Information on the Format, Length, and Style of the Written Thesis
PSYC 499 Winter 2007
Lindsay (adapted from Brimacombe)
The structure of a psychology honours thesis is typically similar to that of a
psychology journal article. The principal components are a title page, abstract,
introduction, a report of one or more pieces of empirical research (each consisting of a
method section, a results section [including tables and graphs], and discussion section), a
reference section, and an acknowledgement (or “author note”) section. Most
undergraduate theses report a single study and so have just one of each of these sections;
if you report two or more studies, then you may want to have a general introduction
setting up the whole thing, then more focused intros and discussions for each study, and
then a general discussion wrapping up the whole thing. (As discussed below, theses often
also include appendices).
Your supervisor will mark your thesis. I will give supervisors feedback if I think
their marking departs sharply from that of other supervisors, but nonetheless your
supervisor is the primary source of the mark on your thesis. I hope that you will engage
in a process in which you create a draft of a component of your thesis, get feedback from
your supervisor, then revise and resubmit the revised component to your supervisor. This
will enable you to hone in on the “right” level of information for your particular project
and produce a polished final product. Note, however, that it is probably a bad idea to
give your supervisor your first rough draft of anything; do a bit of proofreading and
polishing before turning in a draft. Also, few supervisors are willing to look at more than
two or three drafts of any given component.
You have flexibility in how you format each section (e.g., do you think your
Method section should include an Overview subsection? Do you want to include a
Materials section? Do you want to create a sub-section within your discussion called
“Directions for future research?”). These choices are up to you and your supervisor, but
unless your supervisor disagrees I encourage you to use sub-headings within your
introduction and discussion. Such subsections help create clearly organized “chunks” of
information (see the APA Publication Manual for assistance in formatting sub-headings
and take a look at published articles for examples).
With respect to the length and content of your thesis, your supervisor is your best
guide. A thesis that “weighs in” at around 25 - 40 pages is fairly standard around here,
but some successful theses are much shorter and others much longer. The large variation
in thesis length is appropriate, in part because some projects put more emphasis on work
such as preparing materials, programming, data collection, and/or data analysis, whereas
others put more emphasis on reviewing and synthesizing the literature, proposing future
studies, etc. Also, some supervisors prefer a more complete/extensive document that will
serve as a detailed archive of the work done, whereas others prefer a briefer document in
the style of a journal article.
Compared to journal articles, literature reviews in theses are typically broader,
more extensive, and more detailed. Theses also often include appendices (e.g., copies of
questionnaires, interview questions, transcriptions of participants’ responses). Your
supervisor might ask you to include a lot of the “history” of your project in your final
written document, so that he or she can refer back to the thesis when planning future
Thesis Format Etc.
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research. On the other hand, your supervisor might ask that you create a document that
more closely adheres to norms for manuscripts submitted for publication in journals. In
any case, I encourage you to develop your skill in writing succinctly and to be judicious
in selecting articles to include in your lit review. This will demonstrate that you have
expert knowledge of your thesis topic and that you can make good choices in deciding
what to include vs. exclude in your lit review – after all, you’re writing a literature
review, not an archive of everything published on the subject.
The APA Publication Manual provides guidelines regarding proper formatting of
tables and figures (although note that below I ask you to deviate from that style in some
particulars). The course website includes a variety of resources that will help with
writing and APA style. I also encourage you to look at past UVic theses (but keep in
mind that they may include various kinds of errors; when in doubt, check with your
supervisor).
On the due date, you will submit one final copy of your thesis to your supervisor.
Do not staple it or use any kind of clip that will leave an icky mark on the paper. Your
supervisor will keep that copy nice and clean (comments concerning the thesis will not be
recorded on that final copy). When your supervisor has assigned a grade for your thesis,
s/he will give the nice, clean thesis to me together with an evaluation of the thesis. I will
read the thesis and then I will give that nice, clean copy to Wendy Davies in the
psychology general office. Wendy will create copies from that nice, clean original you
submitted – one copy will be bound for you (at no cost to you). Your supervisor will get
one and one will be retained for the department (or we might opt to retain an electronic
copy instead – looks like this is the way of the future). Your copy should be ready for
you no later than spring convocation.
