We Italicize in Chicago Style, DON'T WE?
The dissertation, in more or less finished form, is now in my advisor's hands. I am now returning my attention to its lesser accompaniments, namely the bibliography and the appendixes.
As I suppose is the case at most schools, we are supposed to do everything in a special university-sanctioned format. Whether dissertations are in that format is not of great concern to dissertation committees so long as the said dissertations are legible and have citations and chapters and all that sort of thing, but once the committee signs off (after the defense), then it all has to be shoehorned into the template if it was not already template-ized.
Overall, I think the idea of a template is quite helpful. But life could hardly be so simple as to offer smooth template-ization. The template is in Microsoft Word, meaning that at some level it is supposed one will write in Word. Of course, not all of us choose to write in Word. Generally speaking, pretty much any word-processing program's output can be converted to a Word document when necessary.
I was not too happy, therefore, when I copied my bibliography into the template and found that applying the "Bibliography entry" style to it had to be done in pieces (apparently it was too long a bibliography for Word to tolerate doing the style all in one piece), and then, much worse, that the "Bibliography entry" style turned all my italics into Roman. The thought of manually re-italicizing 50 pages worth of bibliographic entries really does not appeal to me, but I suppose it must be done.
The grad student's work is unending.
As I suppose is the case at most schools, we are supposed to do everything in a special university-sanctioned format. Whether dissertations are in that format is not of great concern to dissertation committees so long as the said dissertations are legible and have citations and chapters and all that sort of thing, but once the committee signs off (after the defense), then it all has to be shoehorned into the template if it was not already template-ized.
Overall, I think the idea of a template is quite helpful. But life could hardly be so simple as to offer smooth template-ization. The template is in Microsoft Word, meaning that at some level it is supposed one will write in Word. Of course, not all of us choose to write in Word. Generally speaking, pretty much any word-processing program's output can be converted to a Word document when necessary.
I was not too happy, therefore, when I copied my bibliography into the template and found that applying the "Bibliography entry" style to it had to be done in pieces (apparently it was too long a bibliography for Word to tolerate doing the style all in one piece), and then, much worse, that the "Bibliography entry" style turned all my italics into Roman. The thought of manually re-italicizing 50 pages worth of bibliographic entries really does not appeal to me, but I suppose it must be done.
The grad student's work is unending.
posted by Karla at 8:23 PM
5 Comments:
I thought the very same thing about staying in the conference hotel (-about saving time and all). I was persuaded otherwise when I found out that the overflow hotel in Denver was the Brown Palace Hotel (so nice!). Its the place where Obama stayed during the DNC....as well as all manner of celebrity that was in town for the same.
I suppose the tension arose from the fact that I was in this great city, but only ever saw it from one of the 4 windows that I found myself looking out of, day after day. It started to feel a little like I was in an aquarium.
Hope you are well and enjoying your new office! Fancy...!
Egads! Sorry to hear it. BTW, the template is only a template to a point. You don't have to follow everything slavishly--I specifically asked about the bib because the style in the template was not what I was using. They told me you just have to use a consistent bibliographic style (per the deans office for FAS), so just get rid of their bib settings and put your own in.
Glad to hear the diss is basically done! Yay you!
Well, as far as I can tell, the bibliographic style in the template merely does things like provide a hanging indent (which is pretty normal) and do single line-spacing with a 12-point added space after each entry. All of that is desirable. I think the problem arises in that the style is based on the Normal style, which does specify Times New Roman 12, and therefore doesn't include any italics, bold, or underlines. Any of those three have to be added after applying the style.
I don't know how this works for people who are writing directly in the template document (Cindy did that), but it isn't very pleasant for those of us cutting and pasting in. Makes me wonder whether I'm also going to have to re-do all my italics in the text once I past that in.
Congrats on handing in the diss! That's great news. Good luck with the italics. Word does cause grievous annoyance more often than it should, sad to say!
Word also turned the en-dashes into hyphens. Grrr! Not that most people even know the difference, so that's rather trivial.
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