Document Preparation
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First rule of giving documents to Mike: Provide both hard and soft copy. Soft copy can be provided either by email or by providing a pointer to the location on RedGiant where the document resides.

Byrne is picky about documents you give to him. Some of these are just foibles, but most of them are based on legit human factors concerns.

First, you should find and read the book The Mac is not a Typewriter or The PC is not a Typewriter and remember many of the admonitions there, like only using a single space after punctuation with a proportional font, and that long text runs should use a serif font. (Times New Roman or just Times is recommended since that is also always available to all PostScript printers. It is not an accident that most camera-ready proceedings formats require this.)

In general, APA conventions are desireable since most of the manuscripts our lab produces will be going to journals that either require or suggest APA formatting. However, there are some conventions that should be violated in certain cases:

[1] Documents should be organized into sections (and subsections), and each section should have a header and a number, like this:

2. Experiment 1
2.1 Methods
2.1.1 Participants
2.1.2 Design
etc.

I realize this is not APA format, but you should use this anyway, and simply strip off the numbers if you're handing something in to an APA copy editor.

[2] You need not follow the APA convention of putting figures and tables (and their captions) at the end of the document. You can, but again, until it goes to an APA copy editor, people rarely object.

[3] 4th edition APA rules asked for references to be forward-indented. They backed off with 5th edition rules but there are still some people who belive in this. NEVER do this; all references should be reverse-indented, which is they way they appear in APA journals.

Also, a note about figures. I don't care if you use Excel to generate graphs, but if you do, you must do two things:

* Change the background color to something other than gray. The decision to have it gray in the first place is astronomically dumb.

* Change the colors of the bars/lines to something that looks good in black-and-white. Use dashed lines if you need to. Local laser printers and APA journals reproduce graphs in black-and-white, so you should produce graphs that look good in that format.

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Last modified 2003.08.29