This section tells you how to use Microsoft Word to produce the kind of dissertation you want. Some of the advice is specific to Word, but most of it can be used in other word-processing packages such as Lotus Word Pro or Star Word.
Word provides some features that are supposed to be intelligent and helpful but turn out as often as not to be dumb and annoying. Here are some changes that you might want to make to get more control of Word.
Make paragraph marks visible. A lot of Word’s formatting is embedded in paragraph marks (see Section Paragraphs below); so it makes sense to be able to see these as you work. Switch this feature on with Tools > Options. Choose the View tab and tick the Paragraph marks checkbox. There is a button marked ¶ on one of the toolbars that allows you to toggle this feature on and off. While you’re at it, you might want to make tabs and spaces visible. Tabs are a common source of problems, and you should avoid double spaces anywhere in your document: Word is not a typewriter and should format spaces between sentences without any help from you.
Switch off unhelpful autocorrect features. Click Tools > AutoCorrect and switch off all the features you don’t want. I suggest you turn off automatic spelling corrections, automatic bullets and numbering (there are buttons for that), ordinals with superscript, fractions with fraction character, and internet and network paths with hyperlinks under the autoformat and autoformat as you type tabs. Most of these features are nice for two page documents that you want to email to people, but can be nasty in a 50-page dissertation.
Now that you’ve got Word set up sensibly, let’s take a quick tour of how Word works. This really helps when you can’t see why Word has done something you did not want. For example, have you ever had Word give you a numbered list where all the numbers except one were bold and nothing you did seemed to make a difference? After reading this section, you should can work out how to fix little problems like that.
Word has only three levels of formatting: character, paragraph and section. It does not recognise words at all. When you understand this, its easy to see what has been formatted and how to control it.
The lowest level of formatting is character level. You can change the font and size of individual characters and whether a character is bold, italic or both. (You can even change underlining at this level, but underlined words look ugly and were only used as a cheap alternative to italic in the bad old days of typewriters. Many publishers will not publish books with underlined words.) If you want to make a single word bold or italic, this is the level to do it at. If you want to change the font of your document, it is probably better done at paragraph level.
The next level of formatting is the paragraph. Paragraphs have a number of features of their own such as tab marks, indentation and justification. They also have character features, which can be altered by changing the ¶ character at the end of the paragraph. The only thing I know is changed by this is the appearance of bullets and numbering formatting used by the paragraph.
For general formatting of paragraphs, you can select Format > Paragraph... or use the right mouse button on the paragraph. This gives you very fine control of how you want the paragraph to look. You can change alignment: that is, whether the paragraph is left aligned (often called ragged right), centred, right aligned or justified (both the left and right of the text are placed flush against the margin. You can also change various indentations, line spacing and amount of space before and after the paragraph.
A new paragraph is created every time you hit the return key. So if you hit the return key twice in succession, you create two new paragraphs. "Ah!", I hear you say, "But when I want a new paragraph, I just hit return twice." This is ok for short documents, but it is a good idea to wean yourself from this sloppy practice. If you want space between paragraphs (and you probably do), format the paragraph and select the option to add space at the end. Then you will only need to hit return once and there won’t be any nasty surprises about how much space you actually get.
Unfortunately, the default in Word is ragged right paragraphs with no space between them. This raises another issue. You probably want two or three standard paragraph styles for your dissertation. You will want fully justified paragraphs with space between in (say) 10 or 12 point roman font for most of your text. You will want an indented version of this for block quotes. You may want a different style for the abstract. And you can use a paragraph for each section heading. But Word does not give you any of these, and you do not want to format every paragraph individually. There is a solution. You can define a set of linked paragraph styles so that most times you start a new paragraph, Word automatically formats it in the way you want. We discuss this in Section Choosing styles below.
