by Chelsea Lee

If you have ever cut and pasted information from a webpage into a word-processing document, you know what a mess you can get of font face, size, color, and spacing. It takes one click to paste and then five more steps to get the format to match your default settings—very aggravating. Paste Special is a feature of Microsoft Word (the program I use—please share solutions for other software in the comments) that can make your work easier and more accurate. It allows you to skip the format wrangling and to paste just the text you selected using the same settings as in your document.

What Paste Special Is Good For

Paste Special is helpful when you want to copy and paste from your Internet browser window or PDF into your Word document. You can use Paste Special to help construct your reference list, and in doing so you can reduce transcription errors and save time. For example, you can use it to copy and paste 

• DOIs,
• URLs, and
• text from PDFs or any webpage.

How to Use Paste Special

To use Paste Special, first copy the text you want from your webpage. Second, put your cursor where you want to paste in your Word document. Then select Paste Special from the Edit menu (Word 2003) or from the Paste button on the Home Tab (Word 2007, 2010). A dialog box like the one below will pop up.

Select “Unformatted text” or “Unformatted Unicode Text” (the latter seems to work better when copying from a PDF), and click OK. Your copied text will paste in the same format as the text that surrounds it in your document.  

Shortcuts

If you prefer to use keyboard shortcuts, the combination for Paste Special is either ALT+V (Word 2003) or CTRL+ALT+V (Word 2007, 2010). Finally, if you really know your way around the computer, this DIY lesson will show you how to make a one-key shortcut for Paste Special (it uses a Word macro to skip the dialog box and paste unformatted text directly).

Stay tuned for more editing tips! And please share your own tips in the comments.

by Stefanie

No film student’s education is complete until he or she watches 七人の侍 by the influential director 黒澤 明.

Wait, what? Who?

In our increasingly interconnected and multilingual world, it is not uncommon for people, researchers especially, to go beyond local or national borders in the quest for insight and knowledge. This may seem great at the information compilation stage, but once the time to create a reference list rolls around, confusion sets in. If I am writing a paper in English for my film class in New York, does 黒澤 明 come before, after, or between Hitchcock and Peckinpah when I am alphabetizing my reference list (pretend, for a moment, that the director and not the producer comes first when creating movie references; see the Publication Manual, sixth edition, p. 209, on the specifics of movie reference formatting)?

That’s somewhat of a trick question. First, the director and movie title need to be transliterated: that is, converted to the alphabet one is using to write a paper. In this example, I am using the Latin alphabet. Alphabetizing cannot happen if the references are not in the same alphabet! So, 七人の侍 transliterated is Shichinin no Samurai, and 黒澤 明 is revealed to be Kurosawa Akira (or Akira Kurosawa once the name is put in Western order—i.e., family name last—to standardize the treatment of names across references). The final reference for this great film would look like this:

Motoki, S. (Producer), & Kurosawa, A. (Director). (1954). Shichinin no 
 samurai [Seven samurai; motion picture]. Japan: Toho.

Please note that if you are not familiar with the language you need to transliterate and translate, please find someone who is that can help, if possible. Also, if (a) you are familiar with the language being transliterated and translated and (b) you translate all of the titles for the references, thank you for your effort, but this does not earn you translator credit in the reference.

What other questions about foreign-language sources have you run into while compiling your reference lists?

by Chelsea Lee

As a new school year begins at universities around the world, a new crop of students will set upon the task of learning APA Style. Below you will find some of the most popular and (we hope) helpful content published to this date on the APA Style Blog and on our parent site, apastyle.org.

Getting Started With APA Style

What is APA Style?

Why is APA Style needed?

A tutorial for those totally new to APA Style

A tutorial for those using the 6th edition manual for the first time

FAQs about APA Style

Sample Papers in APA Style

Sample Paper 1

Sample Paper 2

Sample meta-analysis paper

Sample published APA article 

What To Do If Your Reference Isn’t in the Manual (a.k.a. How References Work)

Our series on the “generic reference”

How To Cite...

