This document is accessible online via this link: http://acs.ist.psu.edu/reports/dR19 /dR19.pdf and /dR

A condensed version of this document is published in XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 26(1), 10–11.

Some Tips for Academic Writing and Using Microsoft Word

Pooyan Doozandeh

1

& Frank E. Ritter

Applied Cognitive Science Lab, The Pennsylvania State University

ACS Tech. Note 2019–2 (June 10, 2019)

includes using dash and hyphen, quotations and italicizing, outline view, styles, hidden text, key

bindings, breaks, and bibliography tools. The main use of this document is in writing articles,

proposals, theses, dissertations, books, resumes, CVs, and other academic texts.

types of dashes and hyphens described in Table 1. Word does not make these clearly available, but

they are available to use if you know how to find them.

boards. They might not work with the hyphen key on the main section of keyboards.

there are certain conventions that are followed commonly. The purpose of double quotation is to

Doozandeh & Ritter June 2019

this usage, use quotation marks only the first time the word or phrase is used. To cite a letter, word,

phrase, or sentence as a linguistic example, or to introduce a technical or key term, do not use

double quotation. Instead, italicize the term (“we call it fidelity-transfer correlation”). The main

use of single quotation marks is within double quotations to set off material that in the original

source was enclosed in double quotation marks (In their study they found that “the ‘fidelity of

simulation’ should not be of concern” (p. 55).).

text. Academic papers usually have headings in different levels; a heading might have several sub-

headings, each having their own sub-headings, and so on. This tool can thus help in organizing

your documents. To access Word’s outline view, go to the View tab. In outline view, you can

ondary headings (e.g., within the method section, there are headings of materials, participants, and

design), and these levels continue as such. See the Appendix for a list of keybindings for outline

view. Some operations available in outline view are listed below.

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using + or – keys on the keyboard while the heading is selected.

Note: it is preferable to use outline view when you start creating a document. Converting docu-

ments that were created without outline to outline view might take some time.

"Title" style for your title, "Heading 1" for level 1 heading, "Text" style for the main text of the

document, and "Caption" style for the figure captions and subtitles. The main reason of using

and choose the kind of formatting you need (e.g., title), and Word does all the formatting for those

parts across the whole document. Once you have several sections of your document in a specific

style, and if you want to apply a change to all those sections (e.g., changing the font size from 11

to 12), instead of editing those sections one by one, you can simply make the change to the Style

of those sections, and it automatically applies the change to all sections with the same Style.

As a side note, when you install Word in your computer and open a new page, the default

formatting (e.g., line spacing, paragraph spacing, indention, font, font size) is decided by Word,

and it might be different from your preferred default formatting. So, you should change formatting

elements for every new document. You can change this, so that every time you open Word, the

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ers to see at first sight, or if you have old or personal notes about the document (e.g., author con-

tact details, dead prose, prose to reuse, references yet to include), you can hide selected text in

your document. To hide a piece of text, select the text, and then press Ctrl+Shift+H. Or:

the same time for a specific purpose (also called keyboard shortcuts). There is a list of useful

keybindings in the Appendix. You can also find many useful keybindings when using Word at:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/. In that webpage, search “keyboard shortcuts”, and you

can find keybindings for both Win and Mac. Two useful keybindings are listed below.

at the closest space character. To prevent Word from breaking a line at a certain space char-

acter, you can insert a non-breaking space. To do so, you can use Ctrl+Shift+Spc (in Mac

Option+Spc). For example, you would not want Word to break a line at the space in “730 ms”

or “ad hoc”.

Non-breaking return (cr - carriage return), or soft return

When you press the Enter (or Return) key in Word, it automatically puts extra space between

the current line and the next line. But sometimes you do not need space between lines (e.g.,

you may want to divide a title into two lines without adding additional space between them).

Here, you should use a soft return or non-breaking return. To do so, press Shift+Enter (in

Mac, Option+Return). For example, the space between the current paragraph and the title

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paragraph, you can right click, choose Paragraph, and in Lines and Page Breaks tab, choose “Keep

in two separate pages. You can similarly insert page break.

first 100 pages, but will pay off after that. You can use a range of tools to store the citation of your

articles, books, and other sources, and afterwards, you can cite those sources easily, both in text

and in references section. For a list of the professional bibliography management tools, go to the

webpage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_management_software.

Word has a simple tool that can help you manage your references. In Word, go to Refer-

ences>Citations & Bibliography (Figure 3, A). After choosing your style of formatting (e.g., APA),

you can click on Insert Citation, and choose Add New Source (Figure 3, B). After filling the in-

formation of a source and adding the source, you can go to Citations & Bibliography and choose