Formatting guidelines

The honors thesis should include a short abstract of the work, in English, preceding the title page.

Parts of the thesis should be arranged in the following order: abstract; title page; acknowledgment; table of contents or outline; table of charts, figures, or diagrams, if any; preface and/or introduction; main text by chapters or parts; summary or conclusion; appendices, if any; bibliography or literature cited.

Do not include a permissions page at the beginning of your thesis; the Student Theses and Honors Collection submission system allows you to set access and permissions options.

It is recommended that you use a font such as Times Roman, Palatino, or Courier in 12 point.

Five spaces indentation is recommended for paragraphs in the double-spaced matter in the text and appendices; for footnotes and bibliography, three spaces indentation is suggested.

Page numbers and Arabic figures should appear in the upper right hand corner of the page in line with the text margin.

Pages should normally be numbered sequentially. Pages with charts, diagrams, illustrations, or photographs may be assigned lower-case letters after the number of the page they follow, e.g., 14a, but the thesis should be internally consistent in its treatment of such pages.

Each chapter or division should begin on a new page, the heading and title dropped about two inches from the top of the page, centered and written in full capitals.

Footnotes may be placed at the bottom of the page below a line drawn completely across under the text, at the end of the chapter, or following the summary or conclusion. Acknowledgment of sources should follow the accepted practice in the discipline concerned. The thesis director can refer the student to a style manual that will set forth acceptable practices. Quotations of five or more lines should be single-spaced and indented five spaces from the left margin, without framing quotation marks.

If a single paragraph or part of one is quoted consecutively, indent the first line of each three spaces. Verse quotations of a single line or part of a line should be run on, in quotation marks, in the text; longer verse quotations should be centered. For ellipsis within a sentence, use three . . . spaced periods, leaving a space before the first period.

Please consult your advisor on any printing or binding that may be required within your department.

LITS does not accept paper copies of honors work; you must submit a digital copy of your final and corrected thesis.