Classical works (the Bible, the Qu’ran, Aristotle, etc.)

Constitutions and other legal references

E-books

Facebook

Interviews

Secondary sources (sources you found in another source)

Twitter 

Wikipedia

How to Format...

Headings

Lists (lettered, numbered, or bulleted)

Statistics 

Tables and figures

Still Need Help?

Please contact us if you need further assistance and we’ll be happy to help. You can also find the APA Style team on Facebook and Twitter.

by Timothy McAdoo

Page 67 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.) notes that “writers often use redundant language in an effort to be emphatic.” Instead, the redundant wording can be distracting.

by Chelsea Lee

 You’ve burned through the midnight oil. You’ve written the last word, double-, nay, triple-checked the reference list, and as the sun clambers over the windowsill you face the last remaining question: What to call this work of staggering genius? You are tempted to play the facetious card and call your paper “A Study of the Effects of Red Bull on a Person's Ability to Form Coherent Sentences,” but the long-term implications of such a title for your academic success give you pause. What else, then, shall suffice?

The title of your paper is incredibly important. A paper’s title not only sets readers’ expectations for what the paper will be about but may also determine whether it gets read at all—or with how much trepidation versus excitement it is greeted.

Below are five general principles that, if followed, will produce a great title: 

1. A great title summarizes the main idea of the paper. Your title should identify the key issues under investigation as well as how they relate to each other. The title “The Effects of Transformed Letters on Reading Speed” achieves this goal, whereas the title “Transformed Letters and Reading Speed” identifies the elements but misses the relationship.
2. A great title has a length of 12 words or fewer. If your attempts to create a summarizing title have produced a five-line manifesto, try to pare it down to the essentials. Keep in mind that 12 words is a guideline, not a hard ceiling.
3. A great title includes only words that contribute meaning. Phrases such as “A Study of,” “An Experimental Investigation of,” or “The Results of” are like empty calories (not unlike most of what’s in that Red Bull...). Make your title easier to digest by cutting the fat. “The Results of a Study of The Effects of Heavy Metal Music on Plant Growth” can slim down to “The Effects of Heavy Metal Music on Plant Growth” or even the jazzier “How Heavy Metal Music Stimulates Plant Growth.”
4. A great title gives away the ending. If your title is in the form of a yes–no question, try rephrasing it so that the question is answered or the answer at least alluded to. This primes the reader for deeper comprehension. If Philip K. Dick had written for an academic audience, you might be perusing Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Empathy in Nonhuman Species before bed tonight. (Click the image of the book cover at the right to read about his actual book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.)
5. A great title says it with style. Academic writing must be precise, but it needn’t be fusty. Consider these titles of real published psychology articles: “The Unicorn, the Normal Curve, and Other Improbable Creatures” (Micceri, 1989, Psychological Bulletin) and “Pride, Prejudice, and Ambivalence: Toward a Unified Theory of Race and Ethnicity” (Markus, 2008, American Psychologist). These titles pique readers’ interest while also conveying essential information about the content of the article. 

Armed with these principles, you are now ready to give your next paper a great title. You can also read more about titles in the Publication Manual in section 2.01 (p. 23).

by Timothy McAdoo

Today I want to zero in on a special topic. This is not just an empty set of words: Let’s de-cipher another APA Style point!

The zero before a decimal point is known as a leading zero. Have you noticed that sometimes this zero is used in decimal values and sometimes it is not?

APA Style has a very simple guideline for leading zeros:

• If a value has the potential to exceed 1.0, use the leading zero.
• If a value can never exceed 1.0, do not use the leading zero.

Thus, because most units of measure have the potential to exceed 1.0, the leading zero is frequently needed. A value over 1.0 does not need to actually appear in the text. Here are just a few examples:

There are some values that by definition can never exceed 1.0. The omission of the leading zero is a visual indicator of this restricted range. The most common cases are p values and correlations:

A consistent presentation of statistical values, both within a paper and across published articles, provides a visual symmetry that can help readers focus on content over form.

