General Requirements for Formatting and Construction

General requirements for formatting and construction have been set for your disquisition’s appearance to ensure it reflects well upon your work as a student. For more information on the special formatting required in Prefatory Material, Body of the Disquisition, and Appendix Material sections of the disquisition, please see their respective pages.

The requirements for fonts, hyperlinks, margins, paragraphs, headings, and page numbers apply to all sections of the disquisition.

Related Pages

1. Required Order of Sections
2. Fonts
3. Paragraphs
4. Headings
5. Landscape Pages
6. Page Numbers

Order of Sections

The sections in your document must follow a general order, from prefatory material to chapters to backmatter. Prefatory sections include things like your Title Page, Abstract, and Table of Contents, whereas the backmatter is largely composed of your reference list--if applicable--and any appendices. While you should precisely follow our order of prefatory sections, you're welcome to organize your chapters at your discretion. Your chapters and backmatter are sometimes referred to as the disquisition body.

See the entry on our knowledge base for our full guidelines on our required order of sections, including special considerations for reference/works cited sections.

Font

Your document should use a font from our list approved of fonts, and it should be used consistently throughout your document. We request that you embed all fonts when you convert your disquisition to PDF, in order to ensure its quality. For more information about how to embed fonts, refer to the instructions provided here.

See the entry on our knowledge base for our full guidelines on fonts, including special considerations for hyperlinks and tips for avoiding potential issues with equations.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs should be left-aligned, with their first-line indented one-half inch (0.5"). Paragraphs should be double-spaced, without any additional line spacing before or after them. The font you use in your paragraphs is considered the default font of your disquisition, and everything else in your document should use your paragraph font.

See the entry on our knowledge base for our full guidelines on paragraphs, including special considerations for numbered/bulleted lists and tips for avoiding issues with line spacing.

Headings

Headings separate out the sections of your document, and should be easily distinguishable from your paragraph text. Headings of different levels should be visually distinct, whereas headings of the same level should be formatted similarly. You can use numbered or non-numbered headings, and we have templates for both styles.

See the entry on our knowledge base for our full guidelines on headings, including special considerations for numbered vs. non-numbered headings and tips for creating consistent heading styles.

Pages

Your disquisition's pages should be sized as American Letter, 8.5" x 11", with 1" margins on all sides. Do not include any blank pages in your document. Landscape pages can be used for tables, figures, or other non-text items wherever necessary.

See the entry on our knowledge base for more information about formatting landscape pages, including special considerations for creating section breaks around landscape pages and tips for setting the page number.

Page Numbers

Page numbers should appear three-quarter inches (0.75") from the bottom edge of each page of the disquisition, except for the Title page and the Disquisition Approval page; these two pages should not contain page numbers. Pages in the prefatory material should be numbered with lowercase Roman numerals (iii, iv, v, etc.) whereas pages in the rest of the disquisition should use Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.).

See the entry on our knowledge base for our full guidelines on page numbers, including special considerations for page numbers on landscape pages and tips for adjusting page numbers.