# 10. Lay-out

Follow the guidelines in the style guide of your academic program on the format and lay-out of your thesis. Despite their self-evidence, I list the following rules because I have so often seen them violated:

- Always put your name and date on the title page of your paper, and the occasion
- Start each section on a new page. Even if that means you have only one line on a page. Don’t worry about the lay-out before you have finished everything else. Before you know it you spend half an hour shrinking margins to get rid of that single line on the otherwise empty page. Focus, remember?
- Leave space for your supervisor to scribble remarks and suggestions in the margins. Use wide margins and line space (1.5 or 2).
- Put all the publications you have referred to in the main text in a list of references at the end of your document (but before the appendices, if any), also if your thesis is not yet complete. Put all references in one list. Don’t rubricate them into ‘books’ and ‘articles’ and ‘websites’. If you refer to websites, save it to the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/web/) and refer to the URL you get there. Put all references in alphabetical order, not in the order in which you have found them or in the order in which they appear in the main text. Hint: in most word processing software programs you can order references (or any selection of text) in alphabetical order by selecting them all, and clicking ‘Sort’ choosing ‘by paragraph’.
- Insert page numbers on all pages of your paper, except the title page.
- Remove double spaces and trailing blanks using CTRL-H.
- Titles of papers, sections, and paragraphs never end with a period, colon or semi-colon. PERIOD.
- Avoid the use of variable names straight from your data set such as `ehgincy, pid` or `v660_3b.`
- Use a serious font, not Comic Sans MS.
- In the layout of tables and figures, less is more. Avoid colored or shaded rows and columns and remove gridlines and outside borders. Beware of over precision: do not put more than two decimals in your tables, unless the standard errors of your estimates justify more decimals. Left align text in your tables, and right align numbers. Table 4 provides an example.