thesis writing using word

Using Microsoft Word for Writing a Thesis:

Hints and Tips

(Revised April 2009)

©Prof. Martin Fahey

School of Civil & Resource Engineering

The University of Western Australia

Thesis Writing Using Microsoft Word School of Civil and Resource Engineering

Hints and Tips The University of Western Australia

(i)

FOREWORD

The aim of this document is to encourage you to take a little time to learn some of the basic

features of Microsoft Word that are relevant to the preparation of long documents, such as your

thesis1. It explains how to use these basic features. The time you put into learning these features

will save you lots of time in the end.

The aim is not to force you to follow this format exactly – you can do so if you wish, or you can

modify the format to suit your own taste. However, I strongly encourage you to adopt the

formatting principles outlined, as these will be useful not just for the exercise of writing your

thesis, but will prepare you for report writing in a team environment in your subsequent

employment, where it will almost certainly be mandatory to adhere strictly to company

formatting policies (which will be based on principles similar to those outlined here).

The ideal is to use the procedures here right from the start of writing your thesis. If you start by

using manual formatting etc (i.e. breaking all the rules), it is much more difficult afterwards to

apply these rules without first undoing all the manual formatting you have applied.

I have made the recommendations on the best techniques for doing various operations on the

basis of my own experience (from more than 20 years of frustration with many different word

processors and many different versions of Word). However, if anyone has a better way of doing

something, I would welcome the feedback (and likewise, any feedback on grammatical or other

errors).

I initially set out with this document to write a few pages with some brief tips about how to use

Microsoft Word for thesis writing – and got carried away, and produced this, which is now 442

pages long!

I used Microsoft Office Word 2003 to prepare the latest version of this document. Anyone using

a later version might have to adopt the procedures slightly.

(Note: On the title page, I used a ‘text box’ for inserting the title, and my name etc. This allowed me to locate this

block in the centre of the page, without using paragraph returns. If you click within the text, and then click on the

frame boundary that appears, and select ‘Advanced…’ in the “Format Text Box’ window that appears, you will see

how I have done this).

1 This document was written to provide guidance to final year undergraduate students in the School of Civil &

Resource Engineering to help in the preparation of their Final Year Honours theses. However, it could also be used

as a guide to thesis or technical report writing in any technical area.

2 The ‘shading’ on number of pages indicates that this number was generated using an automatic ‘fields’ function of

some sort. This shading option can be switched on or off – see Figure 1.1 on .



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TABLE OF CONTENTS1

Foreword .................................................................................................................................... i

Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... ii

Table of Figures ....................................................................................................................... iii

Chapter 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1

Chapter 2. Main features .......................................................................................................... 3

2.1 The essentials ................................................................................................................ 3

2.2 Templates ..................................................................................................................... 4

2.3 Templates and Macros .................................................................................................. 5

Chapter 3. Writing your Thesis ................................................................................................ 6

3.1 Heading styles .............................................................................................................. 6

3.1.1 Use Heading styles for all section and sub-section headings.......................... 6

3.1.2 Viewing the document in ‘Outline’ view ...................................................... 8

3.2 Changing a style ........................................................................................................... 9

3.3 Chapter and heading numbering .................................................................................. 11

3.4 Fields .......................................................................................................................... 11

3.5 Entering Figure & Table Numbers .............................................................................. 11

3.6 Inserting cross-referencing to Figures and Tables ........................................................ 13

3.7 Automatic Equation Numbering & Cross-Referencing ................................................ 14

3.7.1 Equation numbering ................................................................................... 14

3.7.2 Cross-referencing equations ........................................................................ 16

3.8 Tables ......................................................................................................................... 16

3.9 Figures ........................................................................................................................ 17

3.9.1 Placement of Figures .................................................................................. 17

3.9.2 Importing EXCEL Figures .......................................................................... 19

3.9.3 Colour or Black & White for Excel plots?................................................... 20

3.10 Organisation of Figures within Excel .......................................................................... 20

3.11 Generating Tables of Contents, Lists of Figures .......................................................... 21

3.11.1 Standard Table of Contents ......................................................................... 21

3.11.2 Adding other items to the Table of Contents ............................................... 22

3.11.3 List of Figures, List of Tables, etc ............................................................... 23

3.12 Including references in your document ........................................................................ 24

3.12.1 ‘EndNote’ Software .................................................................................... 24

3.12.2 Manual entry .............................................................................................. 24

3.12.3 Sorting reference list into alphabetical order ............................................... 25

3.13 An example thesis ....................................................................................................... 26

1 The Table of Contents and List of Figures have been generated using the methods outlined later in Section 22.



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Chapter 4. Language, and some common errors ................................................................... 28

Appendix A. Humorous grammar rules ................................................................................. 35

Appendix B. Macro listing ...................................................................................................... 38

TABLE OF FIGURES1

Figure 1.1. Selection in ‘Tools – Options’ menu to shade text generated by Field Codes. ........... 2

Figure 3.1 ‘Styles’ pane open on the right of the screen ............................................................... 7

Figure 3.2. Part of the ‘Outline’ view of this document, with ‘Show Level 3’ selected. ............... 8

Figure 3.3. Selecting ‘Show All Levels’. .................................................................................... 9

Figure 3.4. Example of Figure numbering ................................................................................. 12

Figure 3.5. Cross-referencing window – cross-referencing to a Figure number. ........................ 13

Figure 3.6. The ‘Eq_with_number_at_start’ Macro puts equation number at the start of the

line (Alt-N)....................................................... Fehler! Textmarke nicht definiert.

Figure 3.7. The “Equation” Macro (Alt-N) puts equation number at the end of the line, but

this cannot be (easily) cross-referenced. ............ Fehler! Textmarke nicht definiert.

Figure 3.8. A drawing created using Word’s drawing toolbar ................................................... 18

Figure 3.9. The Table of Contents window. .............................................................................. 22

Figure 3.10. Including additional style items in the Table of Contents ...................................... 23

Figure 3.11. Inserting a List of Figures. .................................................................................... 24

Figure 3.12. ‘Bullets and numbering” settings for setting the Appendix headings in the

thesis document. .................................................................................................... 27

1 If you insert the cursor on any of these table entries, you will see from the top ruler that the right margin marker is

set with an indent (at 15.5 cm), and the ‘right tab’ is set at the right margin (16.5 cm). This allows the page number

(which is set at the tab) to be always outside the text, even with multiple-line table entries (as in the final entry in the

table above). A bit neater than the alternative that would result from having the right tab marker and the right margin

marker at the same location.



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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

Microsoft Word is a very powerful (and at times very frustrating!) software package that has

become practically the only word processor used in academic and industry sectors for production

of reports, research papers, and theses.

It has very powerful formatting capabilities. These can make your life very easy – or if you

misuse them or don’t use them at all, they can make your life much more difficult that it should

otherwise be.

You might be able to produce a thesis with a perfectly-acceptable overall appearance without

using any of the tools referred to above. However, this is definitely not a good idea as:

You will be wasting lots of valuable time in formatting, when you could be doing other things.

• Certain tasks, such as numbering of figures, equations, and table, and preparation of a

Table of Contents, are made very much more labour-intensive (and subject to error).

• You can use automatic cross-referencing to Figures and Tables, which saves a lot of work

later when these numbers change.

• It is not good preparation for working later on in a team environment, where it is common

for many people to be working on the same document, so adherence to the formatting

‘rules’ is absolutely essential. You will be murdered (ok, maybe not literally) by others in

the organisation if you do not know how to follow the formatting rules used by that

organisation.

So, this very brief (well, it started out as being very brief!) document outlines some of the most

important rules with regard to using Word for the purposes of writing your Thesis. To aid in this,

I have applied them to a thesis written a few years ago by an undergraduate student, which I will

use as an example of how to go about setting up your thesis. The formatting I have used is not

meant to be taken as an absolute requirement, but rather to illustrate the principles that should be

used.

I have applied exactly the same formatting to this document, so it is formatted like a Thesis, when

in other circumstances I would probably have formatted it differently.

I have assumed that you already know the basics of word processing – i.e. finding, replacing,

cutting, pasting, etc – and also that you know how to use the inbuilt Equation Editor1. This

document is aimed at those who have never gone much beyond these basic functions – i.e. have

1 There are far better equation editors available than the Equation Editor 3.0 built into Word. However, you might as

well get used to the fact that almost everyone uses Word and the inbuilt Equation Editor, and you will only make life

awkward for yourself and others if you choose to go in a non-standard direction in this regard.



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used Word as no more than a glorified typewriter, using only manual formatting. For those who

have gone well past this, much of what is in here is probably redundant (and you may in fact have

devised better ways of doing various operations yourself). Nevertheless, I hope you will find

something useful in here to help. (Look through the table of contents to see if anything sparks

your interest).

This document has been prepared using Styles and other settings identical to those in the example

thesis provided elsewhere. It uses automatic numbering of Headings and Figures, and uses

automatic cross-referencing to Heading and Figure numbering. These automatic features

generate what are called ‘Fields’, containing ‘Field Codes’. In the ‘Tools – Options’ menu (see

Figure 1.1 below), I have selected to ‘Always’ show ‘Field shading’, so that throughout the

document, anywhere there is a hidden Field Code, the text generated by that Field Code is shown

shaded. This shading will not appear in the printed version of the document, so it can be left

switched on.

Figure 1.1. Selection in ‘Tools – Options’ menu to shade text generated by Field Codes.1

If you want to see all field codes, you can tick the ‘Field codes’ box in Figure 1.1. You can also

see an individual field code by ‘right clicking’ within the shaded area in any of the fields, and

selecting ‘Toggle field codes’. Note that the whole Table of Contents is an example of text

generated using field codes.

1 The two versions of the figure are different. In the version on the left, I pasted the screen capture image into Word,

cropped it, and then drew the oval and arrow onto it within Word. These elements are anchored to the drawing, but

under some circumstances can become ‘unstuck’, and end up in unpredictable places. The version on the right was

done in Powerpoint, and all three elements grouped, before pasting into Word as a picture – with no risk of the

elements being separated. This is a much safer way of doing things.



