Home

The instructions for the form not the content) of your Honors Paper is dictated by Faculty Legislation; the relevant portions are quoted below.

Once your thesis has been accepted and all corrections made, you should bring a clean print copy to the Library, marked to the attention of Jane Ting. This copy may be left at the circulation desk or at the director's office. Alternatively, the copy may be mailed to: Ms. Jane Ting, Technical Services Unit LITS, Mount Holyoke College, 50 College St., South Hadley, MA 01075. In addition, a copy should be submitted to Library, Information, and Technology Services (LITS) in an electronic version (PDF) as an attachment through the web form located at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/go/submit-thesis.

A thesis which cannot be submitted electronically, in whole or in part, will be scanned for the student by LITS. Please contact the staff in the Information Commons for help submitting the electronic version of your thesis.

If you are a performing arts major, a copy of your performance (VHS videotape, slides, CD-ROM, etc.) should be delivered to the library with the written portion.

THE FORM OF THE HONORS THESIS MANUSCRIPT
The final form of the honors thesis should be produced on a word processor and printed on a good letter-quality printer, on 20 to 24 pound white bond paper of good rag or cotton fiber content (at least 25% to 50%), 8 1/2 X 11. Printing should be on one side of the paper only, and the text should be double spaced throughout except that footnotes, bibliography, and quotations of five or more lines should be single spaced. For type, the library recommends Times Roman, Palatino, or Courier, 12 Point; check with your adviser for specific requirements within your particular discipline. The left margin should be two inches wide to allow for binding, the right, not less than one inch, and about 1 1/4 inches should be left at the top and bottom of the page. All illustrations, tables, maps, etc., should come within the limits of the page margins; folding is permissible, but the folded page should be narrower than the thesis page so that it will not be caught in the binding. Five spaces indentation is recommended for paragraphs in the double-spaced matter in the text and appendices; for footnotes and bibliography, three spaces indentation is suggested. Page numbers and Arabic figures should appear in the upper right hand corner of the page in line with the text margin. Pages should normally be numbered sequentially. Pages with charts, diagrams, illustrations, or photographs may be assigned lower-case letters after the number of the page they follow, e.g., 14a, but the thesis should be internally consistent in its treatment of such pages. Each chapter or division should begin on a new page, the heading and title dropped about two inches from the top of the page, centered and written in full capitals. All matter that would be italicized in printing should be underlined in the typed copy, if italics are not supported.

Number Of Copies
A student should submit three copies of her thesis to her major department/examining committee who will, in recommendations for summa cum laude, submit all three copies to the Academic Administrative Board for review. These copies will later be returned to the department.

Parts Of The Thesis
Theses presented for honors should include a permission sheet placed within the binding which reads as follows: "I give permission for public access to my thesis and for any copying to be done at the discretion of the archives librarian and/or the College librarian." The permission sheet must be signed and dated by the student at the bottom. Parts of the thesis should be arranged in the following order: permission sheet; title page; acknowledgment; table of contents or outline; table of charts, figures, or diagrams, if any; preface and/or introduction; main text by chapters or parts; summary or conclusion; appendices, if any; bibliography or literature cited.

Footnotes
Footnotes may be placed at the bottom of the page below a line drawn completely across under the text, at the end of the chapter, or following the summary or conclusion. Acknowledgment of sources should follow the accepted practice in the discipline concerned. The thesis director can refer the student to a style manual that will set forth acceptable practices. Quotations of five or more lines should be single spaced and indented five spaces from the left margin, without framing quotation marks. If a single paragraph or part of one is quoted consecutively, indent the first line of each three spaces. Verse quotations of a single line or part of a line should be run on, in quotation marks, in the text; longer verse quotations should be centered. For ellipsis within a sentence, use three . . . spaced periods, leaving a space before the first period.