These formatting suggestions MUST be approved by all members of your examining committee (excluding the Chair), as they deviate from the Grad School's guidelines for final thesis submission. When you submit the final copy of your thesis you MUST conform to the Graduate School's regulations.
At draft thesis submission prior to your defence, you are required to send a pdf to the Graduate School so they can check for formatting. The Graduate School is aware that submissions from Biology may have the formatting listed below, so you just need to add a note to say that these will be changed on final submission.
- Submit your draft thesis as a PDF or Word doc to the Graduate Program Advisor and circulate to your committee members.
- To make it easier for examiners to provide comments and corrections, you may include line numbers in the margins. This is an easy option in most word processors and we suggest using continuous line numbers incrementing by 2 or 5. Such line numbering greatly facilitates commenting on pdfs and allows the examiners to provide you with a detailed list of comments and corrections at the exam.
- Put Figure captions below figures or all on a single page at the end of each chapter (manuscript) and NOT each on a separate page facing each figure. You should be doing this anyway, as instructed in the Graduate School guidelines—the facing page caption format is a holdover from the days of the typewriter.
Last updated February 2024.
