In Search of a Dissertation Paper Template: Vital Advice
Why bother formatting your dissertation manually when you can simply use a template? However, a wrong template can ruin your dissertation and result in extra work as you would be required to fix your paper. Here are a few bits of advice on how to get a reliable template.
- Know your dissertation formatting guidelines.
- Begin with your university library.
- Assess the credibility of websites.
- Do not rush to pay for templates.
You should know exactly what fonts and margins you have to use in different parts of your thesis. Every university has its own guidelines for dissertation students to follow; meanwhile, your professor may set some specific requirements as well. Make sure to familiarize with them all. Without knowing your thesis guidelines, you will not be even able to determine whether a template fits you or not.
Your university guidelines may contain a link to a template you can use. If it’s the case, you will have to go no further. If you can see no such link, you still can discover a relevant template on your university’s website. Check the writing center and library databases. Many universities develop dissertation templates for their students as they help to save everyone’s time and work. Students get an easy way to format their thesis and can focus on the content instead of setting all fonts and intervals manually, and professors find it more convenient to check unified papers.
If you decide to look for dissertation templates online, do a quick examination of each website you discover to determine whether it can be trusted. Remember that an inferior template can bring you more problems than it solves. Does this website belong to a university or other educational institution? Does it have .edu or .org in its URL? Congratulations, you have found a reliable website with quality templates. However, if a resource does not fit this description, it still can have good templates. Just check whether a template’s author is stated and check his or her name in Google or other search engine. It should be a real person, with relevant academic credentials (e. g. if the template is for a PhD dissertation, the author should have a PhD degree).
In your online search, you may discover websites that offer to pay for thesis templates. Usually, no preview is available for you to make sure that this template is better than those you can get for free. As practice shows, in most cases paid templates are nothing special, while the best ones can be obtained from educational resources for free.