Thesis Information
Official Thesis Guidelines are on the web at:
http://grad.ucalgary.ca/grad/policies/thesis
Note that Other Graduate Policies are at:
http://www.grad.ucalgary.ca/policies
Picky
The thesis guidelines are, for good reasons, very picky, specifying things like exact margin measurements, the sorts of fonts you can use, line spacing, etc. The template we are providing has been set up to follow the guidelines and save you time. If you use it carefully, you should be okay. However, we are not responsible for what you do with it once it's left our hands. If you prefer to go your own way, that's fine. We recommend that once you've started typing up your thesis, you spend 10 minutes with Brian or Katherine to make sure you're on the right track, and that as you proceed, you come and consult us for things like footnotes or styles or whatever you may have a problem with.
Thesis Templates exist for both French and Spanish. You may contact Carole Taylor for access to these.
These templates are set up with the right margins, styles, page numbering, font, footnotes and spacing. All of these can be overridden by you, and also changed for the whole document, so be careful what you do... Note that to use all of these preset features, you have to select the template when you open Word by clicking on File > New, then choosing the right template.
Styles
Styles such as Normal, Indent Quote, and Heading 1, are an extremely powerful tool, and should always be used, rather than overriding them by bolding or centering or justifying individual pieces of text. In the templates, Normal style is set to Times New Roman, 12 point, double-spaced, fully justified. If later you decide you'd prefer one and a half spaces, or left justified, all you'd need to do is change the style, and the whole document would change automatically. Similarly with the headings. Changing the style is a bit cumbersome, but not difficult (Format > Style > Modify > Format, then choose Font, Paragraph, etc.). We can help if you want. On the other hand, if you need single-spacing for something, you can mark it and impose single-spacing (Ctrl-1, guess what double-spacing is, or one and a half?).
One document or several? We recommend you do your thesis as a single document, using the Heading 1 style for chapter headings and the Document Map (View > Document Map) (to cancel: View > Document Map again) feature to move around from chapter to chapter when you begin to have a lot of text. It's also possible to do different documents for different chapters, but this sometimes causes page numbering problems.
Footnotes
The setup is presently for footnotes rather than endnotes. If you prefer endnotes, it's easy to change, and we'll help you do it if you wish.
Indenting
To indent a quote, use the Indent Quote Style. This will put the right spaces before and after the quote and single-space it. Do not use spaces to indent. To indent other things, use Tab (for the first line of a paragraph for example) or Ctrl-M, which will indent a whole paragraph. Do not use spaces to indent. This can cause problems when printing.
Table of Contents
If you use the Heading 1 style, and maybe Heading 2 for subheadings, you will be able to generate a table of contents automatically at the end, with the correct page numbers, which will save you several hours of work.
Backups!
Make sure you back up your work at least every day. One student a few years ago lost more than half her thesis and had to write it again. You should always have at least two copies, and preferably three: one on the computer's hard drive, one on a new floppy (old floppies wear out and you can lose everything) and one that you e-mail to yourself as an attachment. But make sure you always name the latest working version in the same way (Laurathesis.doc, for example) and name backups with the date (Laurathesis01-03-01.doc) so you don't start working on the wrong one and get into a lot of trouble.
Automatic changes
Word will change some things automatically as you write. For example, it will capitalize after a period, even if you don't want it to. To undo any of these automatic changes, hit Ctrl-Z. If you've typed a word before you notice, hit Ctrl-Z as many times as you need to get back to the uncapitalized letter. Ctrl-Z (Or Edit > Undo) is invaluable to undo mistakes. Ctrl-Y will redo. Note that there is also an undo icon on the Word toolbar which has exactly the same function as Ctrl-Z. However, Ctrl-Z works in nearly all Windows programs (in Netscape Messenger, for example), even when you can't easily find the Undo icon.
Moving around
Use Ctrl-End to go to the end of the document, and Ctrl-Home to go to the beginning. Ctrl-G (Go To) will ask you for a page number to go to. Otherwise, to find your place in a document, scrolling is not the best option. It's slow and bad on the eyes. Use Ctrl-F and type in the first few letters of your search term. For instance, if I was in this document and wanted to find this paragraph, I'd Ctrl-F and type "bad on" or "find your" or just "find y" or "ctrl". Type your search term in lower case usually. Lower case finds both lower and upper case, whereas upper case only finds upper case. So "Ctrl" will only find Ctrl, but not ctrl. Note that to start a new page in Word, you use Ctrl-Enter.
Accents
The easiest way to do accents for both French and Spanish is to use the Portuguese Brazilian keyboard, which we install in our labs, and leave all the keys where they are instead of changing them around. Instructions for installing the keyboard on your own computer are given on Dan Maher's site: http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dmaher/219/keyboard.html
Check with your supervisor
You can borrow previous theses from the departmental office (please sign them out) to check on style, for example, but check with your thesis supervisor to find out what style s/he wants you to use, especially in terms of references (op.cit. vs. Genette 1972:23).
Use the shortcuts on our plastified Tips page. It's worthwhile trying them out and getting used to some of them. You'll save hours.
Good luck!
Brian Gill and Katherine Guevara, February 2001