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CHAPTER 2. MAIN FEATURES

2.1 THE ESSENTIALS

I have tried here to list what I consider the most important features of Word that you must master

if you are going to be efficient in writing any major document, such as a thesis. There are lots of

other features that I have not included, as I consider that they are not particularly useful for a one-

off document, such as your thesis.

The main features are:

• Formatting of paragraphs is always done using Styles, and never by directly formatting

the paragraph. A style can be considered a ‘tag’ that contains all the information with

regard to how a paragraph should be formatted (line spacing, spacing before and after the

paragraph, justification, font type and size, etc.) Applying a tag style to a paragraph

immediately forces the formatting of that paragraph to conform to the formatting

contained in that style.

• The default style is ‘Normal’. The first stage in formatting any document is to set up the

Normal style for the document – i.e. set up the required line spacing, and spacing between

paragraphs. The ‘Normal’ style is used for normal paragraphs within the document.

• Spacing between paragraphs should never be done using extra paragraph returns. (The

spacing between paragraphs is set up in the Style for those paragraphs).

• Word has certain style names reserved for certain functions; the most important of these

are the Heading styles (Heading1, Heading2, etc). As the name implies, these are used to

tag 1st level headings, 2

nd level headings, etc. It is essential that these be used for this

purpose (and this purpose only), as they form the basis of

o how a Table of Contents is prepared automatically;

o being able to overview the document using the Outline View option (in ‘View –

Outline’ menu);

o as a means of automatic section numbering using the ‘Bullets and Numbering’

function in the Format menu.

• If you want a Heading to have a particular appearance, do the formatting in the style, and

not directly – e.g. you want it to be in CAPITAL LETTERS, don’t use ‘Caps Lock’ to

format headings, but in the style specification the ‘All Caps’ tag should be ticked (in the

‘Format – Font’ menu). See Section 3.2 on Page 9 for alternative methods of changing a

style.

• Numbering of Figures and Tables should always be done using the ‘Caption’ function,

located within ‘Insert – Reference – Caption’ menu. These can be set up to number

sequentially all through the document, or to have numbering that incorporates the Chapter



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number with numbering starting at the start of each chapter. The advantages of using

Captions for this are:

o Word automatically updates all such numbers if an additional one is inserted earlier in

the text, or if one is deleted earlier in the text.

o When referring to an individual Figure or Table, we can use the ‘Cross-referencing’

function within ‘Insert – Reference – Cross-reference’ menu. Then, if a Figure number

or Table number changes, the references to it also change automatically. This is a very

useful feature in long documents with lots of Figures and Tables.

o When captions are used in this way, it is easy to automatically prepare a List of

Figures, and a List of Tables, to follow the Table of Contents.

o Equation numbering can also be automated in a similar way, but it is slightly more

complicated than Figure and Table numbering, and will be discussed in detail later.

• It is a good idea to break your document up into Sections (using the ‘Insert – Break –

Section Break Types – New Page’ menu item). For the thesis, the first section contains

only the Title Page, and (following a Page Break) the letter of transmittal to the Dean.

The second section contains the Abstract, Acknowledgements, Table of Contents, List of

Figures, Nomenclature, etc. The third section contains the thesis proper. The final

section contains the Appendices (if any).

• In the Thesis document, I have set up automatic page breaks at the start of each Chapter.

This could be done manually, but I have done it by incorporating it into the Heading1

style definition (‘Page break before’ tag).

2.2 TEMPLATES

Every new blank document you start has a ‘template’ associated with it. The default template is

‘Normal.dot’ (the ‘.dot’ identifies it to Word as a ‘document template’). Template files are kept

in a special Templates directory by Word – you can see where this is by trying to save a

document as a template using ‘Save As..’, and selecting ‘Document Template (*.dot)’.

When a new blank document is opened using a given template, all of the pre-set styles associated

with that template are automatically incorporated into that document. Subsequent changes to the

template are not brought into documents created using the template. Nor are changes to the

document reflected back as changes to the style (unless this option is specifically selected for the

individual styles). By default, all new documents are opened with the ‘Normal.dot’ template,

unless another one is specifically selected.

Any document can be saved as a template. Once a document has been formatted properly for a

given purpose, a template for this can be prepared by deleting all the content, and saving the

resulting blank document as a template.



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The alternative to using a template to open a new blank document incorporating specific

formatting is to simply open an existing document with the required formatting, deleting all the

contents, and saving it as your new document. This is what I recommend here with your thesis –

just start with this document, save it with the name of your thesis, and go from there.

So, even though templates are very important, you don’t need to know very much about them for

the purposes of this exercise.

2.3 TEMPLATES AND MACROS

When you write a macro (a set of commands to carry out a series of instructions), by default it

gets stored in the normal.dot template on your computer, so that such a macro will then be

available from within any document that is based on this normal.dot template (all new documents

are created with this default template, unless you specifically choose otherwise). However, one

disadvantage of this (as I found in doing this exercise) is that simply providing this document to

people to use as the basis for a thesis does not provide access to these macros.

Therefore, in this case, I have also embedded these macros into this document. On your own

setup, you could use the Organizer (under “Tools_Templates and Add-Ins”) to copy the macros

from this file to your own Normal.dot file, which would give you access to the macros from

within any Word document created with the Normal.dot template. There is no need to do this if

you use this document as the starting point for your thesis. You can user the same Organizer

within “Tools_Templates and Add-Ins” to copy Styles from this document to your Normal.dot

template, so that the styles in this document would then be the default styles for any Word

document you create from scratch.



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CHAPTER 3. WRITING YOUR THESIS

3.1 HEADING STYLES

3.1.1 Use Heading styles for all section and sub-section headings

The easiest way to begin is to start from this document: ‘save as’ a new title (your Thesis title),

and delete the text, but do so carefully, so as to preserve the section breaks. I recommend

deleting everything except the chapter headings and the first paragraph of each chapter, leaving

the Introductory sections intact (to be completed later automatically). Then use this as the

starting point for your Thesis.

If you wanted to start from scratch, you could save this document as a template document (i.e.

“save as …template file”, which will put a “.dot” file extension on it, and save it in the Templates

directory. You could actually delete everything from it first and then save as a template file,

which would preserve the heading definitions, etc. Then, starting from scratch, just open a blank

document using this template.

On the first page, just as a temporary ‘placeholder’, type “Thesis title”, followed by a return.

Then insert a Section Break (new page). Again type a temporary placeholder ‘Abstract etc’,

followed by another Section Break (new page). This will reserve these first two sections for

these items, which you can add later.

You are now at the start of Section 3.

Type ‘Introduction’ – just like that, in plain text – no other formatting. The default style for

anything you type (in this template) is “Normal”, and this shows up in the Styles window in the

toolbar at the top of the document.

If you look under ‘Format – Paragraph’ you will see that this paragraph is Left Justified1, No

indents, with 0 points2 before and 8 points after, and ‘At Least 16 point’ line spacing. In the

1 Overall appearance of a block of text is probably improved if you use ‘Alignment’ (i.e. justified both sides), but

readability is better using left justification. This is a matter of personal preference. One thing to remember if you

use ‘justify both sides’ is that ‘soft line breaks’ (‘Control – Enter), which gives a new line without giving a new

paragraph, require a ‘tab’ before the line break, otherwise the text in the line will be stretched to fit the whole line.

2 A ‘point’ is a unit of measurement used in traditional hot-press printing – there are 72 points to an inch (i.e. a point

is about 0.35 mm, or, in round terms, 3 points ≈ 1 mm.



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“Line and Page Breaks” tab of ‘Format – Paragraph’ you will see that only ‘Window and Orphan’

control is ticked (this forces the formatting not to have only one line of a paragraph on its own on

a page either at the start of the paragraph (a ‘Widow’) or at the end (an ‘Orphan’).

Now, with the cursor still in this Introduction paragraph, open the drop-down Styles menu by

clicking on the down-arrow beside this window, and select the style “Heading1”, which in this

case I have formatted to insert the Chapter Number before the actual Heading 1 title. So this will

give you Chapter 1. Introduction, with all the style attributes imposed – in this case, All Caps,

Font Ariel 16 Bold.

You can also see all the styles by selecting ‘Format – Styles and Formatting’ in the ‘Format’

menu. This opens a pane on the right of the screen (Figure 3.1). If the cursor is within a

paragraph, any style can be applied to the paragraph by simply clicking on the style name in this

pane.

Figure 3.1 ‘Styles’ pane open on the right of the screen

Back to the Introduction….



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Once the Heading1 style has been applied, and the cursor is at the end of ‘Introduction’, a

carriage return will open a new paragraph, which will have the Normal style (this option is

chosen in the Heading1 style definition). At the end of the paragraph, a carriage return will start

a new Normal paragraph. The Normal style already has an appropriate paragraph spacing built in

(8 points), so there is no need to enter an extra carriage return to leave space between paragraphs

(this should be avoided). If you would like more space between paragraphs by default, just

change the paragraph spacing in Normal style (as below).

And so on….

If you want to have sub-headings within the Chapter, simply tag them using Heading2 style for

second-level headings, Heading3 for 3rd level headings, etc. These will be numbered

appropriately – i.e. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc for Level 2 headings in Chapter 1, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3 for Level

3 headings in part 1 of Chapter 1, etc, etc. I have not numbered Level 4 headings (they appear as

Italic), as numbering beyond 1.1.1 is a bit meaningless from a continuity point of view.

There’s a note on setting and changing the numbering system for headings in Section 3.3 below.

3.1.2 Viewing the document in ‘Outline’ view

If you have rigorously followed the advice above about using the in-built Heading styles to label

all sections and subsections in the document, then you have the advantage of being able to use the

features of the ‘Outline’ view.

• Select ‘View – Outline’. The document appears now as a series of headings (and maybe

additional text), with what is shown being selectable. By default, it probably shows

‘Show all levels’ in the selection box, but if you instead select ‘Show Level 1’, it will only

show the ‘Level 1’ headings, and ‘Show Level 2’ shows ‘Level 1’ and ‘Level 2’ headings.

For this document, selecting ‘Show Level 3’ gave the view pictured in Figure 3.2.

Figure 3.2. Part of the ‘Outline’ view of this document, with ‘Show Level 3’ selected.

