The Dissertation Format Under Various Style Guides

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When an undergraduate degree student or a master's degree student has selected his dissertation topic and completed the research process for his topic, the next step he would usually do is formatting the dissertation document or the dissertation format process. The format of the dissertation is based on the particular style guide or style manual that is specified by the university or college lecturer. A style manual is a published guide that contains the written standards for writing and designing academic documents such as dissertations, theses, and essays.

The specific aspects of the dissertation format is based on specific style manuals specified by the lecturers of the students. In most universities and colleges in the United Kingdom, the thesis or dissertation format is based on at least four style guides that are commonly used in various universities and colleges on the UK. The style guides are: Fowler's Modern English Usage; The King's English; New Hart's Rules; and The Complete Plain Words.

But most of the higher education level institutions in the United States would follow a different set of style manuals, which are: A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations; MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (MLA style); Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA style); and the AMA Manual Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors.

Consequently, there are several differences between the style manuals used in the British and American higher education systems. For example, the dissertation format under the APA style and MLA style would show some noticeable differences. Under the APA format, the document margins should be one inch for the top and 1 ½ inch for the bottom and the right and left sides should have 1 ½ inch. But the MLA format requires the top, bottom, right and left sides to be in one inch margins.

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Take note that various undergraduate degree programmes would include dissertation projects as part of their assessment or evaluation requirements together with other academic writing requirements such as university essays. Therefore, it is not unusual for the undergraduate degree students to perform dissertation projects and various essay writing tasks within the same term.

The students who may have some challenges for correctly formatting their dissertations and essays could always obtain help from the free samples of previously written dissertations and free sample essay documents that could be written by actual students or by the professional writers employed by the websites where those sample dissertations and sample essays are posted for free reading and downloading. The sample dissertations and sample essays could be effective as learning tools for the undergraduate degree student because the samples could show the formatting of the dissertations and essays as they would actually appear in the actual documents.