Scholarly Writing Guidelines
Scholarly Writing Guidelines
The Aspen University dissertation follows the APA form and format. Writing must reflect doctoral level, scholarly-writing standards. The document should be well organized and easy for the reader to follow. Each paragraph should be short, clear, and focused. In general, every statement in a dissertation must be supported either by a reference to published scientific literature or by original work. Ideas must be referenced within the text and follow the author-date method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, for example, (Jones, 1998), and a complete reference should appear in the reference list at the end of the paper. Each sentence in a dissertation must be complete and correct in a grammatical sense. Moreover, a dissertation must satisfy the rigorous rules of formal grammar (e.g., no contractions, colloquialisms, slurs, or use of phrases that are common in the spoken language). The committee members are not obligated to edit documents. Students may need to identify a writing coach, editor, and/or other resource to help with writing and editing. Additional support materials regarding form and formatting can be found in the Doctoral Lounge and in the Writing/Resource Center from the D2L Classroom. Poorly written proposals and dissertations will be suspended from review if submitted with grammatical, structural, and/or formatting errors.