Formatting your work
General advice
The format of your assignment (for example, margin size, font size, word count, line spacing) will vary module by module. Please consult your module handbook (via Blackboard) or ask your module tutor for advice.
Resources
Formatting Appendices
What is it?
An appendix includes additional information that provides useful background and context for your topic. This must be relevant and aid the reader in understanding your work. This could include your own research data or information from other sources. If you are using more than one appendix, you would refer to them as appendices.
What to include in your appendices
Supporting information for your work from other sources, for example data or diagrams.
If you have conducted your own research, it is a good idea to include your raw data for example: interview transcripts, surveys, correspondence (emails, letters etc.), statistics. Additionally, consider putting images or graphs in an appendix, whether your own or from another source.
Where are they?
They are located at the end of your work after your reference list or bibliography.
What do they look like?
- To make it clearer for your reader, consider breaking down long appendix into separate ones.
- Keep information in a single appendix within a particular focus area, for instance interviews on a topic with participants.
- Label each new appendix alphabetically, for example appendix A, appendix B.
- Give each appendix a meaningful title.
- Start each appendix on a new page.
- Refer to individual tables or sources within the appendix as numbered items. This ensures you can easily refer to these individual sources within your body of work. Order the appendices as they are referred to within the main body of the text for the first time. If your work includes a contents page, add appendices to the table of contents.
- Continue page numbers from the end of your main body of work.
How to refer to appendices in your work
All appendices should be mentioned in your work. You could do this in the following ways:
The data I gathered on this topic suggests there’s a correlation (see appendix A).
Appendix B suggests …
If your appendix contains more than one information source, refer to it in the following way:
(see appendix A1)
As shown in appendix B3 …
If your appendix refers to your own research or data you do not need to provide a reference. However, if your appendix refers to the work of others, provide an-text citation in the appendix and add the full reference to your reference list. For instance, if you’ve created a table using someone else’s work, underneath the table it could look like this:
(Table author’s own, data from Greig, 2021.)
Quoting other works in your assignment
You are expected to acknowledge the books, journal articles and other sources of information that you use when preparing and completing your university work. This is known as referencing.
You will often find you need to quote from your sources of information. Use your own judgement to make sure that the layout and flow of your writing is logical, and that use of quotations is clear and easy to follow as well as being consistent throughout your assignment.
The following guidance only applies when referencing using the Cite Them Right version of the Harvard style.
Quoting one or two lines
Put quotation marks around the quote and include within a standard-format paragraph of your text. Include any italics and errors of spelling or punctuation found in the original.
Example:
As Kador states (2025, p. 4), object-based learning "refers to any facilitated learning activity that draws on multisensory engagement with material culture".
Quoting more than two lines
Indent the quotation in its own paragraph and leave out the quotation marks. Include any italics and errors of spelling or punctuation found in the original. Leave a space before and after the quotation.
Example:
Kador (2026, pp. 5-6) defines such museum items as a specific kind of object:
The term ‘artefact’ generally refers to archaeological, anthropological (ethnographic) and/or historical objects that have been produced by humans (or in some cases other hominins, such as Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis). Artefacts can be made from lots of different organic and inorganic materials, including stone, bone, wood, fibres, clay (for example, pottery and bricks), teeth and skin, as well as many others.
Editing a quote
It is best practice to repeat the words exactly as you find them when you are quoting directly from your source. In rare circumstances, you can make minor changes to a direct quotation as long as you don't change the meaning and indicate where you have made changes.
- If you insert your own words, or different words, into a quotation, put them in square brackets [ ].
- To draw attention to an error in a quotation (for example a spelling mistake) do not correct it, but write [sic] after the error.
- To emphasise something in a quotation, put the emphasised words in italics, and state that the emphasis is your own.
Archeaological, [sic] anthropological (ethnographic) and/or historical objects that have been produced by humans (or [even] in some cases other hominins” (Kador, 2025, pp. 5-6, my emphasis).
Omitting text within a quote
If you wish to omit part of a quote, indicate the omission by inserting a space, three full-stops, and another space.
Example:
As Kador (2025, p. 21) points out,
Specimens … could be relatively easily obtained in the 1800s but are now extremely rare as the animals concerned are now extinct, this [skeleton] can teach us important lessons about European colonialist expansion, human population growth, climate change, pollution and other human-induced extinction events.
A quotation within a quotation
Sometimes you may wish to provide a quotation within a quotation. This might be when your source is citing a common phrase, idiom or proverb, or if your source is referring to a quotation from another source that you haven’t read (secondary referencing). It is recommended that you use single quotation marks for your direct source’s quotation, then double quotation marks for your source’s quotation. So, if your source of information is quoting direct speech, be consistent in your use of the two types of quotation marks to differentiate them.
Example:
As Kador suggests, it is not now always seen as best practice to try to repair items damaged through historical processes, whereas ‘In the past, conservators tended to take a rather “active” role in trying to “restore” objects to their “former glory,” which sometimes resulted in “over conservation”’ (2025, p. 100).
Word count
- In-text citations and quotations are included in your assignment's word count.
- References, bibliographies and footnotes containing references are not included in the word count, unless it is clearly stated in the coursework instructions that the module is an exception to this rule.
Please consult the UWE Bristol Policies for further advice (includes the Assessment Content Limit policy).
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