This not only gives you an overview of the document, but it enables whole sections to be moved

around easily. For example, if I wanted to move all of Chapter 3 to place it before Chapter 2, in



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this view I would simply hold the mouse button down on the ‘+’ bullet at the start of the ‘Chapter

3’ line, and move the selection upwards to above the ‘Chapter 2’ line – everything (headings,

text, figures, tables) gets moved backwards, all headings are re-numbered appropriately (and, if

you follow the Figure and Table numbering and cross-referencing recommendations made later,

all these are also automatically looked after. (Equation numbers are also automatically looked

after, but references to equation numbers are only looked after if you use the ‘equation number at

the start of the line’ option explained later). Similarly, I can move sections within a Chapter,

using the same technique – very powerful.

Within the ‘Outline’ view, section headings can be ‘promoted’ or ‘demoted’ – e.g. a Level 3

heading can be promoted to a Level 2 heading by selecting the appropriate ‘+’ bullet, and using

the appropriate ‘green blue’ arrows on the menu (the ‘double arrows’ have a different function –

the left-pointing one promotes any heading all the way to Heading1, while the right-pointing one

demotes any heading to normal text.

You can change the ‘Outline’ view to see all paragraphs, and, in this case, have the option of

seeing only the first line of each paragraph:

Figure 3.3. Selecting ‘Show All Levels’.

The buttons to the right allow the choice of viewing only the first line of each paragraph,

or the whole paragraph, and viewing with or without formatting applied. The view above has

first line only selected, and formatted selected.

3.2 CHANGING A STYLE

There are a number of ways of changing a style. The first one below does not work for Normal

style:



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• With the Styles pane open on the right:

o select a paragraph tagged with the style you want to

change by clicking within the paragraph.

o Make the changes to the paragraph directly (for line

spacing, paragraph spacing etc, no need to select

any text, but for font changes, or font appearance

changes, text must be selected)

o This will now show up on the top window of the

Styles pane as a modified style, which will have the

name of the original style, plus the changes made.

Ignore this

o Find the original style name (unaltered) in the main

part of the pane, ‘Right Click’ on the name, and

select ‘Update to Match Selection’

o This will change the Style format to that of the selected paragraph – which will

automatically change the format of all paragraphs tagged with that style.

o (If you ‘Left Click’ rather than ‘Right Click’ on the style name, it simply forces re-

imposing the Style on the paragraph you just modified – bringing you back to square

one).

• For the Normal style, where the above cannot be done, the procedure for changing a style

is as follows (this also works for all other styles):

o ‘Right Click’ on the style name, and select ‘Modify..’

o In the window that opens, you can now change the style name (but don’t do that with

Normal style), and can enter the style of the paragraph that follows this style (you will

see for most styles that I have ‘Normal’ following the style, by default – so that if you

have a Level1 heading, for example, a carriage return gives you a paragraph with

‘Normal’ style).

o You can change the default font and font size directly in this window.

o Don’t in general tick ‘Automatically update’ – I use that only for the Table of Contents

tags (TOC1, TOC2 etc) – as it can create a big mess of your formatting for other styles.

o Open the ‘Format’ tag at the bottom of the window to allow formatting of Font,

Paragraph, Language, etc

o Click OK when done.



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3.3 CHAPTER AND HEADING NUMBERING

Chapter and Heading numbering can be quite tricky, and requires experimentation to get it right.

I recommend that unless you know what you are doing, you do not change what I have set up.

Numbering can be done using the ‘Format – Bullets and Numbering – Outline Numbered’ item in

the Format menu. Play with it if you wish, but you may get into a mess.

The default numbering I have set up will number Level 1 headings (i.e. Chapters), and Level 2

and 3 headings, but not Level 4 headings. I have included the word ‘Chapter’ before the number

in the Heading1 numbering, and set the style as Ariel, 16 point bold, centred, with an automatic

page break before. I have also used Heading1 level for the Appendices, and changed the

numbering for these. There is a further note on this later.

3.4 FIELDS

Many of the automatic functions with Word generate hidden ‘Fields’, which are really a type of

inbuilt macro language for doing something automatic. The instructions below for generating

automatic figure and table numbering, and for generating automatic cross-references to these,

generate ‘Fields’. These are hidden, but you can see the field codes by placing the cursor within

the text generated by the field, and doing ‘Right Click’. For example, I used the instruction in the

next section to generate here a cross-reference to Figure 3.4. If you put your cursor anywhere

with the text ‘Figure x.x’ in the previous sentence, do ‘Right Click’, and select ‘Toggle Field

Codes’, it will show the following text ‘{ REF _Ref124823772 \h }’. If you repeat “Toggle Field

Codes’, it will revert to showing ‘Figure x.x’. Try it. If you get brave (i.e. if you get foolish!),

you can edit these field codes. Don’t do it unless you know what you are doing!

In this document, I have selected ‘Tools – Options – View – Field shading: Always’, so that all

text generated by a field code is shown shaded (including the whole of the Table of Contents).

NOTE: Fields do not update automatically – that is, if, for example, you delete a Figure (with its

number and caption), the numbers of the following figures do not change automatically right

away. To get them to change, you have to select the caption, and use either:

• ‘Right Click’ and ‘Update Field Codes’; or

• F9

Saving or printing the file updates them automatically. More about this later.

3.5 ENTERING FIGURE & TABLE NUMBERS

The way to enter Figure and Table numbers in the titles of figures and tables is to use the ‘Insert –

Reference – Caption’ feature in the ‘Insert’ menu.

For example, to enter a Figure number and Figure title, do the following:



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• Immediately below the figure, enter ‘Insert – Reference – Caption’ and select ‘Figure’ as

the Label in this window. This is shown on the left of Figure 3.4 below.

Figure 3.4. Example of Figure numbering

• Clicking ‘OK’ at this stage will put ‘Figure 1’ (or 2, 3 etc, in sequence) into this position,

if you just use the default. The default will give you figure numbering that starts from

Figure 1 and continues sequentially right through the document. You then manually enter

a ‘period’ and a space and then the figure title after the ‘Figure 1’. The whole thing will,

by default, be given the ‘Caption’ style.

• If you want to have alternative numbering (including the Heading1 level number for

example – which is the chapter number in this case, with numbering starting afresh in

each chapter), then, when you have the Caption window open, select ‘Numbering …’, as

above.

o By ticking ‘Include chapter number’ and ‘Chapter starts with Heading 1’, and ‘Use

separator .(period)’, the Figure number appears as shown above for Figure 3.4. This is

the format I have used in the example thesis document.

o You can also change the actual number format by choosing from the list in the top

panel.

• The Figure itself should be given the ‘Figure’ style (this style has ‘Keep with Next’

selected, so that the figure will then never be separated from the Figure title). The

‘Caption’ style has ‘Keep lines together’ selected, so that the Figure caption will not break

across a page break.

Exactly the same procedure is used for Table Numbers (selecting ‘Table’ as the caption, and

ticking ‘include chapter number’ and choosing ‘.(period) as the separator (it’s neater than the

default hyphen).

Note that I have built these steps into two Macros, one for entering the Figure number

(simultaneously hold down ‘Alt-F’), and one for Table number (‘Alt-T’). However, these will



13

only work if you have gone through the process once (for both Figure and Table captions) of

setting up the ‘Numbering’ as shown in Figure 3.4.

The method of numbering and cross-referencing equation will be explained in Section 3.7.

3.6 INSERTING CROSS-REFERENCING TO FIGURES AND TABLES

If you rigorously follow the procedures above for labelling Figures and Tables, then it is

straightforward to insert automatic cross-referencing to these. What this means is that if you refer

to a particular Figure by its number in the text, and subsequently the number for that Figure

changes, then if you have used cross-referencing, the number in the text will also change, as it is

linked by the cross-referencing procedure to the actual Figure caption.

The easiest way is to demonstrate. Suppose I want to refer to the figure with the title ‘Styles pane

open on the right of screen’ earlier, I do the following:

• where I want to insert the reference, I do ‘Insert – Reference – Cross-reference’, and this

brings up the panel shown here (Figure 3.5).

• In the first window, select ‘Figure’ (or ‘Table’ if you are cross-referencing to a Table).

• In the bottom window, select the Figure you want to reference

• In the top right window, don’t select ‘Entire caption’ – that would insert the word

‘Figure’, plus the number, plus the whole text in the caption. Instead, select ‘Only label

and number’. Then click ‘Insert’, and ‘Close’. Result: Figure 3.1

Figure 3.5. Cross-referencing window – cross-referencing to a Figure number.

As explained in Section 3.4, the Figure and Table numbering using ‘Caption’, and the cross-

referencing to these, generate ‘Field codes’ hidden behind the text generated – you can see these

by ‘Right Clicking’ in the generated text and selecting ‘Toggle Field Codes’ to see the field code

(and repeating the ‘Toggle Field Code’ to hide it). Also, Fields do not automatically update, so

the Figure and Table numbering have to be forced to update using the options presented in

Section 3.4.



14

Note you can also cross-reference to other standard items, as you can see when you do an ‘Insert

– Reference – Cross-reference’ sequence. I used this to generate the reference to the ‘Fields’

section in the previous sentence, where I selected ‘Heading’ as the cross-reference item, and

selected the ‘Fields’ section heading, and selected ‘Heading number’ in the top right window of

the panel. If I subsequently inserted another section earlier than the ‘Fields’ section, the

reference to this section number would update correctly.

When cross-referencing to any of the above, it is also possible to cross-reference to the page on

which it appears – so I could refer to Section 3.1, where I choose to refer to ‘Heading number’,

and repeat this to show that this is located on Page 6 (by selecting ‘Page number’ in the options

menu).

If an item to which you have cross-referenced is deleted, the field containing the cross-reference

shows up as an error, like this: Fehler! Verweisquelle konnte nicht gefunden werden. (but only

when the field is updated).

To update all fields in a document, simply ‘Select All’, and ‘Right Click’ and select ‘Update

Fields’ (and selecting ‘update entire table’ if a choice is provided for the various tables of

contents).

3.7 AUTOMATIC EQUATION NUMBERING & CROSS-REFERENCING

I am most grateful to UWA PhD student Kok Kuen Lee for this method, and for permission to

include it in this document. It makes all of the descriptions of other tortuous methods on this

topic in my original document redundant, and hence I have removed it and replaced it with this

method.

