Your dissertation is likely to have a few different categories of text that need to appear differently including:
- body text (the words in each paragraph)
- headings and subheadings
- chapter titles
- blocked-off quotes
- and more.
These “categories” are called styles in Word. With styles, you can specify that all of the quotes in your document be single-spaced and indented by .5” on either side. You can specify that you want your primary headings to be centered and bold, and your subheadings should be left aligned and italicized. Rather than formatting each heading or quote one-by-one throughout your entire document, you can use styles to specify what each category of text should look like, and then label your text as “Heading” or “Subheading” or “Quote” as needed.
Styles define the appearance of text elements throughout your document. In particular, applying the Heading styles identifies text that can be used to automatically generate a table of contents. Styles also allow for quick changes throughout your document – if you change the font of a Heading style, for example, any text identified with that heading will then be changed throughout the document.
To see a list of the predefined styles in Word, look at the Styles Group in the Home Ribbon.
We suggest you set up your styles in a blank document, then save it as a template as described in Creating and Using Templates. The ScholarSpace template has many of the styles already set up.
View this video to get started and then visit the pages in the drop down menu to receive written instructions.