Formatting – the importance of a space

When I was in elementary school I was taught that “there is a lot of space between ‘a’ and ‘lot'” and I have never spelled that as a single word since.

I was looking up how to properly format my dissertation so I can start getting tables and such in the right form now rather than having to reformat everything later (which I already have to do for my 80+ pages of appendices because I did 1″ margins all around on the worksheets, forms and measures that make up those appendices) and saw this, which made me scratch my head:

4. Acknowledgements

• Optional
• Margins:
  • Top 1.5″
  • Bottom 1″
  • Left 1.5″
  • Right 1″
• The heading must be centered
• Margins: Same as Body
• Spacing: Maybe single spaced
• Note: One page maximum

Maybe the acknowledgements section is single spaced. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe we don’t know what we’re doing after all. Other sections are listed as “must be double spaced” or “must be single spaced.” But apparently nobody is really sure what’s going on in the acknowledgements section.

But then again, maybe not.

In other words, the word “measure” is really starting to look funny to me this week. Does it really have an A in it? Doesn’t the last e come before the r?

I’m pretty sure the phrase “statistically significant” is going to start looking real funny real soon too.