Formatting Guidelines, Templates, and Forms
Your disquisition must meet the Graduate School’s requirements for formatting and construction in order to obtain final approval. These requirements are intended to maintain a consistent standard of quality among all published NDSU disquisitions and to make sure that your disquisition reflects well upon your work as a student.
Contents
Graduate School Formatting Guidelines
Our formatting guidelines are below and in a downloadable PDF. The PDF document is the most complete record of our policies and guidelines and should be referred to for examples and more information. We recommend that you review the disquisition formatting guidelines in either form before you format your disquisition.
If you need information about general disquisition requirements, including the required order of elements and a submission checklist, visit the General Requirements page or the formatting guidelines download.
Note: The Graduate School does not edit, proofread, or otherwise review disquisitions for content. Ensure that you have proofread your text, images, and front and back matter prior to submitting your document to the Graduate School. Your disquisition content must be complete and approved by your committee before you begin the disquisition review process.
NDSU Disquisition Templates
NDSU’s Disquisition templates are designed to provide assistance in completing graduate dissertations, theses, and master’s papers. There is a template for numbered headings and a template for non-numbered headings. Each template provides the basic structure, styles, and automated Table of Contents and prefatory lists (based on styles) that will help you to quickly produce a document in keeping with our formatting guidelines.
We have a downloadable manual on using our templates (below) which explains the styles, the automations, and tips for further formatting. We strongly recommend that you consult this guide along with using our templates.
You can see a video demonstration of the templates and other matters of formatting with Word in our Word Crash Course video series. If you have any questions or would like further assistance with NDSU’s templates, both the Center for Writers and the Instructional Design Center (IDC) can provide assistance.
The disquisition templates have been designed to help you format your document, but they are complex documents with settings that you may not be familiar with. Review the following guides and familiarize yourself with the settings in the template in order to save you time and effort during your format review.
Templates
Use the disquisition templates below to create a document that complies with the Graduate School Format Guidelines. You are welcome to change the settings and styles in the template to match the conventions of your discipline or to your own preference, within the constraints of the Format Guidelines.