Your thesis should be prepared as per the APA Publication Manual (5th ed.)
guidelines for submitting manuscripts to journals (with certain exceptions listed in the
next section). In particular:
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Double space your thesis on 8.5 x 11 inch plain white paper
Type only on one side of each page.
Use a 12-point font (preferred typefaces are Arial and Times Roman).
Create page margins as follows: Left margin 1.5 inches (4 cm) – this allows
sufficient clearance for binding your thesis; top, bottom, and right margins should
1 inch (2.54 cm) except that the running head and page number in the top right
corner should be .5 inch from the top.
Do not right-justify lines of text (i.e., do not format so that you get an even line of
text on both the left and right margins; instead, flush everything left and let the
right margin look “uneven” – like what you see in this document.
Indent the first line of every paragraph about half an inch.
In presenting data/results: Use a zero before the decimal point for numbers < 1
(e.g., “0.27”) except for certain statistical values such as p values (e.g., “p < .05”)
and r values; two decimal places is customary in reporting in Results sections.
You should deviate from APA manuscript style in the following particulars:
Thesis Format Etc.
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1. The first (cover) page should be unnumbered, be in bold font size 16, and should
consist of the following information, with each of these pieces of information centered on
a line of its own, starting at about 3.5" from the top edge of the page: Title of thesis,
author’s name, “University of Victoria,” “B.A. Honours Thesis” or “B.Sc. Honours
Thesis,” “Supervisor: X,” “2007.” A sample appears on the penultimate page of this
document.
2. The second page should be numbered 1 and should be an APA-style cover page except
that the words “Running Head: [running head]” should be omitted. A sample appears on
the final page of this document. Note the capitalization in the thesis title.
3. Rather than using a short title, the running head that appears at the upper right hand
corner of each page should be a running head, as it would be in a printed article. So each
page (other than the 1st page) will have a running head of up to 50 characters (including
spaces) that gets across the central topic (e.g., “Individual Differences in Visual
Attention”) followed by about half an inch of blank space and then the right-justified
page number. Note that the running head and page number are ½” from the top, and are
followed by a hard return (blank line), which will make the first line of the body of the
text 1” from the top edge.
3. If footnotes are used, they should appear at the bottom of the page on which the
footnote indicator appears (rather than presenting all footnotes in a separate section at the
end of the document). Note that footnotes, like all other text in the thesis, should be
double spaced. Keep footnotes to a minimum.
4. Tables and figures should be presented either (a) in boxes embedded in the text or (b)
on separate pages inserted into appropriate places in the manuscript (numbered as regular
pages), rather than at the end of the manuscript as per APA manuscript style.
5. Captions for figures should be typed on the figures themselves, rather than on a
separate page. Also, there is no need to write figure numbers in pencil on the back of
figures.
6. In the Reference section, each reference should be presented in hanging indent form
(this is the preferred but not required format in APA Pub Man V; for your thesis it is
required).
7. As noted above, the left margin should be 1.5”.
If you plan to go on for further education in psychology then I strongly recommend that
you buy a copy of the APA Publication Manual. And remember, in the words of sports
writer Red Smith, “writing is easy; you just open a vein and bleed.”
One final point: As you go along with the thesis project, save all of your work very
frequently and in multiple ways. I could tell you stories that would make a heartless
wretch weep about students who lost months and months of work and never got it back.
Have I Remembered This Before?
Nelson Agostinho
B.A. Honours Thesis
Supervisor: Prof. D. S. Lindsay
2002
Memory for Prior Remembering
Have I Remembered this Before?
Nelson Agostinho
University of Victoria
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