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Integrated sessions: Mastering your use of Word

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“Using standard formatting for academic papers shows that you understand the customs of the university community and therefore helps to boost your own credibility. ”

Digital Writing 101 [online]

Most people have used Microsoft Word for a long time and are usually self taught. Just like learning to drive a car, if a friend or someone in your family teaches you, then you often pick up their bad habits; so if a friend has shown you how to format documents in Word then you could be doing things the long and hard way. 

University templates for dissertations and theses

The University has a set of templates which can help take the stress out of formatting thesis, dissertations or final year projects.

There are a number templates available and they can be downloaded here:

Guidance document

Front cover of guidance documentA step-by-step guidance document for using the University templates can be found here:

Templates guidance document

 

 

Assessing your own practice

As mentioned above, most people learn word processing as they go along and often use methods that are considered bad practice (because they work for them). Whilst the templates above will help you avoid many of these, you may not be aware of your own poor practice until you have to create longer documents in the work place etc. The table below gives common examples of poor practice and what you should do to avoid them. The other pages in this guide will then give you the skills you need to employ good practice moving forward.

Click on the bad habit to see why it is bad and how to avoid it.

 

Using more than 2 fonts in the document

Avoid this because: It just looks unprofessional – you do not want your wonderful work to end up looking like a ransom note.
Better practice: Stick to one font for heading and one for main text. Use bold or colour to emphasise text.
Best practice: Use only two fonts at the most, one serif and one sans-serif (never mix two serif or two sans serif). Use bold on headings for more impact and bold (and colour) for emphasis. Do not use colour alone as this is bad for accessibility.

Typing headings using ALL CAPITALS

Avoid this because: Typing in all capitals is the textual equivalent of SHOUTING. It also looks old fashioned as it was used to emphasise text on a typewriter before alternative methods became available.
Better practice: Use bold and/or increase font size and alter paragraph spacing to make your headings stand out.
Best practice: Apply the above formatting as part of a Style.

Underlining and/or centring headings

Avoid this because: This just looks old fashioned, again it was used to distinguish between headings and body text when no alternatives were available. Centring should only be used on a front page where everything is centred, mixing alignments should be avoided if possible.
Better practice: Use bold and/or increase font size and alter paragraph spacing to make your headings stand out.
Best practice: Apply the above formatting as part of a Style.

Pressing the Enter key twice at the end of a paragraph to get an extra line of space

Avoid this because: The space does not belong to either the paragraph above or below so if you try to rearrange your paragraphs, the space gets left behind and you have to go through checking all your spacing is back in the right place.
Better practice: Alter the paragraph options to add automatic space after each paragraph.
Best practice: Alter the paragraph options for Normal Style and make sure it is applied to new documents so that all future documents automatically have the space added.

Using the buttons and options on the Home ribbon to apply formatting to your headings

Avoid this because: You need to change many things (usually font, font size, bold at the least) to make the headings stand out and doing this to each heading will take time you do not have. Even if you use format painter you will have to find every heading if you want to make a change.
Better practice: Apply a Heading style to each piece of text you wish to make into a heading (one click). Modify the style and all headings will automatically update.
Best practice: Create a template that has all the heading styles you like to use already set. Apply these to your text as needed.

Pressing the space bar or tab key several times to move text over from the left

Avoid this because: The size of a "space" is different depending on the font and text size so it is impossible to line things up if they have slightly different formatting. If you use the tab key, you can only indent in jumps of half an inch also several key presses are needed where one could be used.
Better practice: Set a new tab at the position you want the text to be indented – then you will only need to press once to get to exactly the point you need and it will be consistent whenever you use it. Alternatively, if you need the indent to last for several lines of text, use the indent feature to create the white space on the left instead.
Best practice: If you need to indent things regularly, create a style for indented text and save it to your Normal template.

Tabulating information using the Tab key

Avoid this because: Whilst you will have control of where items are positioned horizontally (if you add your own tab stops), you will have no control of vertical spacing and will not be able to easily add lines or shading etc.
Better practice: Insert a table instead. You will gain more flexibility and you can format it to have lines and shading if you wish. You can still include tabs within table columns if you need to (although this is usually only needed for decimal alignment).

Techniques for using MS Word effectively

Whilst the guidance document that supports our templates covers a lot of these skills, some students may want to dip into just one area, learn how to do things themselves or prefer to use videos. Click on the tabs below to see step-by-step instructions or watch videos covering each topic.