Formatting, style manuals, and the graduate school template

Does my thesis follow a style manual or my university's template?

Both, in that order of authority. The style manual governs citation form, capitalization, treatment of numbers, and the hundred small decisions inside a sentence. The graduate school's specification governs the physical document: margins, page numbers, the order of the front matter, and what the title page says.

Where they conflict, the institution wins, because the institution is the body that accepts or refuses the deposit. A thesis formatted immaculately to a manual and wrongly to the template is refused.

Utah State University's education college warns students about exactly this gap, telling them a professional editor should know APA seventh edition formatting but is not necessarily familiar with the graduate school's own requirements for dissertations.¹ The warning is worth reading twice, because it describes the most common way an editing budget gets spent on the wrong thing.

What does the graduate school actually check?

Physical conformity, item by item, against a published specification. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign sets margins at a minimum of one inch on all sides, and body text at 10 to 12 point and easily legible. Line spacing may be anywhere from 1.5 to double, so long as it stays consistent through the main text.²

It also fixes the order of the front matter. An optional copyright page comes first, then the title page, the abstract, optional acknowledgments and dedication, the table of contents, the main text, the bibliography or references, and optional appendixes.² Page numbering runs in Arabic numerals through the body, continuing from the front matter, and every body page carries one.²

Those are one university's rules and yours will differ in the details. What does not differ is that the rules exist in writing, and that the review is against them rather than against a general standard of tidiness.

Which style manual do theses use?

Whichever the discipline uses, and the choice is rarely the student's. Psychology and much of the social sciences use APA. History and many humanities fields use Chicago, most often through Turabian.

Turabian is worth naming precisely because students often do not realize it is Chicago. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations is published by the University of Chicago Press, is now in its ninth edition, and was updated to reflect the Chicago Manual of Style.³ The press describes it as written for college and graduate students in virtually all academic areas.³

The practical consequence is that a thesis in a Chicago discipline has two reference books behind it, and the student-facing one is Turabian. An editor working on such a thesis needs to know which of the two the department expects to be cited.

Can an editor do the formatting?

Usually yes, and it is one of the few thesis tasks that raises no ethical question at all. Formatting is not authorship, and no permission scheme we have read treats it as content work.

Editors Canada's definitions place formatting alongside copy editing and proofreading as recognized editorial skills.⁴ What it requires from the student is the specification: the graduate school's template, the style manual, and any departmental variation.

There is a limit worth knowing. An editor can format a document to a specification they have been given, and cannot know a specification they have not. A thesis returned because the abstract exceeded a word limit nobody mentioned is not an editing failure.

Sending the template with the manuscript is what closes that gap. Where the graduate school publishes a template file rather than a written rule, the file itself is the specification and it is worth handing over intact.

What causes a thesis to be returned at format review?

Small mechanical things, almost always, and they are published in advance. Illinois states that font size and type must remain consistent through the front matter and the main text, and that body text which is fully justified will not be accepted.²

That second one surprises people, because justified text looks more finished. It is a legibility and accessibility requirement rather than a matter of taste, and a thesis set justified throughout has to be reset.

The other recurring causes are structural rather than typographic. Front matter arrives in the wrong order, page numbering restarts where it should continue, a table of contents no longer matches its chapters, or figure and table numbers skip. Every one of those is checkable before submission.

How do I keep the formatting from breaking when I revise?

By having the structure carried by styles rather than by hand. Illinois notes that heading styles in a word processor are necessary for document accessibility, which is a requirement rather than a convenience.²

Formatting applied directly to text does not survive revision. A heading made to look like a heading by changing the size and weight stays invisible to an automatic table of contents. It also fails the accessibility requirement, and drifts out of step with its neighbors as chapters move.

The Chicago Manual of Style treats preparing electronic manuscript files as a stage of the author's own work, alongside manuscript formatting and cross-checking.⁵ Doing it as styles from the beginning costs nothing. Retrofitting it into a finished thesis costs a day.

Do headings have to be applied as styles?

At Illinois the requirement is stated in terms of accessibility, and the practical answer at most institutions is yes.² A document whose headings are real headings can be navigated by a screen reader, generates its own table of contents, and can be renumbered without anyone retyping anything.

The related requirement is consistency of level. Heading levels have to descend without skipping, and a thesis that uses a third-level heading under a first-level one has a structural error a reviewer will see immediately.

This is genuinely checkable work rather than judgment, which makes it a good use of an editor. An editor can report every heading in the thesis with its level, in order, and the errors are visible in the list.

Who checks the table of contents against the chapters?

You do, and then somebody else should. A table of contents generated automatically is correct on the day it is generated and wrong the moment a heading changes, and students regenerate it less often than they revise.

The check is mechanical in both directions. Every chapter and section in the thesis should appear in the contents, and every entry in the contents should exist in the thesis with the same wording and the same page.

The same applies to the lists of tables and figures, and to every cross-reference in the text that names a chapter or section by number. Copy editing includes checking cross-references, so this is ordinary editorial work rather than a special request.⁴ Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, drafts and template files included.