HEADINGS
Do not overuse headings. Do not use any level of heading below four (with the first being the chapter title) unless absolutely essential. The purpose of a hierarchy of headings is to help the reader understand the relationship of topics within your writing to each other. Once you get beyond four levels it becomes extremely difficult for anyone, including yourself, to see how a topic placed at this level relates to other topics. Using too many levels also frequently leads to stacks of headings one under the other with very little or even without any intervening text. This becomes unsightly and difficult to read.
Recommended styles and headings
The following represent an overall style presentation which we have found to work very well for theses and can recommend to our students.
Normal style
This is the style for the standard text throughout the thesis. Set it first
Format font. Times new Roman, 12 points, regular.
Format paragraph. Alignment justified; left/right/special indentation = 0, 0, none; Spacing before = 12 points, after = 0 points; line spacing “at least” 14 points.
Heading 1
This is the title of each chapter. We find that it is convenient to use style Heading 1 to format the chapter title rather than some other styles such as “Title”, as it is automatically picked up by Microsoft word as the highest level of heading when it automatically generates a table of contents, and in assigning numbers to headings.
Format font. Times new Roman, 18 points, bold, all upper case.
Format paragraph. Alignment centre and placed at top of page; left/right/special indentation = 0, 0, none; Spacing before = 0 points, after = 18 points; line spacing “at least” 20 points.
Heading 2
This is the first level of heading within the text of the chapter. Within each manuscript it is used for the major headings Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion and References.
Format font. Times new Roman, 14 points, bold, all upper case.
Format paragraph. Alignment left; left/right/special indentation = 0, 0, none; Spacing before = 24 points, after = 12 points; line spacing “at least” 15 points.
Heading 3
This is the second level of heading within the text of the chapter or manuscript.
Format font and paragraph. Exactly the same as Heading 2, but all words in lower case, with the first word capitalised. This does occasionally lead to difficulties with the third word consists only of uppercase letters, such as “PCR”. It would be advisable to add some additional words to the heading that they can be shown in lowercase.
Heading 4
This is the third level of heading within the text of the chapter or manuscript.
Format font. Times new Roman, 13 points, bold, lower case with first word capitalised.
Format paragraph. Alignment left; left/right/special indentation = 0, 0, none; Spacing before = 18 points, after = 6 points; line spacing “at least” 15 points.
Heading 5
As stated previously, try to avoid using more than three levels if at all possible (i.e. no headings below heading 4). It is often better to combine paragraphs and a higher headings rather than numerous small sections or isolated paragraphs under lower headings. If you must use Heading 5:
Format font. Times new Roman, 12 point, bold, italic, lower case. First word capitalised.
Format paragraph. Alignment left, indentation left/right/special = 0, 0, none.
Spacing before 15 points, after 3 points, line spacing at least 14 points.
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