Picture this: You’ve been given a writing assignment. You go home, fire up Word, and stare at the blinking cursor waiting for input.
You somehow crank up a working title for your paper and think: “Hey, I should format this at 24pt.”
“Let’s make this Arial.”
And sure enough, you’ll find yourself lost in toying around with Microsoft’s wonderful Word. Here are the tools I use, which complete each other to form a pretty solid workflow.
LaTeX
Latex is a typesetting environment. Instead of writing your paper directly in an editor like word, you first write the text content of your piece, then let LaTeX do all the formatting for you. You should get a good overview of what LaTeX is and how it works over at Andy Roberts’ amazing tutorials.
Here’s an example of a LaTeX document.
There are several advantages to LaTeX, the most important one to me being that it allows you to focus on the writing. While initially it takes some tinkering and setting up, it can be a huge time saver once you have set up a template file for yourself to use for each one of your papers.
On the Mac, I use the MacTex package, which brings with it the LaTeX program and a good editor called TexShop. TeXShop is your front-end to LaTex.
Collecting Sources
While Word now supports proper citations, it makes it hard to manage them and they often need to be updated by hand. This is also true for other editors like Mellel.
LaTeX solves this, by bringing killer support for citations. While your actual text is in one file (a .tex file) your citations are kept in another (a .bib file). I organize my citations using BibDesk, an amazing application for managing citations. It let’s you organize sources, mark them as read, and creates bibliography files for your term paper with a click of a button.
Using a proper package in LaTeX like apacite will automatically give APA-style citations throughout your document. All I do is insert citation commands into my text where I need them, and LaTeX handles all the numbring, listing in the bibliography and formatting of authors names, the year etc.
Even if you have a citation in your .bib file, LaTeX is smart enough to know that it should only be listed if you actually used it in teh document! No more citation errors!
So why use all this?
There’s a slew of reasons. But the main ones that make it better than others are:
- Never worry about formatting again.
- It looks way better.
- It won’t crash: LaTeX is basically a plain text file. You can edit it anywhere, in any text editor, and it basically can’t crash on you. File size is very small which makes it very portable.
- It’s great for displaying equations, which is why it’s the leading standard among sciencitifc scholars.
- It fits in with the workflow of a student and allows you to do one thing well: Write.
How I Write Papers with LaTex
My basic workflow with LaTex is straight-forward these days: I have a template for my papers, all pre-formatted with the university logo and placeholders for the title, the course name, and the professor or assistant evaluating you. Citations and all necessary packages are in there already, too.
I then go along my usual process of writing, heavily based on GTD. When it comes to organizing sources, BibDesk comes in handy. Once I have all that collected, I really just need to write my paper, citing works along the way.
At the end, I typeset the document and look for any errors I might have made. Presto. A beautifully typeset paper with almost zero time wasted on formatting issues.
That’s just a glimpse of how I write papers, and there’s a lot more on paper writing I will cover right here in the future. Stay tuned.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:43 am
This was a really neat post. I’ve seen latex mentioned before, but never really bothered investigating it.
June 19th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
When I first started grad school (computer science), I was determined to do it all in Word. After all, I was a Word expert.
That lasted until my first 10 page paper was due. Ugh. Word and I just couldn’t agree. Plus, a lot (and I mean most) of the computer science papers/articles/books are written in LaTeX. There’s something to be said for conforming to the industry standard.
For Windows people, Miktex is the LaTeX engine of choice. Then, you can put your front end of choice on. I spent a few years with WinEdt, which I highly recommend. But it can be intimidating for new users (allows much customization). Another option, which I’m using right now, and which allows me to see the latex source, and the resulting output, in the same window, is called LEd. It’s a one-man product, and perhaps has a few quirks, but I love it.
June 19th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
@Benjamin: It’s really great, and takes away a lot of headache once you get your head around it. I’d suggest spending a good few days on really getting things set up nicely.
@GTD Wannabe: Thanks for the excellent advice. I’ve had some trouble with putting LaTeX on a PC, so I’ll definitely look into the options you present.
June 19th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
I’m a long-time LaTeX user/enthusiast; I wrote my PhD dissertation in mathematics using LaTeX 11 years ago and I’ve never looked back. I encourage my students now to use LaTeX whenever possible, and I build a LaTeX boot camp into my sophomore-level intro to proofs course. In general the use of text files for content, in any setting, as opposed to proprietary formats like .doc or .docx is a good idea. (Write the content in a text file; then import it into your favorite program for formatting.)
There are a few things about LaTeX that IMO are downsides. Graphics support is a little complicated; it’s not easy to do simple and necessary formatting tasks like setting margins or formatting footers; and primarily there’s the fact that LaTeX was not really intended to be a word processor but something closer to a markup language, which makes some word processing tasks a little more awkward than they are in Word.
Also, make sure you check out MonkeyTeX (https://ssl.perfora.net/monkeytex.com/) which allows you to typeset LaTeX without having to install anything locally. You can even save the output to PDF online and do collaborative editing ala Google Docs.
June 21st, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Hi, I’m brand new to LaTex. You mentioned the apacite package… How do I get that set up? I can’t seem to figure it out from the readme file.
June 21st, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Hello Hailey,
are you on a Mac or PC?
The easiest way to implement apacite is to move the folder “apacite” to the same place where your TeX file is.
Inside the TeX file, you should include the apacite package and use the bibliography command at the bottom of the file.
I recommend you get accustomed to LaTeX basics first, as apacite is rather advanced.
But I’ll probably write a more extensive post to help you!
Cheers Arjun
June 25th, 2008 at 5:28 am
Arjun,
I saw this post from academihack. Just thought I’d toss along a link I made specifically for writing a Humanities term paper in LaTeX:
http://www.1984produkts.com/donkeyhottie/archives/2008/05/05/how-to-write-a-simple-english-humanities-paper-in-latex/
I intentionally tried to write everything as slowly and spelled out as possible–avoiding even discussing bibtex at all.
June 27th, 2008 at 3:00 am
You write: “I have a template for my papers, all pre-formatted with the university logo and placeholders for the title, the course name, and the professor or assistant evaluating you. Citations and all necessary packages are in there already, too.”
I ask: This template sounds awesome. Care to share it? (Or perhaps some version of it?)