The method (which I have modified slightly, and for which I have written a macro) involves

putting the equation and caption in a table1 (with border not shown). An example is shown

below:

2mcE = (1)

3.7.1 Equation numbering

Create a 2-column 1-row table, and type the equation using Equation Editor. Then select the

Equation, and do Insert_Caption_Equation; select Below selected item; and Exclude label from

caption.

1 For the aficionados, the reason for putting the number in a table is that it splits the number from the equation within

the caption, so that cross-referencing, and choosing ‘Entire caption’ does not include the equation itself in the cross-

referenced number.



15

This is the result:

2mcE =

2

In this case, I used the “Equation” label, or I could create any new label. You can choose to add

chapter numbers (numbering equations by chapter) or not, as you wish (by selecting

“Numbering” in the Caption box, as in the figure above.

Then, Cut and paste the equation number into the second column, and add an opening and a

closing bracket. Also delete the paragraph marker below the equation, adjust the cell widths to

choice, ‘centre justify’ equation in first cell, and ‘right justify’ the equation number in the second

cell. This is the result:

2mcE = (3)

As shown by the “Field Code” shading, the number, but not the brackets, are part of the Field

Code. You may also have to select the table, and use “Format _ Borders and Shading_None” to

get rid of borders (the light-grey borders showing on the document after this do not get printed).

I have written an “Equation” macro (Alt-N) that does all of this, except to change the cell width

of the first cell). If you run ‘Alt-N’, the result is as follows (and exits with the Equation Editor

open):

(4)

Just enter the equation in the normal way, or copy in a previous equation for editing, and change

the width of the first cell by dragging the vertical boundary line to the right.

The alternative macro ‘Alt-Q’ does exactly the same, but includes the Heading1 level number

with the equation, and re-starts the numbering with every new Heading1.:

I have not shown this here, as running ‘Alt-Q’ changes all the previous ‘Equation’ tags to include

Chapter (i.e. Heading1) number also. Of course, you would choose either Alt-N or Alt-Q, but not

both, in the same document.



16

For the subsequent equations in the same document, there is no need to repeat the above

procedures, but just copy the entire table (including all its contents) to the relevant place, and then

delete the old equation and replace it with the new one. The equation number remains. Highlight

the entire table and update the code (i.e. press F9), and the equation number will automatically

update following the correct sequence. Of course, it is easier to use the option of running the

macro ‘Alt-N’, or ‘Alt-Q’.

3.7.2 Cross-referencing equations

With the way the equations are numbered above, the equation can be cross-referenced in the

usual way – e.g. as in “The mass-energy relationship is given by Equation (1)”.

This is done by the usual manner of Insert – Reference – Cross-reference – Equation and select

the corresponding equation number and insert with the option of “Entire caption”. Though the

brackets are not part of the Field Code, they are included because of the selection of “Entire

caption”.

If you select the box ‘Insert as hyperlink’, this makes the number a clickable link back to the

equation it refers to.

3.8 TABLES

Tables are inserted using the Table menu in Word. The default style for the text in a Table is

‘Normal’ – which is fine, but it will give excessive spacing (as we have set up Normal style to

have ‘8-point after’ paragraph spacing. Don’t panic – just use a different style for text within a

table.

I have set up a Style ‘Table text’ which can be applied to all cells in the table, which will give ‘3-

point before’ and ‘3-point’ after spacing, and will centre the items in the table. This, of course,

can be changed, either by changing manually, or by changing the ‘Table text’ style.



17

Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 4 Item 5

23 44 55 66 77

Table 3.1 Table with ‘Table text’ style applied.

The normal ‘Format – Borders and Shading’ menu item is used to put borders around the whole

table (and individual cells or groups of cells) as required. In this example, I have put the Table

caption below the table, but it is common also to put it above the table.

3.9 FIGURES

3.9.1 Placement of Figures

• Traditionally, the only practical way of including Figures in a thesis document was to

group them all together at the end of the document, as it was too difficult to incorporate

them into the text. This is still a perfectly acceptable method, and in some ways, I find it

easier to read a thesis if this is done, but I recognise that this may be old-fashioned. It is

generally the method used in engineering consulting practices to incorporate figures

within a report (mainly because figures come in such a variety of formats that it is not

always practical to incorporate them into the text).

• A slight alternative to this is to group Figures for each Chapter together at the end of each

Chapter.

• Most people seem to want to embed the Figures in the text (as is done in most textbooks,

for example). This is definitely more work than the previous alternatives – in fact, it looks

like Microsoft has conspired to make it as difficult as possible, and with each new version

of Word, some previous faults are rectified, and new ones are introduced!

Word has different options for how a figure is embedded with the text. The most simple to deal

with is to always have the figure ‘In line with text’, where it is treated like any other paragraph.

(This default is set in the ‘Tools – Options’ menu in the ‘Insert/Paste pictures as’ box.)

With some of the other options, the figure can be moved to any location on the page, with the text

‘flowing around’ the figure, or hidden behind the figure (and, for example, allowing the figure to

be anchored at the top of the page, or the bottom of the page). However, these other options give

much more hassle than they are worth for long documents. (The way the figure jumps around the

page as extra text is inserted earlier in the document is very difficult to control). The figure also

tends to get separated from the figure caption. To overcome this, the figure caption and the

figure can be enclosed with the same text box, but then the possibility of automatic cross-

referencing is lost. (The text within the text box is ‘invisible’ to the document).

Drawing within Word

You can draw simple diagrams with Word directly using the Drawing toolbar, which you can

open permanently using ‘View – Toolbars’, and ticking the ‘Drawing’ box. To do a drawing, go

to a new paragraph, and click on any of the drawing tools. See Figure 3.6. A box opens on the



18

page with ‘Create your drawing here’ written in it. Note that this only occurs if you have ticked

‘Automatically create drawing canvas when inserting AutoShapes’ in the ‘Tools – Options –

General’ menu window. If you don’t have this ticked, then drawing within Word can produce

very bizarre results – with the output lying on top of the text as a floating object.

Once it is drawn, the bounding box can be cropped to fit the drawing. Clicking outside the

drawing closes the box. Clicking inside it again opens the box.

Figure 3.6. A drawing created using Word’s drawing toolbar

Once the drawing is selected, any element within the box can be edited, and this includes moving

it outside the box. This is when the fun (i.e. frustration) starts, as this element then becomes a

separate drawing, and, by default does not have the ‘Align with text’ format. Try it with the

drawing above. Click the green square for example, and drag it outside the bounding box. It is

now a ‘floating drawing’, and, if it is lying on top of text, the text will be invisible beneath it.

This can be changed using ‘Right Click’ on the object, and selecting ‘Format picture’ or ‘Format

autoshape’ or ‘Format text box’ (if you clicked on the text). Very quickly, everything goes awry.

To avoid this, when you want to edit the picture in a way that requires more room that is currently

with the bounding box, just enlarge the bounding box first using the crop handles, and then edit

away, keeping all drawing within the box.

Drawing within Powerpoint

A drawing created within Powerpoint behaves exactly as just described if the drawing is pasted

directly into Word using the ‘Paste’ command. This is the case even if all the elements are

‘Grouped’ together in Powerpoint before pasting. If you use ‘Paste As…’, and select ‘Picture’, it

will be pasted in as a picture that you can’t edit in Word.

So, you could use Powerpoint to create your drawings, and keep all the drawings in a single

Powerpoint file (e.g. one per page), and paste them as ‘pictures’ into Word. This keeps all your

original drawings together, and, as pictures within Word, prevents them being accidentally

separated into different bits.

Click anywhere within

drawing area to see the

drawing bounding box.

Use the handles to enlarge

or to crop to size



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Drawings created with Drawing Programs or Computer Output

More detailed drawings created using drawing or graphics packages (e.g. Autocad, Corel Draw,

etc) may be pasted into the Word document – probably best done as ‘Paste As..Picture’. The

original drawing, saved in the format native to the drawing package, can be edited and re-pasted,

as required, within the drawing package. Graphic output created by (for example) various Finite

Element packages may also be importable into Word, depending on the format of the output –

experiment to see how to do it.

As a last resort, you can do ‘screen capture’ (‘Control – PrtScn’), which puts a snapshot of the

screen into the clipboard, and paste this into your document as a bitmap. The normal picture

editing tools can be used – e.g. use the ‘crop’ tool to get rid of the part of the picture you don’t

want, and the sizing handles to adjust the size. This is how I created the screen shots shown

earlier.

3.9.2 Importing EXCEL Figures

‘Paste Special…Paste as …Picture’

To import an Excel figure (or Excel Chart in Microsoft-speak) into Word, do not paste it in as a

‘Microsoft Excel Chart Object’, but always as a ‘Picture’. I repeat - do not paste it in as a

‘Microsoft Excel Chart Object’, but always as a ‘Picture’. (Different versions of Word have

different defaults for ‘Paste’ – my current version defaults to pasting an Excel chart as a picture,

so there is no problem, but on other versions, I know that the default would paste as an Excel

Chart object, and I had to always use ‘Paste Special … Paste As …Picture’).

If you paste the figure in directly, you are also pasting in the entire worksheet hidden behind the

Figure, with the result that your file size will increase dramatically each time you paste a Chart –

not a good idea if you are going to paste in dozens of charts!

‘Paste Special … Paste Link’

There is another option, which is to do ‘Paste Special..” and choose ‘Paste Link..’. This still

pastes the Chart in as a Picture, but maintains a link to the Chart in the Excel workbook. Thus,

you can click on the Chart picture within Word, and it opens up the Chart within the Excel

workbook. This link is maintained, even if you move the Excel workbook to another directory on

your computer.

In previous versions of Word, this feature never worked very well, and I after trying to use it for a

few years, I gave up in frustration. However, I re-looked at it in writing this document, and now

it appears very robust. It has the advantage that you can always find the original Chart, even

though in Word it simply appears as a picture. Nevertheless, I cannot recommend this method

with a large thesis document and a large number of linked Excel Charts, as I do not know how it

would perform in these circumstances.

The method I use for large documents is outlined in the next section.

