How (and why) to make a style guide for your dissertation

First things first: What is a style guide? A style guide is basically a manual that an organisation or a publisher uses to make sure that all of the documents it produces are consistent in terms of language, presentation, and citations. In the context of a thesis or dissertation, it will cover things like how to present a table of contents, note any formatting requirements, tell you whether to use footnotes, endnotes or in-text references, and so on. I like to think of it as our secret weapon for ensuring consistency.

Is there a style guide you have to follow?

The first thing to do is find out if your university or department has a style guide that you have to follow. Hopefully this is something that has already been communicated to you, but sometimes you have to go on a bit of a hunt. Have a word with your advisor or supervisor, or the research contact in your department, or contact your graduate research centre if you have one. If there is a style guide that you have to follow, print or download a copy and you can make a cup of tea, pop your feet up and read something good (I’d obviously suggest checking out the (academic) writer blogs, but you do you.)

If you have confirmed that there is no particular style guide that you need to follow (maybe double-confirmed to be absolutely certain!) then you have a couple of options. The quick and easy approach is to find another university’s style guide for dissertations that you like and just use that. There are a fair few available – just do a search for ‘PhD style guide’ or ‘thesis formatting guidelines’.

 But if there is no particular style guide that you have to follow, and if you have – shall I say – strong preferences about formatting (I say this as one of those people), I suggest that you make your own style guide. It’s going to be very brief and not at all time-consuming, but making some key decisions at the outset will make the rest of the editing and submission process much more streamlined. In effect, it gives you a nice and easy reference document so that your brain doesn't have to remember more than is absolutely necessary.

What should I include in my style guide?

The decisions about what you want to include in your style guide are fairly straightforward. This is the style guide I used to write the book based on my dissertation. You’re more than welcome to use my style guide, or to use it as a template and tweak as you see fit. 

As you can see, mine includes fonts, size, and spacing for the different levels of heading, details about how to cite in-text quotes (including things like emphases and single or double quotation marks), how I want the captions to my figures to look, and consistency around spelling, capitalisation and numbers.

The one thing to note here is that there often aren’t really any ‘right’ decisions – a lot of edits that you make will be just a matter of making sure you’re consistent throughout your thesis. If you have an in-text citation, for example, if you want to have a comma after the year of publication, then make sure every in-text citation has that comma. It doesn't matter – it’s fine to have a comma after the year of publication, it’s fine not to have a comma after the year of publication – but you need to pick one and stick with it throughout.

This style guide that you’re making is just for you – you don’t include it in your dissertation or anything – but it means when you’re going through and making your edits, that you have a quick reference to remind yourself, for example, if you’re using ‘the United States’ or ‘the United States of America’ or ‘the US’ or ‘the U.S.’ because really, your brain has better things to be doing than remembering that.

My four style guide rules

 Most of these things will be a question of personal preference. But, while there's plenty of scope for you to personalise your style guide in line with your discipline and personal preferences,  there are four rules that I strongly suggest you follow.

First, I pretty much always suggest going with Times New Roman for font. This is not the time to break out your fanciest fonts; boring is good in the case of dissertations. Also don’t mix fonts. Be faithful to Times New Roman and let your creativity out somewhere else.

Second, in terms of the size of the font, I generally suggest going no smaller than 12pt for the body text, and 11pt for footnote text. Admittedly, as dissertations are being submitted and marked electronically more and more, things like font size and pagination don’t matter as much as they did when you had to print out and deposit hard copies for examination. This is because your reader can Zoom in if they’re reading on-screen. But still, it’s good practice to have a sensible size of font. 

Third is spacing: 1.5 or double spacing for your dissertation is the way to go. Trying to read 90,000 words single-spaced – either on a computer screen or on paper – is not fun. (Though you can be a little more flexible when it comes to your bibliography or reference list – 1.5 spacing or even single spacing with a line between citations is usually fine). Whatever you end up doing, show your examiner some mercy.

Fourth is margins. Again, it mattered more when you had to print out and have a copy of your dissertation bound, so margins needed to be bigger to allow for the binding process. The default Word setting of an inch margin all around – or about 2.5cm – is fine if you’re submitting digitally; if you are printing and binding a copy, you’ll want to consider making the left margin just a little bigger – say 1 ¼ inches. 

You don’t have to have a style guide, but I find it much easier to make a decision once and then have a document I can refer back to when in doubt, instead of winging it and then going back and forth during editing to work out if I need to change the formatting of half my dates or references to currency. (And as a bonus: if you wave your style guide at your supervisor, you'll look super organised and they will be very impressed.)