My dissertation and I are deep in battle. At the moment it's winning. I have four of five chapters written (all that's left is the conclusion) and two are fully edited. However, today I decided it was a good time to take those 6 separate files, condense them into one, and start working on the formatting.
Now, I don't want to toot my own horn, but if I'm good at anything, it's making things fit well on a page. My best friend Andrea can attest to the fact that I spent many a wintery night in South Bend formatting my papers, her papers, my CV, her CV, her husband's CV, our papers, the list goes on and on. I think it's well established that I'm quite the nerd - I'm in the 23rd grade and the best Christmas present I ever got was a stamp that says "From the library of Jessica Greenfield" - and you will not be surprised to learn that I LOVE formatting documents. Well, lovED. Now I hate it!
A little background: I've heard from friends that the worst part of the dissertation (and this is after two years of research and two years of writing) is the formatting. In fact, the formatting guide provided by UNC is 16 pages alone! They were right. Everything has a silly little catch. On the first page of every chapter, the text should start 2 inches from the top of the page while 1 inch from the top on subsequent pages. The title page should not have a page number, but everything after that up until the end of the table of contents should be numbered with roman numerals starting with ii. Following the table of contents, everything should have regular numbers including the bibliography (which I recently noticed is missing some of my sources and I also recently discovered that I have two books from the same author but didn't realize it as I was citing them.....so that's a bit of a problem since I can't remember what came from what book). Page numbers should be centered, 10, 11, or 12 point font in Arial, Times New Roman or an equivalent font half an inch from the bottom of the page.
Are you eyes rolling back in your head yet? Mine are! I cannot make the stupid pagination work! I know there needs to be a section break but I can't seem to place it in the right spot and all it's doing is throwing off my 2 inches on the following page. Don't even get me started on the block quotes!
And then......there are the footnotes. If you know me at all, I'm sure you've hear at least one of my rants about footnotes, and then my explanation of how one of my professors at UNC scared me into believing that if a page doesn't have a footnote, it doesn't say enough. But here's the things about footnotes: there's supposed to be a 2 inch line separating the 12 point font of the body of the paper and the 10 point font of the footnotes (which should also have a single spaced line between them). BUT.....the line doesn't always appear......sometimes it disappears! And the reappears if you try and edit the sentence before the footnote. And if you add your own line, then when you print it sometimes there are TWO lines! AHHHHHH! I know I know it's a rite of passage....but I think it's overrated. And incredibly annoying when you can't make the computer work the way it's supposed to!
And deep breath.
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