An ETD is a document that explains the research or scholarship of a graduate student. It is expressed in a form simultaneously suitable for machine archives and worldwide retrieval. The ETD is similar to its paper predecessor. It has figures, tables, footnotes, and references. It has a title page with the author's name, the official name of the university, the degree sought, and the names of the committee members. It documents the author's years of academic commitment. It describes why the work was done, how the research relates to previous work as recorded in the literature, the research methods used, the results, and the interpretation and discussion of the results, and a summary with conclusions.

The ETD is different, however. It provides a technologically advanced medium for expressing your ideas. You prepare your ETD using nearly any word processor or document preparation system, incorporating relevant multimedia objects, without the requirement to submit a hard copy to the Graduate College. Consequently, ETDs are less expensive to prepare, consume virtually no library shelf space, and never collect dust. They will be available to anyone that can browse the World Wide Web.

The thesis/dissertation is a public display of the quality of work acceptable to the student's department and to the university for meeting graduate degree requirements.

It is the responsibility of the student's thesis or dissertation committee to judge the acceptability of the thesis/dissertation from all standpoints, including writing quality, neatness, mechanical considerations, and technical and professional competency. Committee members attest to acceptability when they sign the ETD Approval Form. Therefore, it is important that they be provided with a view of the thesis or dissertation before the student's defense.

Students are strongly encouraged to publish their research results and scholarly inquiry. Graduate students are to utilize the traditional format for theses and dissertations established in the Thesis/Dissertation Handbook.