Stop Getting Your Dissertation Sent Back: The APA 7 Word Settings Every Dissertation Gets Wrong

If you are staring at a chapter that looks almost right but somehow never quite matches the template your program handed you, I want to start by saying this: that is not a sign you are bad at this. It is a sign you have been doing the hard, real work — the thinking, the arguing, the citing — and the formatting is simply the last, fiddly layer that no one ever actually teaches. You have gotten yourself this far. That deserves a moment of credit before we touch a single margin.

Because here is what I have learned after years of APA 7 formatting in Word, dissertation after dissertation: when a committee sends a draft back over formatting — not the argument, not the data, just margins and headings and mystery spacing — the problem is almost never that the writer does not know the rules. It is a handful of Word settings quietly working against them. And when Word starts doing things that make no sense — text jumping, tables sliding, spacing you did not ask for — it is almost always a styles problem.

So here is the single idea behind everything below: stop formatting by hand. Set Word's styles correctly one time, and the chaos stops. This is the one-pass setup I use, with the keystrokes for both Mac and Windows. Take what is useful and leave the rest.

1. Start with the bones: margins

Open your file and go to the Layout tab, then Margins. APA wants one inch on all four sides, and that is usually Word's default — but never assume. Files get corrupted; someone changes a setting; suddenly your pagination and line breaks are off. If custom margins have crept in, click Normal, then select all (Command+A on Mac, Ctrl+A on Windows) and confirm everything sits inside the standard margins.

2. Fix the Normal style — do not format by hand

On the Home tab, the “Normal” style is what Word uses for your default text — and out of the box it is usually not APA. Right-click Normal and choose Modify (or open the Styles pane, find Normal, and choose Modify Style from its dropdown). Set it to Times New Roman, 12 point, color Black — actually Black, not “Automatic” — double-spaced, left-aligned. Click OK. Now your baseline text is APA-correct everywhere Word uses it.

3. Build a body style with the indent built in

Because Normal also gets applied in tables, footnotes, and other odd corners, I like to make a dedicated body style. In the Styles pane, click New Style and name it APA Paragraph. Match the Normal settings — Times New Roman 12, black, double-spaced — then open the Paragraph settings and set a first-line indent of half an inch (Special → First line → 0.5″).

This one style fixes the most common frustration I see. Most people create a first-line indent by tapping the Tab key, and most people create a hanging indent in their references by pressing Tab and hoping. Word does not understand either of those as structure — it just sees a stray character. The moment you adjust spacing or convert to a PDF, everything drifts. If you have been indenting by hand this whole time, please be gentle with yourself — you were never shown the other way. Build the half-inch indent into the style and you never touch Tab again. (Any time you want to see what Word is actually doing, turn on the formatting marks: the ¶ button on the Home tab, or Command+8 on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+8 on Windows.)

One more thing while you are in there: set the Before and After paragraph spacing to 0. Word loves to sneak in extra points of space after each paragraph — that is the mystery white space that quietly turns clean double spacing into something slightly-more-than-double that a careful committee member will notice. Zero it out in every style and let the line spacing do the work.

4. Page numbers — and the running head that is not supposed to be there

In earlier editions of APA, student papers carried a running head — that little all-caps label in the header. In APA 7, student papers and most dissertations that follow APA 7 drop it entirely. You keep the page number in the top-right corner; you lose the label. I still open documents where someone has faithfully typed “RUNNING HEAD:” onto every page — doing extra work to be more wrong. If your program's own template asks for one, follow your program; the graduate school always wins over the manual. But when in doubt, APA 7 wants that header quiet.

For the page number itself: double-click the top of the page to open the header, go to Page Number, and insert a number, right-aligned. Uncheck “Show number on first page” so your title page stays clean. And the trick that surprises everyone: if you want the first page of text to read “1,” open Format Page Numbers and set the numbering to start at 0 — Word counts the title page as 0, and your text begins at 1.

5. APA 7 headings — set each style once

Here is where you save yourself hours. Do not bold and center headings by hand. Open the Styles pane, set the list to show All Styles so every level is visible, and modify each one: Heading 1 centered, bold, title case — and switch the default blue to black. Heading 2 flush left, bold. Heading 3 flush left, bold italic. Headings 4 and 5 indented half an inch and run into the paragraph — bold for Level 4, bold italic for Level 5 (use Special → First line to add the indent).

While you are in each heading's settings, click Line and Page Breaks and check Keep with Next. That prevents a lone heading stranded at the bottom of a page with no text beneath it — exactly the kind of thing reviewers flag. Two things now happen for free: your headings stay perfectly consistent, and Word can see your document's structure — which matters for the next step.

6. The table of contents you never retype again

If you have been building your table of contents by typing chapter titles and hand-typing dotted lines and page numbers, I promise there is an easier life waiting. Because your headings now carry real Heading styles, Word will generate the entire table of contents automatically — References tab, Table of Contents, done — and it updates with one click every time your pages shift. The reason so many dissertations have a TOC that disagrees with the actual page numbers is simply that the TOC was typed by hand and the pages moved. Let Word do the bookkeeping.

7. The reference list: a hanging indent that is a style

Start your references on a new page — “References” is a Level 1 heading. Then make one more style — call it APA Ref List — Times New Roman 12, black, neither bold nor italic, double-spaced. For the indent, open Paragraph → Special → Hanging → 0.5″, and zero out any sneaky after-spacing while you are there. Now highlight your references and click the style: every entry gets a clean half-inch hanging indent that aligns itself, no Tab key required, and nothing shifts when you breathe on the document.

One caveat worth saying plainly: a style handles the macro formatting — the spacing and the indents. It cannot fix the micro details, like italicizing journal titles or using an en dash for page ranges. Those still need your editorial eye (or mine).

The 60-second final check

Before you call it done: select all and confirm one font, one size, double spacing throughout. Scroll your headings and make sure each one is an actual style, not hand-formatting. Check that page numbers run unbroken from the title page. That is the pass that keeps a draft from bouncing back. That is the whole system: set your styles once, and your formatting is handled for every chapter that follows.

If you would rather not build it from scratch

This is exactly why I made my free APA 7 Dissertation Formatting Template — a Word file with every one of these settings already wired up: the margins, the Normal fix, the APA Paragraph and APA Ref List styles, all five heading levels with Keep with Next set, the page numbering, and a table of contents ready to update. Drop your writing in and let the structure hold. Click here for the free template.

Whatever you choose, know that the messy-looking draft in front of you is closer to finished than it feels. Formatting is the part that looks like the whole mountain and is really just the last few steps.

Warmly,
~Jennifer