The Ideal Font for Dissertation Writing You were buried under the stack of research material throughout the dissertation writing process. Now that you are close to completing the dissertation, you are dead worried about the formatting and presentation of the dissertation, especially the fonts. It may seem insignificant if you tell it to someone. But for you, as a student, it matters a lot! We understand dissertation is the one of the most important academic documents you are ever going to produce so you need to see that everything is in proper order with perfection, especially the fonts.
Mistakes to Avoid While Choosing a Font for Dissertation It is fair to spend time in selecting fonts because visibility is the way of presenting important information where fonts decide how your content will appear in front of the readers. But problem arises when you seem to have endless choices with no way of understanding the options. So you may want to know what the recommended fonts are and how to pick one. But for that, it is important to first learn what mistakes you need to avoid during the selection.
Searching for Individuality Many of the beginners go about picking a typeface as if they are searching for new music to express their personal aesthetic taste. But font is not about individuality. You should not pick any font just because you like it; it is not you who has to read the 2030 page content.
Too Many Fonts Students tend to experiment a lot on the content in order to make it appealing to the readers. They are likely to use too many fonts in the document. Too many fonts make the well-organized document appear cluttered. So stick to one or two, maximum three. Clashing Fonts You have picked the perfect font for your title, now what about your sub-titles? All fonts in your document don’t need to be unified, but at least they should work
together. For example, Arial and Lucida Console, which are good in their places, can clash when viewed together. Going for Cooler-looking Fonts A font might look cool on the document, but is it really good while reading? The ‘Impact’ font has an appeal to it, but it is not very soothing to eyes when it comes to reading. Too Similar Fonts In order to keep the flow of writing, students apply similar fonts in their writing. It someway makes the reading boring and monotonous. You can separate the title of the paragraph and the body of paragraph by using two different fonts. Remember, choosing an outfit obviously implies you want to wear it. The clothes you wear unravel many facts about you: your personality, your style, your socio-economic background, even your age. Fonts also serve the same purpose in writing. In academic writing, fonts provide at-a-glance first impression to the evaluators on the basis of which they judge the content.
Recommended Font for Dissertation You surely don’t want to make your evaluator feel uncomfortable while reading your document. Remember, it is 30-page long assignment. Maximizing readability is the best option, and fonts can help you to do that. Here are the fonts that our experts recommend, but also point out some of the drawbacks associated with them:
Times New Roman, everyone is familiar with it. So it is probably the safest option to go with. The content appears clean and easily readable. Drawback: The font has originated from The Times in London. The purpose of creating the new font was to squeeze more characters and words in the newspaper column. Moreover, some people discourage using this font because they think it is overused. If you are having time crunch and cannot think of any other option, you can go for Times New Roman as it is a standard choice for academic documents. Calibri or its friends such as Arial and Verdana can be an option because they look smooth and clean on computer screen.
Drawback: Although it looks clean on the screen, generally it is less readable in the printed format. In addition, Calibri looks less formal in the body of the thesis. Georgia, Cambria, Garamond, Century, Palatino and Minion Pro are all perfectly acceptable as they are available on Microsoft Word. Drawback:
Some of them, for example Georgia, has the feature of non-lining numerals which means the number appearing in the content has no unified size; instead of sitting neatly on the base line, some will stand higher and lower than the others. It is not such a problem in the writing, but it will create problem when you are using a table. As we mentioned above, it is acceptable to use different typefaces for heading and the body. It mainly enhances the readability of the content because eyes scanning the papers can separate the subject from the ideas. The easiest way to create a good contrast is by using Serif Body Text with Sans Serif Headings. You can also use the combination of Garamond/Helvetica, Times New Roman/Arial Narrow, Minion Pro/Myriad Pro etc. Drawback: In the hope of creating visually appealing content, too much experiment can ruin the final output.
ďƒ˜ Pro Tip: You can use the combination of fonts, but avoid using more than two fonts in your thesis. Include bold and italics for variety.
ďƒ˜ Final Note Before deciding on what font you should use, you must check with the university and go through university style guide for further information. You may discover they have
already mentioned certain typeface and font size for writing. In that case, you need to stick to the requirements. Most of the universities provide an array of options for fonts with font size ranging from 10pt and 12pt. Italics should be used for non-English language and bold words if they signify something important in the sentence. Hope these suggestions will help you to choose and apply certain font. With all the different typefaces available nowadays, one can easily get confused with the choices. So understand your needs first and then do the final selection of font.