The highest level of formatting is the section. You may well never have used more than one section in a document before. Sections allow you to control features like the page-width and layout of different pages, what appears in the headers and footers (e.g. running heads and page numbers). The page numbers conventionally start on the Contents page; so you could define a section for the front matter (Title page, acknowledgements etc.) that has no page numbers and then define one that has page numbers for the rest of the dissertation. Conventionally, each chapter of a dissertation starts on a fresh page. The neatest way to achieve this is to use next page section breaks.
Use Insert > Break.. and choose a section break to create a new section. Format the page layout for the section under File > Page Layout.... This can be useful if (say) you want one landscape page between two portrait pages. Format the headers and footers using View > Header and Footer. Look at Word’s help to find out more.
We mentioned earlier that paragraph styles were useful for getting formatting right. So how do you define and use them?
First, you use a style by selecting the paragraph and selecting a style from the drop-down box, usually on the left of your toolbar or by selecting Styles... from the Format menu. The default style in Word is called normal. Word has a lot of built in styles that are easily modified to suit your needs. When I’m typing a Word document, I usually ask myself if I want to change style every time I hit the return key and create a new paragraph. It is a good practice.
Although Word has many built in styles, they are probably not (yet) right for your dissertation. This is because Word uses ragged right paragraphs with no spacing between as a default. Is this sensible? Probably not. But remember that Word was originally marketed as a replacement for the typewriter. Fortunately, its fairly easy to modify Word’s built-in styles and even define your own. The first one you will want to modify is normal. Select Format > Styles. Now modify the style. (Format > Styles, Modify... button and select Font, Paragraph, etc. from the Format drop-down button.) Think of this as modifying a paragraph, but with a few additional options. You probably want settings something like the following.
Most of the other settings can be left alone. You should make the format for next paragraph also normal. Then when you start a new paragraph, it will have all your settings by default.
Try creating a new style—call it "block quote"—for block quotes, that is quotes from articles that you want to make clear are not your own. Base your style on normal and make the style for the following paragraph normal. The only thing you should need to change is the paragraph indentation—set that to about 0.5 inches for all lines.
Styles are a very powerful feature in Word and you should find all the help you need to use them in Word’s help system. You can even modify styles in retrospect.
Styles are also useful for creating headings for chapters, sections and subsections. What you do here is create a style for chapters, another for sections, another for subsections etc. Then, when you want a heading, you choose the appropriate style in the toolbar dropdown box, type the heading and press return. This is a good way of ensuring that all headings are formatted consistently.
But Word can do more than this. If you use Word’s built in styles called "Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc., you can use the styles to generate a table of contents for you—see next section. Typically, you use Heading 1 for chapters, Heading 2 for sections, etc.
You will probably want to modify Word’s default styles for Headings. And you will probably want to use at least some of the features available in styles. You can create relative font sizes and base styles on normal so that, for example, Heading 3 is 2 points bigger than normal in Arial Bold, Heading 2 is 4 points bigger in Arial Bold, and Heading 1 is 6 points bigger, Arial Bold and centred. Set the following paragraph style to normal. So when you have finished typing a heading you are immediately ready to type ordinary text. Use "keep with next" to make sure that you never get a heading at the bottom of a page.
Word can number chapters and sections (through the style) automatically. You will want to do this at least for chapters. Using styles to do this has one great advantage: if you insert or delete a chapter or section, the remaining sections are automatically renumbered correctly. How do you do this? Format > Bullets and numbering..., under the Outline numbered tab, press the Customize... button and then the More button. Link levels to the various Heading styles and format the style for each level. You will probably need to look at Word’s help for this feature.
When you have finished everything else in your dissertation, you can, if you’ve used the "Heading" styles to create headings, have a table of contents with page numbers generated automatically. This feature is a bit fiddly, but Word gives you some help. Open the "Office Assistant" (the big staple) and ask for help on "Table of Contents". This should give you enough to get the job done.
Word gives you a great deal of control over exactly what goes into the table of contents, but you really should generate (or at least regenerate) the table of contents right at the end. The table of contents is not adjusted automatically when you change the document, so inserting even one word after can make the page numbering go awry.