Keeping with formalities
Students find it petty that some of the clearest instructions on theses are font sizes and margins.
Even after years of academic training, hardly anything about a final academic project really seems to be pre-determined. More or less anything goes, and many academic mentors even emphasize this openness to design your own research project as one of the defining challenges of the thesis. And right they are! So you set out and do some designing – not only in terms of your project’s set-up, synthesis of prior research, stellar analytical work, but also in terms of the design of your document. Meaningful work justifies a meaningful appearance, right? Sadly, not quite.
Universities generally do not like to define many things – academic freedom is a valuable good. But what they define, they tend to defend tooth and nail. Margins of a thesis are among those things fought for. Font sizes, line spacing, and many other technicalities. Of course, the citation format – who could have forgotten? Here, it often does not matter what might even be more appropriate to address target journals or editors. Each university and sometimes even each school or professor might have their individual “house style” of preferred layout and technicalities. There is not much rhyme or reason behind this beyond the attempt to establish one common, acceptable style among a group of students. In the end, possibly the central means of academic communication is the written word. Conveying an appropriate way of shaping and styling the technicalities of this written word can be seen as an important teachable insight. However, there is also at least one additional driver behind the focus on appropriate layout: while many facets of evaluation are very complex to develop and reason, it is quick and easy to review a text for technicalities and its result is not negotiable. Either the line spacing is 1.5 or not. And it does ring true that a document that is thoroughly unprofessionally and inconsistently produced simply does not carry the same visual cues of academic work as one that looks the part.
Instead of moaning about the seemingly unimportant technicalities of format in light of the weighty relevance of one’s research project, let’s rather consider requirements on the design of a research project’s outcome as a welcome task taken off our plate. There is enough left to design, anyhow.
While your thesis provides an enormous amount of freedom to roam and set up your research claim and machinery, this freedom can get overwhelming at times. The number of decisions not only to be made but also to be derived and reasoned is astonishing. If anything is amiss in a student research project, it’s usually not an abundance of opportunity to design. This turns guidelines and requirements into little oases of orientation. There is simply no need to try out multiple fonts or layout options – this has been decided before. One less thing to worry about, one more thing to easily win a great evaluation on because you can tell with certainty when you performed well or not. Picky administrative requirements are not only a nuisance, they can be a welcome spot of creative relaxation. Thank you to Timo Korkeamäki who mentioned this particular perspective in our interviews for the book and co-inspired this blog post alongside the student research project which brought up the topic again!
How do you experience guidelines and layout requirements in your research projects? Do you try to push the boundaries or just play it safe and rather invest your creativity somewhere else?