OPPapers.com

Psychology

Scientific research is a public venture. Therefore, one of the essential skills of the scientist is to be able to communicate ideas and research results effectively. This hypertext guide is an attempt to make the style of writing used in the field of psychology clear to you. It summarizes a lot of the material available in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5-th edition) (2001) and is oriented toward undergraduate students. For example, it includes numerous hints to avoid common mistakes students make. Note the examples appear in a teletype font to distinguish them from the normal text. Finally, the document is organized in an outline format for at least two reasons. First, it should make it easier for students to quickly locate the information they seek. Second, it should make it easier for an instructor to grade students papers. In most cases, the student can simply be referred to the outline item that addresses the problem rather than writing the comment repeatedly on multiple papers. Note that a checklist version of this writing guide is available.
I. General Topics
A. Typing - Here is a Microsoft Word 2002 document/template that should help you with some of the basic formatting.
1. Your papers must be typed or printed on a computer.
2. Set the typewriter or word processor to double space and keep it there throughout the entire manuscript.
3. Use one inch margins on the left, right, top, and bottom of the page. These margins are wide in order to leave room for reviewer's comments.
4. Use normal paragraphs in which the first line is indented five characters for all paragraphs in the manuscript except the abstract, block quotes, titles and headings, subheadings, references, table titles, notes, and figure captions.
5. Use a 12 point font. In other words, there should be 10 typed characters per inch.
6. Single space after sentence terminators (i.e., '.', '?', '!').
7. Capitalize the first letter following a colon if...