Thesis Preparation Guidelines 5 Conventions

Division of Graduate Studies and Research

5.1 Scientific units

For theses in Science and Engineering, SI units must be used as the primary system of units throughout the thesis. In several disciplines, other systems are still routinely used, such as the British units and the cgs system. For making the thesis easier to understand, it is allowed to include the equivalent values in the other units, provided that these values appear after their equivalent in the SI system, and between parentheses. For example, the value of a length would read: "...0.25 m (10 inches)." It is also permitted to report data in more than two sets of units, such as, for example, in nuclear engineering, the reactivity of a reactor in "units" of mk, percent and dollars.

5.2 English language

The convention for theses at the Royal Military College is to use the English language as per DND directives (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). Most word processing software programs have this option which uses a dictionary or thesaurus with the proper spelling.

5.3 French language

For theses written in French, the option of International French or French Canadian is acceptable.

5.4 Hyphenation

When hyphenation is used, extra care must be used in order to hyphenate the words correctly. The grammar rules in French are quite simple, but in several cases in English, a dictionary must be consulted to determine the appropriate place to position the hyphen to separate the words at the end of a line. It is not acceptable to hyphenate the last word of the last line of a page.