No matter which method you use to import your Excel figures, do not add any additional

annotation, comments, or other graphics onto the image within Word. Do so back in the Excel



20

spreadsheet (this is similar to the recommendation given earlier with regard to adding graphics to

pictures – refer to Figure 1.1)

3.9.3 Colour or Black & White for Excel plots?

Since we still don’t have readily-available (and cheap) colour photocopiers (and most journals

and other means of publishing technical papers use B&W), you should probably prepare all

charts using B&W only. This means careful choice of symbols to differentiate between different

curves on the same chart. You could use colour, but you will have to have access to a colour

printer, as we will not be providing colour printing for theses anytime in the near future, and you

will also have to have a colour photocopier to make additional copies (or print each copy

separately on your colour printer).

3.10 ORGANISATION OF FIGURES WITHIN EXCEL

For many technical theses, the bulk of the Figures in the document will consist of Excel-

generated graphs (‘Charts’), originating from output from experimental work or computer

modelling work, and manipulated and processed within Excel. Inevitably, these Charts will come

from many different Excel workbooks. If the recommendation regarding ‘pasting as picture’

given above is followed, there is no link between the figure in the text and the original Excel

workbook (maintaining the link, by pasting in as an Excel Chart Object, is definitely not a good

idea, for the reasons given above).

The method that I use in preparing any significant-sized document with lots of Excel Charts is as

follows:

• Do the manipulation of the data within the original workbook, getting the format more-or-

less correct (i.e. the final format you require in the Word document).

• Having done this for all the figures in a section, create a new Workbook, and give it a

name such as: “Thesis Figures” or “Thesis Figures Chapter 3”, or whatever. If the former,

maybe use different spreadsheets within the workbook for the figures in each Chapter

(with appropriate labelling of these spreadsheets).

• Copy the first Chart, and paste it into a Spreadsheet in that Workbook. (Make sure that

you use ‘Paste’, and not ‘Paste As..’, to preserve the dynamic link between the Chart and

the data from the original worksheet). Adjust the size, line thicknesses, fonts, grid line

types and thicknesses (if any), etc, until satisfied. Select, and paste into your Word

document as a picture. (By the way, be sure to switch off the ‘Auto Scale’ option in the

‘Format Chart Area – Font’ menu, or it will drive you mad!).

• If the size is what you want (e.g. about a third of the size of your A4 page), then proceed.

If not, go back to the Excel “Thesis Figures” workbook, and adjust the size etc, and repeat

the paste into Word, and repeat this until you are happy with the final format. Ideally,

after you paste into Word, you should not have to adjust the size (this changes font sizes

etc).



21

• Now you can paste successive figures into the same Excel worksheet, and since you know

what the first one looks like, the others can be easily adjusted to be the same size and

format. When completed, do ‘Paste as…Picture’ for each in turn into the appropriate

location in the Word document.

• Note that if you line up the borders of the charts with cell boundary lines, it is easy to

change the widths of all charts by just changing the width of the columns in which the

row of charts lie (or the heights of all charts by changing the heights of the rows)

• Save this Excel ‘figures’ workbook in the same directory as your thesis document, so you

always know where to find it. If you need to edit any Excel figure in the thesis, go to

Excel ‘figures’ workbook, and do the editing there, and re-paste (‘as picture’) into Word.

• Some editing requires that the original source file be open when doing the editing; finding

this is now no problem, because selecting any data point in the figure will show you the

directory path to find the original data file.

• If you organise your data in this way, it is very important to not move original data files

around from one directory to another. If you do so, the link between the Excel figure in

the ‘figures’ workbook and the original data may be broken. So, setting up a logical

directory structure at the start helps enormously to keep you organised.

3.11 GENERATING TABLES OF CONTENTS, LISTS OF FIGURES

3.11.1 Standard Table of Contents

If you have followed the rules above with regard to using the Heading styles, then generating a

Table of Contents automatically is relatively simple.

In the ‘starting’ instructions in Section 3.1, we reserved the first section of the document of the

Title Page and the Letter to the Dean, and the second section to Abstract, Table of Contents, etc.

Go back now to that section. In the Table of Contents, we will want to include these initial bits

and pieces. So, just enter the headings you will need in this section – i.e. Abstract,

Acknowledgements, Table of Contents, List of Tables, List of Figures, Nomenclature, with a

blank paragraph between them (do not apply any formatting to them).



22

Figure 3.7. The Table of Contents window.

Place the cursor in the blank paragraph below Table of Contents, and

• Select ‘Insert – Reference – Index and Tables’ and click on the ‘Table of Contents’ tab.

Figure 3.7 shows the window that opens, with the correct choices made.

• In this case, under ‘Show levels’, we have asked to include up to 3 levels of headings

(Heading1, Heading2, Heading3, but not Heading4). The format we have chosen is

‘From template’, which we will explain in a minute.

• We have also ticked ‘Show page numbers’, and ‘Right align page numbers’ (which will

show page numbers placed on the right-hand margin with a ‘right tab’. The ‘Tab leader’

selected is ‘…….’, which will place a dotted line between the end of the entry and the

page number. See the Table of Contents at the start of this document for an example.

• By selecting ‘From template’ as the format, the Table of Contents entries are

automatically tagged with styles TOC 1, TOC 2, TOC 3 etc for the various heading levels.

These styles can be edited using the normal style editing procedures.

• Note that with the TOC styles in this document, I have ticked them to ‘Automatically

update’, such that if you manually adjust one entry with TOC 1 style, for example, then

all entries, and the style definition itself, changes to reflect this change. Do not do this for

general styles.

• The Table of Contents does not update automatically (otherwise, it would be continually

updating as you typed in new material). To force it to update, just ‘Right click’ anywhere

with the Table, and select ‘Update Fields’, and then select ‘Update entire table’.

3.11.2 Adding other items to the Table of Contents

The Table of Contents generated using the above procedure will contain only entries

corresponding to the selected number of Heading levels (3 in this case). There are a number of

ways to include other items:



23

• We could label the extra items (Abstract, etc) in the preliminary sections as Heading1, and

re-do the numbering to have ‘None’. This will strip the numbering from all headings

throughout the document. To then re-establish the numbering for the headings in the main

part of the document, go forward to the Introduction, and re-apply the numbering, but

select ‘Apply changes to this point forward’. This is not what I have done.

• The alternative is to use some general non-heading style – which, perhaps confusingly, I

have called ‘General Heading’.

• To include these headings in the Table of Contents, re-do the ‘Insert – Reference – Index

and Tables – Table of Contents’ sequence above, but now select ‘Options’, and include

the ‘General Heading’ style as a Table of Contents level 1 entry (enter a ‘1’ in the box

following this style (a ‘tick’ appears in front of the style name) – see Figure 3.8

• Scrolling through this table shows that already the Heading1, Heading2 and Heading3

levels are selected, with appropriate TOC levels assigned.

Figure 3.8. Including additional style items in the Table of Contents

3.11.3 List of Figures, List of Tables, etc

The procedure for generating a List of Figures is practically identical to that just described.

• Put the cursor into the location where you want the List of Figures entered (after the

heading ‘List of Figures’ in the preliminary section.

• In ‘Index and Tables, select ‘Table of Figures’ (irrespective of whether it’s a List of

Figures, or a List of Tables, or a list of any other ‘Captioned’ items).

• In the ‘Caption label’ box, select ‘Figure’, and tick ‘Include label and number’ to include

the Figure number with the Figure text, and click ‘OK’. See Figure 3.9.

• Do exactly the same to insert a List of Tables, except that ‘Table’ instead of ‘Figure’ is

selected as the ‘Caption label.



24

• The style ‘Table of Figures’ is the default style for these – this style is also tagged as

‘Automatically update’, so that altering the appearance of any one entry automatically

updates the style, and hence updates all entries.

Figure 3.9. Inserting a List of Figures.

3.12 INCLUDING REFERENCES IN YOUR DOCUMENT

The attached thesis document shows examples of how to refer to a list of references at the end of

the document, and how to present the list of references.

3.12.1 ‘EndNote’ Software

In fact, there is very powerful software for doing this, which is used for major works, but it is

probably not warranted for an undergraduate thesis in engineering. This software is called

‘EndNote’ (not to be confused with the Footnote and Endnote functions within Word), and is free

to UWA staff and students. This is used first to generate a whole data base of references, as you

go about your background reading, which can then be referred to from within any document, and

which allows a list of references for that document to be constructed automatically. I have not

used it for this purpose, and so cannot offer advice on whether or not it is worth the effort to use it

for your thesis.

If you are interested, you can find details at this link, and the staff in the library can give help in

its use:

http://www.library.uwa.edu.au/guides/endnote/index.html

3.12.2 Manual entry

I have only ever used a ‘manual’ method of referencing. There are different accepted formats for

the references, and how to refer to them, in different fields of study, and in different journals, but

the most commonly used in my field (geomechanics) is as set out below.

When referring to an article within the text, use the format:



25

• “…..Author_surname & Author_surname (date)…” if there are two authors, or

“…..Author et al. (date)…” if there are more than two authors.

• Thus, for the references given below, these would be referred to in the text as “….

Whitlow (2001)…”; “….Wu (2002)….”; “….Kohata et al. (1997)…”; “….Baldi et al.

(1989)…” and “….Foti & Fahey 2003)…”

The list of references is assembled at the end of the text, using the format: Author1, Initials,

Author2, Initials,…..& AuthorLast, Initials (year). Reference.

The form of the ‘Reference’ depends on the type of publication (Note no inverted commas

around titles):

• For a book: Book title. Edition No, Publisher details:

o Whitlow, R. (2001). Basic Soil Mechanics. 4th Ed., Prentice-Hall, UK.

• For a thesis: Thesis title. Type of Thesis (i.e. PhD thesis, Honours thesis, etc), University

name:

o Wu, L. (2002). Dilatometer testing in Perth soils compared to other in situ testing

techniques. Honours thesis, The University of Western Australia.

• For a journal article: Title of the article. Title of Journal, Vol. xx, No. xx, xxx-xxx (where

No. xx is the issue number, and xxx-xxx indicates page range)

o Kohata, Y., Tatsuoka, F., Wang, L., Jiang, G.L., Hoque, E. & Kodaka, T. (1997).

