragraph group allows the author to add a numbered prefix to the heading. Sub-headings follow this numbering system by adding another number, and so on. For example, the third sub-section under section two would be numbered 2.3. The first section below that sub-heading would be numbered 2.3.1. It is also possible to modify numbered headings. For example, if you would prefer to indicate chapters or sections in your document more explicitly, you can use this option to this as a prefix. For example, 'Chapter 1' or 'Section 1'.
Please note that applying this list version as a heading might lead to the display of different fonts. For example 'Chapter' might default to Times New Roman, while the rest of the heading remains in your defined style, e.g. Calibri Light. To resolve this, place the cursor on 'Chapter', right click and open the floating style toolbar. Select 'Styles' and then 'Apply Style'. In the 'Apply Style' window, click on 'Modify' and change the Font in the 'Formatting' drop-down box, then click 'OK'.