Art History Thesis work

Every year, the Art History theses are due around this time or later. Every year, I have a few students feverishly working on their thesis and trying to get it printed on the day it is due. Over the past few years, I've held workshops for the students on how to successfully and easily format their thesis. Generally, I've held one workshop for them towards the beginning of the year and one more towards the end of the year at the beginning of the block before the thesis is due.

I did that this year, too. Unfortunately, these thesis students didn't learn anything from the workshops and have asked me for individual help. The students ask for help with the following:

• Setting up/formatting the table of contents
• easily done if section headers are formatted with the built-in styles
• Setting up/formatting the table of images
• easily done if captions are inserted properly
• Formatting the bibliography
• Setting up page numbers
• (first page of the chapter not there, but subsequent pages there)
• Front matter in lower-case Roman numerals
• no pages numbers on end matter
• Scanning/finding images
• images should be of sufficient resolution and DPI so as not to print terribly
• Inserting images
• Formatting images in the paper (eliminating weird margins due to images that are rotated in Word

What is somewhat frustrating is that the official format for these theses should be Chicago style, yet the students seem to know little about how to adhere to the Chicago style guide. What is worse is that the thesis advisors have their own preferences they tell the students to adhere to. This is detrimental as these students are more likely to need to go on to graduate work, where they will HAVE to adhere to the appropriate style guide, yet they will have no experience doing so. 

Last year, I created a video that shows what to do with Word 2008. It's been viewed 263 times and liked once. Of course, there are several other videos on YouTube alone which deal with formatting theses.

There are many websites which offer guidance on formatting, some of these associated with college or university programs or writing centers, in addition to several software packages which are supposed to assist in formatting according to style guides. Finally, there are several services which will format (or unfortunately write) a thesis for a person. Here's one that even looks like it might be legitimate!

Lessons learned:

• Students prefer one-on-one help/hand-holding. Perhaps this is what they're paying for. 
• Hosting a workshop too early doesn't help many people.
• Hosting it even closer to the deadline still doesn't help many people.
• A template might help them most. Maybe.