Modelling of non-linear deformation properties of stiff geomaterials. Géotechnique,

Vol. 47, No. 3, 563-580.

• For an article in a Conference Proceedings: Title of Article. Proc. of Title of Conference,

Conference City, Vol. xx, xxx-xxx, Publisher of Proceedings.

o Baldi, G., Belloti, R., Ghionna, V.H., Jamiolkowski, M. & Lo Presti, D.C. (1989).

Modulus of sands from CPTs and DMTs. Proc. 12th International Conference on

SMFE, Rio de Janeiro, Vol. 1, 165-170, Balkema, Rotterdam.

o Foti, S. & Fahey, M. (2003). Applications of multistation surface wave testing. Proc.

3rd International Symposium on Deformation Characteristics of Geomaterials (IS-

Lyon), Lyon, France, 13–20, Balkema, Lisse.

• The common elements are that the actual book title is the only part in italics, and that the

date is in brackets. Journal titles have standardised abbreviations (e.g. J. Geotech. Engng

for Journal of Geotechnical Engineering) but you can write the whole title rather than

trying to invent abbreviations if you are not familiar with the standard abbreviations.

3.12.3 Sorting reference list into alphabetical order

The reference list should put into alphabetical order. This can be done very easily:



26

• Select the whole reference list, once all references are entered.

• Select ‘Table – Sort’, and select ‘Sort by - Paragraphs’ and ‘Type – text’ and ‘Ascending’

and ‘No heading row’. Done.

3.13 AN EXAMPLE THESIS

The example thesis provided illustrates most, or all, of the points made in the preceding sections.

Since it is mostly covered above, only a few additional comments are given here.

I used the style ‘General Heading’, which is not a ‘Heading’ style in the Word sense, to tag the

headings in the first section, and then, when inserting the Table of Contents, included this style as

one of the ‘Options’ in the ‘Table of Contents’, being treated (for this purpose only) like a

Heading Level 1.

The thesis contains a number of Appendices, which were used to present extra data plots. The

appendices are numbered A to G. The easiest way of labelling them would be to do so manually.

However, this will then not allow the subsections within the various appendices, and the figure

numbering in the appendices, to be done automatically. In spite of this, manual entry may be the

most efficient.

However, just to show what can be done, I used automatic numbering. As the author of the thesis

wanted to continue the figure numbering convention used earlier (i.e. figures numbered by

Chapter, with the Chapter number included in the Figure number), the Appendix headings had to

be given ‘Heading 1’ style, but the ‘Chapter’ was not required before the number.

To get around this, the appendices are numbered as follows:

• Each appendix starts with a blank line. This blank line is then tagged with the ‘Heading

1’ style. This labels these appendices Chapter 10, Chapter 11, etc., with no chapter title.

• The cursor is placed in the first of these (Chapter 10), and ‘Format – Bullets and

Numbering – Outline numbered’ selected. Then, select ‘Customize’, and fill in the fields

as in Figure 3.10. Instead of ‘Chapter’ before the number, enter ‘Appendix’, and then

select the number type to be ‘A, B, C…’, and ‘Starts at A’.

• It is very important to select ‘Apply changes to this point forward’, otherwise the changes

you make will affect all the previous chapter numbering.



27

Figure 3.10. ‘Bullets and numbering” settings for setting the Appendix headings in the thesis document.

This works, after a fashion. However, it should be noted that re-defining headings like this can

be very troublesome - because the numbering is related to Heading styles, the change you make

here can rebound back into the earlier part of the document, so you can end up going around in

circles. If you are going to adopt this approach, don’t do so until the very last operation (just

before you print the document), or it will drive you crazy as you go around in circles!

Note that this complicates page numbering. In this document, I have just numbered the pages

consecutively, but it is also common to have page numbers in the format 1.2, where the ‘1’ refers

to the Chapter number, and the ‘2’ refers to the page number in the chapter (just as for Figure

numbering). However, changing the Heading1 styles as above makes this sort of numbering

behave erratically. (In fact, I could not work out how to have the chapter page numbers as 1.1, 1.2

etc mixed up with the Appendices having page numbers A.1, A.2, etc., so if anyone has a

suggestion ….).

If you can’t see all of

this, be sure to select

“More” here



28

CHAPTER 4. LANGUAGE, AND SOME COMMON ERRORS1

This is not meant to be an English language or grammar tutorial; it just discusses some of the

most common sources of error that I come across in reviewing students’ work2.

• Writing style for technical work tends to be in the 3rd person impersonal (‘passive voice’),

rather than in a personal ‘active voice’. ‘The testing was carried out using…’ rather than

‘I carried out the testing using …’. Many people see this as awkward and unnatural (and

the Word style checker always objects to it), but for the present that is the common usage

in engineering writing.

• Try not to mix tenses in describing experimental work, or other work. Generally, use past

tense. In come cases, the present tense can be used to describe a general procedure – e.g.

if describing how to do a triaxial test in general, you might use the present tense (but do

so consistently): ‘… a triaxial test is carried out by first selecting the sample. The sample

is then set up in the cell …..” etc. However, when talking about a particular experiment

or series of experiments that you did, use the past tense.

• Agreement of number: Know what is the subject of the sentence (is it singular or plural),

and make sure the verb agrees. Mistakes occur in this regard when the subject is separated

from the verb by clauses that contain plurals. ‘The aim of all the tests presented in these

documents is….”: the singular verb (is) agrees with subject (aim); do not get tricked by

the plurals in “tests” and “documents” into using the plural “are”3.

• Standard usage in Australia is to use ‘Australian’ rather than ‘US’ spelling. This is

selected at the start of any document under ‘Tools – Language’, and, after selecting

‘English (Australia)’ select this as ‘Default..’. Having the correct language selected will

allow the spell checker to check spelling according to the language selected.

o The main differences are in some spellings – ‘colour’, ‘labour’ (Aus) rather than

‘color’, ‘labor’ (US), and many more. The SI units in Australian are ‘metre’ and ‘litre’,

not ‘meter’ and ‘liter’ as in US. A ‘meter’ is a gauge for measuring something (not a

‘gage’). Our cars have ‘tyres’; US cars have ‘tires’.

o Whether there is a single or double ‘l’ in going from the verb to the present or past

participle – as ‘to model’ – ‘modelling’ (Aus), or ‘modeling’ (US) – and likewise for

1 I recommend that if you feel you need to, grab a copy of simple books on writing English, such as R.F. Bailey’s “A

Survival Kit for Writing English” (Longman Cheshire).

2 The initial version of this section was very much shorter, but feedback from other members of staff, and others, has

resulted in it growing to its present size.

3 This type of error is called an “attraction error”, in which the verb is “attracted” to the nearest preceding (plural)

noun rather than to the correct singular noun that is the subject of the sentence.



29

‘labelling’, etc. A ‘programme of work’ in Australia, would be ‘a program of work’ in

the US, though even in Australia we seem to have adopted ‘program’ for ‘computer

program’ (and I think the ‘programme’ battle is just about lost generally).

o Where US practice has many verb endings in ‘..ize’, Australian practice is to use

‘…ise’ – e.g. ‘realize’, ‘customize’, ‘pressurize’, etc, in US usage would be ‘realise’,

‘customise’, ‘pressurise’ in Australia. If you universally follow the ‘..ise’ practice, you

get into less trouble than if you use the ‘…ize’ practice, though blanket rules don’t

work either way (the boat in Australia capsizes, just as in the US)1. When the ‘Tools –

Language – Set Language’ option is set to English (Australia) as the default (as in this

document) the Word spelling checker will indicate a spelling error if US practice is

followed.

o Note that many miss-spelt words are automatically corrected if you have ‘AutoCorrect’

switched on. To find out, open ‘Tools – AutoCorrect Options’, and if ‘Replace text as

you type’ is ticked, then the corrections given in the list on that menu are automatically

made as you type. Take note also of the other ‘AutoCorrect’ options on this menu.

• Correct case for personal pronouns. “He gave the job to John and I” is incorrect; “He

gave the job to John and me” is correct. You can see this by leaving out the ‘John and’ – I

don’t think anyone would say “He gave the job to I”. (I’m sure this is a left-over from

everyone being belted behind the ears as kids for saying such things such as “Him and me

went to the movies”. Certain ABC sports commentators obviously got belted behind the

ears for this more than most!). So, these are correct: “He and I went to the movies”. “I

gave the money to John and him”. “The note came from me and him” (though here you

would usually put the other person before yourself!).

• The ‘apostrophe disease’ is rampant in English usage in Australia, when in fact the rules

are very simple. An apostrophe is used:

o To indicate the possessive case – before the final ‘s’ in the singular case, and after the

final ‘s’ for the plural case: John’s hat; the woman’s hat; the farmer’s work (one

farmer), the Farmers’ Journal (more than one farmer)2. But the possessive case for

personal pronouns does not use the apostrophe. This is obvious with ‘his’ or ‘hers’ or

‘yours’ or ‘ours’, so why would you want to write ‘it’s’ or ‘their’s’ for the possessive

case of ‘it’ or ‘their’? (The possessive case of ‘it’ is ‘its’).

1 Actually there are rules. Whether you use the ‘-ise’ or ‘-ize’ ending depends on the origin of the word (Greek or

Latin).

2 Inanimate objects do not ‘possess’ anything, so use of the possessive case for inanimate objects is somewhat

awkward : ‘ … the experiment’s aim..’ is hardly good English, when you mean ‘…the aim of the experiment..’.

