If you have gone through the trouble of picking up a copy of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2010), I’m sure your first reaction was similar to mine: “Ugh! 272 pages of boredom.” Do people actually read this monster? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I know I haven’t read every last bit of it. You may be relieved to hear that your reaction resonates with some of the critique that has been voiced by senior researchers in Psychology, such as Henry L. Roediger III (2004). But let’s face it: APA style is not going anywhere. It is one of the major style regimes in academia and is used in many fields other than Psychology, including medical and other public health journals. And to be fair, standardizing academic documents is not a bad idea. It helps readers to efficiently access the desired information. It helps authors by making the journal’s expectations regarding style explicit, and it helps reviewers to concentrate on the content of a manuscript. Most importantly, the guidelines set a standard that is accepted by a large number of outlets. Imagine a world in which you had to familiarize yourself with a different style every time you chose a new outlet for your scholarly work.

From my experience as an editorial assistant at the journal Experimental Psychology I know that fully mastering APA style is hard even for more senior researchers — and that’s okay. In fact, I’m glad that most researchers use their limited time on research (or teaching) rather than memorizing the “Publication Manual”. Life is too short to learn the ins and outs of APA style.

The data presented in an earlier post on this blog indicate that Psychology students find it difficult to adhere to the APA guidelines. Among the 9 most common mistakes in submissions to the Journal of European Psychology Students are

How not to worry about APA style

If you want to publish psychological research, you will have to produce properly formatted APA style manuscripts. Fortunately, this is a problem many researchers face; in other words, there is no reason to start from scratch. You could use an APA template for common word processors such as Microsoft Word or Libre Office that takes care of the page setup, line spacing, etc. But to be up-front, I want to convince you that there is a better way to write your manuscripts that prevents all of the above mentioned errors and more. I want to introduce you to Markdown, an easy-to-read and -write annotation system that makes writing APA style a breeze.

Don’t mix content and style A general principle in typesetting — be it on (digital) paper or the web — is to separate content and style. Separation is commonly achieved through the use of a markup language, which is a system of document annotations. These annotations declare portions of text as title, section headings, or list items but crucially, they are agnostic to what this means visually (e.g., <bold>text</bold> instead of text). There are several advantages to this approach but I’ll only briefly name three of them here: Focus on writing. It seems that a common form of procrastination for many writers is making a document pretty. Adding a newline here or a manual line break there, moving a table just two pixels to the left, etc. When writing a markup document in a plain text document it let’s you focus on the content rather than the style. Swiftly adjust the style. If your paper is rejected and the next target journal prefers a different flavor of APA style, there is no need to touch your writing. As a simple example, I recently submitted a paper to a journal that asked me to collect all figure captions at the end of the document on one page rather than printing them below the corresponding figures. Because my captions were declared as such, I left the text unchanged (captions below the figures) and simply changed the option controlling the captions’ position within the document. Write plain text files. Once you move to writing in plain text files, you open yourself up to a whole new world of very helpful tools to facilitate your writing and collaboration, such as dynamic documents or the version control system git, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

Learn Markdown Am I suggesting you replace one evil with another? Not learning APA style requires learning a whole new language? No, Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as possible. The following is an excerpt from the APA example manuscript written in Markdown. Excerpt from the APA example manuscript in Markdown # Methods ## Participants Younger adults (14 women, 10 men, $M_{age} = 19.5$ years, age range: 18–22 years) were recruited with flyers posted on the Boston College campus. <!-- Add flyer to appendix! --> Older adults (15 women, nine men, $M_{age} = 76.1$ years, age range: 68–84 years) were recruited through the Harvard Cooperative on Aging (see Table 1, for demographics and test scores).[^p] [^p]: Analyses of covariance were conducted with these covariates, with no resulting influences of these variables on the pattern or magnitude of the results. 1 2 3 4 5 6 # Methods ## Participants Younger adults ( 14 women , 10 men , $ M_ { age } = 19.5 $ years , age range : 18 – 22 years ) were recruited with flyers posted on the Boston College campus . < ! -- Add flyer to appendix ! -- > Older adults ( 15 women , nine men , $ M_ { age } = 76.1 $ years , age range : 68 – 84 years ) were recruited through the Harvard Cooperative on Aging ( see Table 1 , for demographics and test scores ) . [ ^ p ] [ ^ p ] : Analyses of covariance were conducted with these covariates , with no resulting influences of these variables on the pattern or magnitude of the results . Without knowing anything about Markdown, it should be easy to guess what the annotations mean. # declare hierarchical section headings, <!-- and --> envelope comments, and [^p] adds a reference to a footnote. As you can see, Markdown is easy to learn and will quickly save time in manuscript preparation. The only thing that may be scary at first are the equations enveloped by $ . Equations are written in the powerful, yet, fairly simple equation syntax used in LaTeX. Although LaTeX is widely used to write entire manuscripts (not just equations), it is not very popular in the field of Psychology. I suspect that the neglect is largely due to its complexity and long learning curve, which I find rather deterring myself. Both seem to outweigh the advantages of the system when it comes to handling citations and cross-references or typesetting large documents, complex tables, and equations which are rare in the average Psychology paper. That is why I like the idea of using Markdown as a simple interface to harness the power of LaTeX without having to write or know much about LaTeX.

Use a reference manager If you are not already using a reference manager such as Zotero, I strongly suggest you start doing so. Reference managers are like iTunes for your literature; they help you search, download, and organize papers. Most importantly, with a few clicks you can export a collection of references you need for a paper into a .bib -file. Once your references are in a .bib -file that resides in the same folder as your Markdown-file, you can easily add citations to your Markdown document. Each reference has a unique handle, e.g. lewandowsky_computational_2011 , which you can use in Markdown. @lewandowsky_computational_2011 creates an in-text citation; [@lewandowsky_computational_2011] creates a citation in parentheses. Everything reference-related, such as in-text citation and the reference section, will be taken cared of automatically.