Things To Consider About The Chicago Style Dissertation Format
The Chicago Style dissertation format may not be as popular as its counterparts, but remains an integral part of academia all over the world. However, its relative infrequency in being used in research papers is what often leaves students confused, and ends up costing them their grades.
Here is a guide of things to consider about the Chicago style dissertation format:
- The lower and upper limits for margins are one and one and half inches on all sides. The margins should not be less than or exceed the same. Use a muted, readable font like Arial or Times New Roman, with the minimum font size being 10.
- The entire text has to be double line spaced, except for figure captions, block quotations and titles of tables, which are single line spaced.
Using Quotations in Chicago Style:
- All quotations should have an indentation of half an inch.
- All quotations that exceed the length of five lines have to be blocked, and should be free of quotation marks.
- A spacing of a single line should be left before and after a blocked quotation.
Extra line spaces should also be used before and after:
- Subheadings
- Notes and references
Title:
- The title should be placed at about one-third of the page length. If you have a subtitle, put a colon after the title and continue with specifying the subtitle on the line immediately after.
- Your name, class, subject, and instructor’s name should be specified many line spaces later, at approximately two-thirds of the page length.
Body:
- All titles in the text have to be styled as a headline, with the first letter of every word (except prepositions) written in the capital.
- When specifying the names of books/journals in text, there are two styles you can follow:
- For long works, write the name of the book in italics.
- For short journals and papers, use quotation marks to specify the title.
- Make sure to block all quotes that are longer than five lines in length, and format them with a half an inch indent.
References:
- Remember, a space of double lines has to be left after the heading for the Bibliography. However, when specifying the entries, sort them in alphabetical order, with each entry beginning with a single line space.
- Mention the names of all authors and publishers of a work. If there are more than five authors, you can specify them by the term “et al” in footnotes, but mention the complete entries in the References section of the paper.
- Refrain from using dates if not sure.
- Similarly, specify entities other than the page number, such as section, volume and so on, if not sure.