Ditto ‘… the car’s door …, ‘….the sample’s size ..’ would be better written as ‘… the door of the car..’ or ‘…the size

of the sample …’



30

o Words already ending in ‘s’: “…James’s version of events…” is better than “…James’

version of events...”. (“Guinness has been brewed at the St James’s Gate Brewery in

Dublin since 1756”).

o An apostrophe is used to indicate missing bits of words: don’t = do not; can’t = can

not; wouldn’t = would not; etc. This is where the confusion regarding it’s comes from:

it’s = it is, and is not the possessive case of ‘it’. (Often, the ‘missing bits’ apostrophe

is dropped over time – it would be simply ostentatious to write ’phone, ’plane, ’bus,

photo’, even though there are bits left out of the original words: telephone, aeroplane,

omnibus, photograph).1

o Common sense has to be used to recognise the difference between the possessive case

and the ‘missing letter’ case: ….John’s briefcase…. John’s mad… John’s mad

brother..

o The ‘apostrophe disease’ refers to the idiotic practice of using an apostrophe + s to

indicate simple plural – the thinking being that: if an ‘s’ is added to a word, then it

‘feels’ right that it should be separated from the word by an apostrophe, because that is

what is done for possessive case! (Thus the signs such as “Hamburg’s and Chip’s for

sale” - aaaagghhhhhh. For some reason or another, this is called a Grocer’s

Apostrophe in the UK). The temptation to stray is strongest when the word ends with

a vowel – e.g. these are all incorrect as plurals, but many people succumb: comma’s,

hernia’s, pea’s in a pod, flea’s on the dog, toe’s, shoe’s, etc. (If you were really

pedantic, you might argue that photo’s is a correct plural, where the apostrophe here

indicates the missing bit of the word ‘photographs’).

o Another variant of the ‘apostrope disease’ uses it for plurals of words ending in ‘y’ –

e.g. “the lady’s went to the races”, when the correct plural is “ladies”. A certain pet

shop on Canning Highway in South Perth compounds this – the shop is called

“Guppy’s and Puppy’s”, when presumably they meant it to be “Guppies and Puppies”.

o Plurals of acronyms should not be given an apostrophe: Thus, LVDTs is the plural of

LVDT (and not LVDT’s). This allows there to be a different meaning to: “.. the PM’s

mad..” (the Prime Minister is mad2) and “…the PMs are mad ..” (not just our PM, but

all PMs, are mad). Common sense realises there is a difference between “…the PM’s

mad..” and “….the PM’s wife…” and “…the PM’s wives…” (no, I don’t think he has

more than one, but that’s how we would say it if he had!) and “….the PMs’ wives…”

(the wives of all the PMs).

1 Colloquial-style writing accepts these contractions – and I’ve used them in this document to ‘lighten’ the style – but

in general they are not used in technical writing.

2 Historical note: I wrote this when John Howard was Prime Minister of Australia.



31

o However, individual letters need an apostrophe in the plural – “ there are four ss, two

ps and two is in Mississippi…” should be “…there are four s’s, two p’s and two i’s in

Mississippi..”. Similarly “don’t forget to dot your i’s and cross your t’s” is a terrible

cliché, but at least it’s grammatically correct.

• Relative pronouns ‘that’ and ‘which’: The simplest rule to follow is:

o the relative pronoun ‘ that’ (never with a comma before it) indicates that the clause

that follows is ‘defining’ – it defines the noun it refers to: ‘I avoid all plants that are

poisonous to people’ - indicates that it is only those particular plants that I avoid, and

not plants in general. Very often, the “that are” or “that is” can be omitted: “Find the

needle in the haystack” is more efficient, and just as correct as: “Find the needle that is

in the haystack”.

o the relative pronoun ‘which’ (always with a comma before it) indicates that the clause

that follows is ‘descriptive’ – it gives additional description of the noun, but could be

left out without making a nonsense of the sentence. Thus: ‘The term in situ, which

comes from the Latin, is used to describe conditions in the ground’. The ‘which’

clause could be left out – it is simply providing extra description, and removing it does

not alter the basic meaning of the sentence1.

• Relative personal pronouns (actually not really an issue in technical thesis writing): The

English language does not have separate relative pronouns for ‘defining’ and ‘descriptive’

purposes, so the difference between ‘defining’ and ‘descriptive’ clauses has to be shown

using the ‘comma’ rule – no comma before the relative pronoun indicates a defining

clause, whereas a comma before it indicates a descriptive clause:

o “All Australians who love cricket drink lots of beer” has a different meaning to “All

Australians, who love cricket, drink lots of beer”. The former means that “only those

Australians who love cricket drink lots of beer”, but the latter means that “all

Australians, irrespective of who they are, drink lots of beer – and by the way, all

Australians love cricket”.

o “I swore at the man who hit me on the nose” has a completely different meaning to: “I

swore at the man, who hit me on the nose”. In the first, the hitting brought about the

swearing, whereas in the second, the swearing came first, resulting in the hitting.

Similarly, there is a big difference between: “The preacher berated the man who killed

his dog” and “The preacher berated the man, who killed his dog”. (Yes, OK, being

berated by a preacher might make you do strange things, including killing his dog).

1 It is not incorrect to use a ‘which’ clause as a qualifying clause, but you must do so without a comma before it (i.e.

a ‘which’ clause without a preceding comma is exactly the same as a ‘that’ clause). However, I think (and others

agree) that the “that – which” rule explained above ensures clarity.



32

• ‘the effect’, ‘to effect’, ‘to affect’,

o The noun is ‘effect’: ‘The effect of his error was that the bridge collapsed’. There is

no noun ‘affect’.

o The verb ‘to affect’ has different meaning from the verb ‘to effect’. “To affect’ means

‘ to have an influence on something’ (or ‘to have an effect on something)’, but ‘to

effect’ means to bring it about: “His error affected the stability of the bridge” (it had

some effect on it – could even improve the stability). “His error effected the collapse

of the bridge” = it was the direct cause of the collapse. Similarly, ‘Ricky Ponting

effected a run out’ (he brought it about – in cricket for the uninitiated); ‘his broken arm

affected his batting’ (influenced it – as it probably would).

• ‘However’ is one of the most abused words in technical writing. Do not use ‘however’ to

link sentences together to form one in the same way as you can use normal ‘coordinating’

conjunctions “For-And-Nor-But-Or-Yet-So”. (‘However’ is a conjunctive adverb, not a

normal ‘linking’ or ‘coordinating conjunction’ – the latter are remembered by the aconym

FANBOYS: For-And-Nor-But-Or-Yet-So).

o This is OK: ‘I used to use a dictionary to check my spelling, but now I just rely on the

spell-checker…’, but not: ‘I used to use a dictionary to check my spelling, however

now I just rely on the spell-checker…’.

o ‘However’ can be used at the start of a sentence (followed always by a comma), or, if

used in the middle of a sentence in this way, requires a semi-colon before and a comma

afterwards: “I used to use a dictionary to check my spelling. However, now I just rely

on the spell-checker…” or “I used to use the dictionary to check my spelling; however,

now I just rely on the spell-checker…”. (‘Nevertheless’ often gets abused in the same

way as ‘however’, and there are many others.)

• Plurals used as singular – particularly ‘criterion’ (singular), with the plural being

‘criteria’. Also ‘phenomenon – phenomena’, ‘automaton – automata’, ‘symposium –

symposia’. There are lots of other words of similar Greek origin where we use the regular

English way of forming plural – ‘electron – electrons’, etc. (Probably also ‘moron –

morons’. The statement: ‘You are all mora’ may be true, does it does not sound quite

right, and does not have same emotional impact as “You are all morons”).

• There are also English words of Latin origin that follow the Latin rules for plural. Latin

nouns are grouped into ‘declensions’, with different rules for each:

o 1st Declension: singular – a, plural –ae: ‘antenna – antennae’, ‘formula – formulae’,

‘vertebra – vertebrae’

o 2nd Declension (masculine) singular –us (or –ius), plural –i (or ii): ‘stimulus – stimuli’;

‘cactus – cacti’; ‘nucleus – nuclei’, ‘focus – foci’, ‘radius – radii’.



33

o 2nd Declension (neuter) singular –um , plural –a: ‘quantum – quanta’, ‘spectrum –

spectra’, ‘quorum – quora’, ‘erratum – errata’, ‘medium – media’, etc. Also ‘data’ is a

plural word (singular is ‘datum’, but the singular and plural have evolved into

somewhat different meanings). “The data from the test are of very high quality...”.

o 3rd Declension: singular –is, plural –es: ‘thesis – theses’, ‘analysis – analyses’, ‘axis –

axes’, ‘basis – bases’, ‘crisis – crises’, ‘synopsis – synopses’.

• Though going out of fashion, hyphens still have a place in keeping meaning clear: “He

has a second hand grenade” is ambiguous – is it “He has a second-hand grenade” or “He

has a second hand-grenade”? Also used with hyphenated adjectives (where a group of

words forms an adjective): “…we have an ugly bearded lecturer” has a different meaning

to “…we have an ugly-bearded lecturer” (the first actually means that the lecturer is ugly

and bearded – may be true – while the second is clear that it’s the beard that’s ugly).

Also: “..a red winged butterfly..” (the butterfly is red and has wings), or “…a red-winged

butterfly…” (the butterfly has red wings). And: “he has a never-forgotten face”, but “his

face is never forgotten”. Generally, lists of adjectives are separated by commas (not

comma’s!), so the examples above where the adjectives are separate should probably be

written “…the ugly, bearded lecturer..”, and “…the red, winged butterfly…”.

• If you are pedantic (like me), you might insist that there should be a hyphen in “… he is a

well-meaning guy..”. However, it is probably generally accepted that if it does not result

in ambiguity to leave it out, it could be left out1.

• Dangling participles: These are called ‘dangling’ because they are placed too far from the

word they are referring to, and become attached to the wrong word: “Having cracked

down the middle, I removed the sample from the testing machine” (wrong – unless you

actually did crack down the middle). “Having taken the reading, the sample was removed

from the balance” (wrong – no, the sample cannot take readings). This error has formed

the basis of (weak) jokes: “If boiled long enough, your child should not get ill from

drinking the water” (hmmm, may be good advice…). “If properly nailed down, the cat

will not be able to move the box” (but the RSPCA might be interested in you…). “I shot

an elephant in my underwear” (Groucho Marx).

• Articles: definite article “the”, indefinite article “a” or “an”. If you are not a native

English speaker, you will probably find that the rules for using the definite article,

indefinite article (or no article at all) are very confusing. Wrong use of the article (or

leaving out the article) is the most common mistake I come across in writing by non-

native English speakers. The names help: use the definite article when something

‘definite’ is being referred to (if it is not already ‘definite’), and use the indefinite article

1 Copy editors for most international journals generally insist on a very strict use of hyphens in such cases.



34

when the object referred to is ‘indefinite’. Use no article when referring to general or

generic objects in the plural (there is no plural indefinite article).

o Proper nouns are already definite, so generally no article is required. Exceptions: some

cities and countries: The Hague, The Netherlands, The Levant.

o ‘Look for the sample’ refers to a particular sample; ‘look for a sample’ refers to any

sample. Likewise, in the plural: ‘Look for the samples’ (definite samples referred to);

‘look for samples’ (general).

