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Formatting Your Thesis
What Does an Honors Thesis Look Like?
Each discipline has different requirements and standards regarding the organization of research and creative work, but they all have the same basic formatting components:
Title Page: Available for download here.
- Make a place for the names of everyone on your Thesis Committee to sign
- Make sure you spell everyone's name correctly!!
- This page is not paginated
Abstract: Immediately follows the cover page
- Outline your research/project question
- Briefly describe your methodology
- Provide your results or what you discovered
*Humanities majors: Your thesis statement belongs in your abstract
**Science & Social Science majors: Be sure to include your hypothesis and conclusion in your abstract
Author's Biography: This is a new requirement and you can see an example here.
The biography should be written in the third person and please include your:
- Place of birth
- Place/date of high school graduation
- Honor Societies
- Major & minor
- Expected graduation date
- Future plans
How Do I Organize the Sections of My Thesis?
- Title Page (required)
- Copyright notice (optional)
- Abstract (required)
- Dedication / preface (optional)
- Acknowledgments (optional)
- Table of Contents
- Lists of Tables, Figures, Definitions, etc. (if any)
- Text
- Endnotes (if any, depends on your chosen bibliographic style)
- Appendices (if any)
- Author's Biography (required)
Examples of past student's theses are available to see by either visiting http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/honors/, or visiting the Honors Office.