Posted August 1, 2018
THE BASICS
When writing, consider your audience. Psychology Today magazine articles do not look like journal articles. PsychologyToday.com blog posts do not always look like items for the printed magazine, although they do look more like magazine articles more journal articles.
Previously I shared tips for writing about psychology for general audiences, in "Psych Write: Psychology Can Make Sense and Be Fun to Read!" Here, I share how we cheat on APA style and yet mostly follow APA style in our reference sections within the Popular Culture Psychology books series that I edit. Most of you may have no use for this, but I urge those writing about psychology for non-psychologists to consider some of what we're doing and why.
Our Cheats
This isn’t the place for anyone to learn how to write an APA-style reference. The American Psychological Association published an entire manual for that, and a number of websites such as the Purdue OWL can help. For the most part, we follow APA style when writing references, but we cheat on a few things for practical reasons.
Changes, Not Cheats
Writers often do a couple of things that suited previous editions of the APA publication manual but not the current one (American Psychological Association, 2009).
Formatting (Never Tab)
This part really isn't a cheat. In fact, it should be good instruction for anyone writing in APA style.
Do not use paragraph breaks and tabs to make your references look like hanging paragraphs when they're really not. If your manuscript goes to press, your formatting will change and make such a mess that your editor might never want to look at your work ever again.
Use hanging indents in the reference section. In MS Word, set them as Paragraph > Indentation > Special > Hanging > 0.5" (unlike these paragraphs about how to write the references). Each reference cited should be a single, self-contained paragraph. Along the same lines, you should format paragraphs in the body of your text the same way because tabs are unlikely to transfer well: Paragraph > Indentation > Special > First line > 0.5".
Endnotes
We use endnotes instead of the parenthetical citations that look weird and intrusive to most readers (e.g., Ellis & Dryden, 1990). When an endnote cites a source with three or more authors, we use "et al." every time, not just the first (e.g., Taylor et al., 1998). We back up our ideas with a lot of sources, which in typical APA style would create a lot of speed bumps to intrude on readability for the everyday reader. Superscript numbers indicating specific endnotes are unobtrusive 1 for most readers and yet they make information readily available to those who want to know how we're backing up what we say.
THE BASICSSample Endnote
1 Like this one, demonstrating what that sentence said about endnotes.
Related Posts
American Psychological Association (2009). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed., 2nd printing). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. [We will almost never identify a book by its printing. I point this out here because the 1st printing of the 6th edition was a fiasco and quickly had to be replaced by a corrected 2nd printing.]
Ellis, A., & Dryden, W. (1990). The essential Albert Ellis: seminal writings on psychotherapy. New York, NY: Springer.
Langley, T. (Ed.) (2017). Star Trek: The mental frontier. New York, NY: Sterling.
Taylor, S. E., Pham, L. B., Rivkin, I. D., & Armor, D. A. (1998). Harnessing the imagination: Mental simulation, self-regulation, and coping. American Psychologist, 53(4), 429–439.