I hope this zippy post has helped nullify any confusion. If you’re still drawing a blank, you can also find this guideline and additional examples on page 113 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.).

We are very proud to announce the debut of several new features to the APA Style Blog. We hope that they will improve the usefulness and user friendliness of the site as well as your enjoyment of it. If you read our posts through a feed aggregator like Google Reader, we hope that you will pay our main site a visit at http://blog.apastyle.org to check it out. The new features include

• a search box to search blog posts,
• buttons to subscribe to our RSS feed, Twitter feed, or Facebook page,
• lists of recent posts and comments,
• our recent Twitter updates,
• a “ShareThis” button on each post, and
• an updated and more thorough “About Us” page.

These features are intended to make it easier for you to search the blog, automatically get new content, see what’s new and what’s been talked about recently, and share content you like with your friends and colleagues. All of this information will also be available on our “About Us” page. 

Thank you for reading and we hope you enjoy the new features of the site.

by Chelsea Lee

APA has gotten a lot of questions and feedback from users who are confused about when to use boldface type and when not to, particularly in headings. Here are the short and sweet answers about font formatting style:

Regular Formatting

Use regular font formatting (no boldface, no italics) for all section titles, such as

• Abstract,
• Author Note,
• Title of Your Paper (on the title page and on the page where the text begins),
• References,
• Appendix/Appendices, and
• Footnotes.

Section titles should also be centered, on their own line, and in title case (that means capitalize all major words—for more information what words are considered major, see the first bullet in Section 4.15 on p. 101 of the Publication Manual). A section also generally begins on a new page. (The only exception is for the author note section, which goes on the title page.)

Boldface Formatting

Use boldface only for headings within the body of your paper, that is, within the text itself—these headings we refer to by levels (Levels 1–3 use boldface; Level 4 uses boldface and italic; Level 5 uses italics only). This blog on headings describes the levels in more detail (see also Section 3.03 on pp. 62–63). Common headings within the body of the paper are Method, Results, and Discussion, but your headings will differ depending on what you are writing about. Additionally, if you have an appendix with lots of text, you can use the levels of heading within that body of text as well (but the section title "Appendix" would still use regular nonboldface formatting).

Take a look at the sample papers for examples of how section titles use regular formatting and headings within the body of the paper use boldface.  

by Timothy McAdoo

In the previous post, we discussed how to use parentheses and commas with statistics.

Today, we highlight an exception to this guideline. There are two cases when brackets are the preferred choice in APA Style.

First, when parenthetical text also includes a statistic, brackets should be used.

Second, for clarity, APA Style recommends that confidence intervals be reported with brackets around the upper and lower limits (as outlined on page 117):

In the context of a sentence this might look like the following:

Also, as noted in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.) on page 117, every report of a confidence interval must clearly state the level of confidence. Multiple confidence intervals would appear as follows. Notice the plural version of the CI abbreviation:

I hope these examples are helpful.  What other questions about formatting statistics do you have? Let us know in the comments.

by Timothy McAdoo

The Publication Manual (6th ed.) presents guidelines for formatting statistical and mathematical copy. As noted on page 116 of the Manual, these guidelines reflect "standards of content and form agreed on in the field" and are designed to enhance clear communication.

The most basic guidelines are that statistics should be italicized and shown in parentheses:

However, when a statistic includes its own parenthetical value (e.g., degrees of freedom that appear with t or F values), you’ll need to separate the statistics from the text with commas. Nested parentheses should be avoided in APA Style.

Consider the next two examples:

Notice how the commas separate the string of statistics from the text, just as they would separate other types of independent clauses.

When you have multiple groups of statistics in a series, use semicolons to separate:

As a side note, notice that there should be no space between a statistic's symbol and its parenthetical information (in this case the degrees of freedom): that is, F(1, 144) not F (1, 144).

Of course, this just scratches the surface of the potential for reporting statistics. Pages 116–124 of the Manual provide much more detail. What questions do you have? Let us know in the comments.