• There, their, they’re; there’s, theirs: “There are many reasons for their lack of knowledge.

They’re just not trying to learn, and the loss is theirs. There’s not much we can do about

it”. Similarly: Your, you’re, yours. “The fault is yours, and if you’re not careful, you’re

going to fail your exam”.

• ‘Able to be’: “The result was able to be calculated …”; “the test was able to be done…”;

“the sample was able to be trimmed…”. Inanimate objects are not able to do anything.

They are also probably not ready to do anything, as in “…the test was ready to be

done…”, or “…the car was ready to be started…”.

• Reflexive pronouns – use only when there is reflexive meaning: “I hit myself on the

head”; “he shot himself in the foot”. But: “The boss gave the credit to John and me”, and

not “The boss gave the credit to John and myself”. (Again, a left-over from reluctance to

use ‘me’).

• Avoid using strings of nouns as adjectives, as in “…the sample density measurement error

estimation technique...”. The solution is to re-write, e.g. “…the technique for error

estimation in measurement of sample density…”.

• Finally, before you print the final version of your document: “Proofread carefully to see if

you any words out”.1

1 See the full list of ‘rules of grammar’ like this in the appendix.



35

APPENDIX A. HUMOROUS GRAMMAR RULES

No comment required (taken from www.creativeteachingsite.com/humorgrammar.htm ):

1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.

2. Never use a preposition to end a sentence with1. Winston Churchill, when once corrected on

this error, responded to the young man who corrected him by saying "Young man, that is the kind

of impudence up with which I will not put!”

3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.

4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive2.

5. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)

6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.

7. Be more or less specific.

8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.

9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies endlessly over and over again.

10. No sentence fragments.

11. Contractions aren't always necessary and shouldn't be used to excess so don’t3.

12. Foreign words and phrases are not always apropos.

13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous and can

be excessive.

14. All generalizations are bad.

15. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.

16. Don't use no double negatives.

17. Avoid excessive use of ampersands & abbrevs., etc.

18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

1 This rule can now be considered dead (but has not been finally buried). But care is still required: “Mom, what did

you bring that book I don't like to be read to out of up for?”

2 This ‘rule’ is also just about dead: splitting infinitives is now acceptable, where appropriate: after all, the mission of

the Starship Enterprise was “…to boldly go where no man had gone before…”

3 In this document, in the interest of informality, I have used contractions widely, but I would never do so in a formal

document – so don’t use them.



36

19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake (Unless they are as good as gold).

20. The passive voice is to be ignored1.

21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words, however, should be enclosed

in commas.

22. Never use a big word when substituting a diminutive one would suffice.

23. Don’t overuse exclamation points!!!

24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.

25. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth-shaking ideas

26. Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed and use it correctly

with words’ that show possession.

27. Don’t use too many quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me

what you know."

28. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a billion times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a

million can use it correctly. Besides, hyperbole is always overdone, anyway.

29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.

30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

31. Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

32. Who needs rhetorical questions? However, what if there were no rhetorical questions?

33. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

34. Avoid "buzz-words"; such integrated transitional scenarios complicate simplistic matters.

35. People don’t spell "a lot" correctly alot of the time.

36. Each person should use their possessive pronouns correctly.

37. All grammar and spelling rules have exceptions (with a few exceptions)....Morgan’s Law.

38. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

39. The dash – a sometimes useful punctuation mark – can often be overused – even though it’s a

helpful tool some of the time2.

1 Unfortunately or otherwise, the passive voice is used extensively in technical writing – see advice earlier on the

passive voice in Chapter 4.

2 I am probably guilty of overuse of hyphens for punctuation, as you will probably see from this document.



37

40. Proofread carefully to make sure you don’t repeat repeat any words.

41. In writing, it’s important to remember that dangling sentences.

41. When numbering in a written document, check your numbering system carefully.

42. It is important to use italics for emphasis sparingly.

43. In good writing, for good reasons, under normal circumstances, whenever you can, use

prepositional phrases in limited numbers and with great caution.

44. Avoid going out on tangents unrelated to your subject – not the subject of a sentence – that's

another story (like the stories written by Ernest Hemingway, who by the way wrote the great

fisherman story The Old Man and the Sea).

45. Complete sentences. Like rule 10.

46. Unless you're a righteous expert don't try to be too cool with slang to which you're not hip.

47. If you must use slang, avoid out-of-date slang. Right on!

48. You'll look poorly if you misuse adverbs.

49. Use the ellipsis ( . . . ) to indicate missing . . .

50. Use brackets to indicate that you [ not Shakespeare, for example ] are giving people [ in your

class ] information so that they [ the people in your class ] know about whom you are speaking.

But do not use brackets when making these references [ to other authors ] excessively.

51. Note: People just can't stomach too much use of the colon.

52. Between good grammar and bad grammar, good grammar is the best.

53. There are so many great grammar rules that I can't decide between them.

54. In English, unlike German, the verb early in the sentence, not later, should be placed.

55. When you write sentences, shifting verb tense is bad.



38

APPENDIX B. MACRO LISTING

These macros are embedded in this document (You can see them under “Tools_Macros” and

select one of them, and “Edit”). They will run with this document provided you have gone

through setting up the numbering options for the Figure and Table captions (See Section 3.5).

Note that you can change the shortcuts for these using the ‘Tools – Customize – Keyboard’, and

select ‘Macros’ from the drop-down list, and choose ‘Save in..’ ‘Thesis template.dot’. The full

list of macros within this template is shown – just scroll down to find the one you want to change,

and change the shortcut keys.

Equation with

number – not

including

chapter number

(Alt-N)

Sub Equation_No()

'

' Equation_No Macro

' Macro recorded 8/04/2009 by Martin Fahey

'

ActiveDocument.Tables.Add Range:=Selection.Range, NumRows:=1, NumColumns:= _

2, DefaultTableBehavior:=wdWord9TableBehavior, AutoFitBehavior:= _

wdAutoFitFixed

With Selection.Tables(1)

If .Style <> "Table Grid" Then

.Style = "Table Grid"

End If

.ApplyStyleHeadingRows = True

.ApplyStyleLastRow = True

.ApplyStyleFirstColumn = True

.ApplyStyleLastColumn = True

End With

Selection.InlineShapes.AddOLEObject ClassType:="Equation.3", FileName:="", _

LinkToFile:=False, DisplayAsIcon:=False

Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend

Selection.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphCenter

Selection.InsertCaption Label:="Equation", TitleAutoText:="InsertCaption3" _

, Title:="", Position:=wdCaptionPositionBelow, ExcludeLabel:=1


Selection.Cut

Selection.MoveDown Unit:=wdLine, Count:=1

Selection.TypeBackspace


Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCell

Selection.TypeText Text:="("

Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault)

Selection.TypeText Text:=")"

Selection.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphRight



.Borders(wdBorderLeft).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderRight).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderTop).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderBottom).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderVertical).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderDiagonalDown).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderDiagonalUp).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders.Shadow = False

End With



39

With Options

.DefaultBorderLineStyle = wdLineStyleSingle

.DefaultBorderLineWidth = wdLineWidth050pt

.DefaultBorderColor = wdColorAutomatic

End With

Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1

End Sub

Equation with

number –

including

chapter number

(Alt-Q)

Sub Eq_No_with_Chapter()

'

' Eq_No_with_Chapter Macro


'

ActiveDocument.Tables.Add Range:=Selection.Range, NumRows:=1, NumColumns:= _

2, DefaultTableBehavior:=wdWord9TableBehavior, AutoFitBehavior:= _

wdAutoFitFixed


If .Style <> "Table Grid" Then

.Style = "Table Grid"

End If

.ApplyStyleHeadingRows = True

.ApplyStyleLastRow = True

.ApplyStyleFirstColumn = True

.ApplyStyleLastColumn = True

End With

Selection.InlineShapes.AddOLEObject ClassType:="Equation.3", FileName:="", _

LinkToFile:=False, DisplayAsIcon:=False


Selection.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphCenter

With CaptionLabels("Equation")

.NumberStyle = wdCaptionNumberStyleArabic

.IncludeChapterNumber = True

.ChapterStyleLevel = 1

.Separator = wdSeparatorPeriod

End With

Selection.InsertCaption Label:="Equation", TitleAutoText:="InsertCaption4" _

, Title:="", Position:=wdCaptionPositionBelow, ExcludeLabel:=1


Selection.Cut

Selection.MoveDown Unit:=wdLine, Count:=1



Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCell

Selection.TypeText Text:="("

Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault)

Selection.TypeText Text:=")"

Selection.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphRight



.Borders(wdBorderLeft).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderRight).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderTop).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderBottom).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderVertical).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderDiagonalDown).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders(wdBorderDiagonalUp).LineStyle = wdLineStyleNone

.Borders.Shadow = False

End With

With Options

.DefaultBorderLineStyle = wdLineStyleSingle



40

.DefaultBorderLineWidth = wdLineWidth050pt

.DefaultBorderColor = wdColorAutomatic

End With

Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1

End Sub

Figure Number

(Alt-F)

Sub Figure_Number()

'

' Figure_Number Macro


'

With CaptionLabels("Figure")

.NumberStyle = wdCaptionNumberStyleArabic

.IncludeChapterNumber = True

.ChapterStyleLevel = 1

.Separator = wdSeparatorPeriod

End With

Selection.InsertCaption Label:="Figure", TitleAutoText:="InsertCaption1", _

Title:="", Position:=wdCaptionPositionBelow, ExcludeLabel:=0

Selection.TypeText Text:=". "

End Sub

Table Number

(Alt-T)

Sub Table_Number()

'

' Table_Number Macro


'

Selection.InsertCaption Label:="Table", TitleAutoText:="InsertCaption2", _

Title:="", Position:=wdCaptionPositionAbove, ExcludeLabel:=0

Selection.TypeText Text:=". "

End Sub

thesis writing using word

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