Appendix E — Plain-text writing

(Modified on 2026-08-11)
390 words

Focus on content while you are writing, not formatting.

When writing using latex or markdown, you write your content in plain-text files (.tex or .md extensions). Writing in plain-text formats, as opposed to the “rich text” of editors like Microsoft Word, can seem odd at first, but it is extremely rewarding if you get used to it. Plain-text allows you to focus on content while you are writing, not formatting.

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I have some advice/expectations about how to write in plain-text:

• Write one sentence per line.
  • This makes it much easier to edit papers, as you can delete/copy/move sentences easily.
• Create visual space be leaving blank lines between paragraphs, headers, tables, etc.
• Dashes (make sure you know what these different dashes are used for)
  • Hyphen: -
  • En dash: -- (for example, 3--5)
  • Em dash: ---
    • Don’t put spaces on either side of the em dash.
• Quotes
  • In tex, you have to write opening and closing quotes differently, using double the grave ` to open, and the apostrophe ' to close. So a quoted word in a sentence looks like ``this'' word.
  • Note that you must explicitly use double quotes (double grave and double apostrophe).
    • Single quotes are only used inside other quotes, like ``This is a quotation that contains a reference to the word `catapult' in it''.
• Spaces
  • Don’t put extra spaces after periods: latex/pandoc will do that automatically.

Make use of markdown and latex commands to make headers/subheaders, emphasis, etc.:

• Markdown guide
• Overleaf’s LaTeX guide

Comments

In plain text, you can write “comments” to yourself which will be hidden in the output. This can be a useful way of removing some content without deleting it (so you can potentially recover it later), write notes to yourself, or write an outline. In latex, any content on a line after % is commented. In markdown, you have to use html-style comments, which start <!-- and end -->—everything in between is commented.

Citation (bibtex)

Bibtex is a system to help you incorporate citations into your LaTeX documents. You keep the actual citation in a separate file (.bib), then you can refer to these citations using their bibtex “key”, by writing things like \cite{huron2006}.

• Cite multiple sources at once using a single \cite command, with multiple arguments: \cite{bibtexkey1, bibtexkey2}.
• Use informative bibtex keys in your bib, unless you (and all your collaborators) are using an automated system to keep track of them.
  • Even then, will the editors/reviewers on your paper be able to use the same system?; using informative keys will probably be best in any case.
• Make sure the citation command is placed correctly in the sentence: i.e., before the final period, but with a space between it and the last word.

Latex citation commands

I recommend you use the following biblatex set-up command in your LaTeX docs: \usepackage[style=apa,sorting=ynt]{biblatex}. You can then use the two commands \cite{} and \cite*{} for parenthetical citation and narrative citations respectively. For example:

• Narrative:
  • “Huron (\cite\{huron2006}) argues that expectations are the main driving force in musical experience.”
• Parenthetical:
  • “Expectations formed from generalized past experience are distinct from those formed from specific past experiences (\cite{huron2006}).”

Better yet, you can avoid having to manually write parentheses by using \parencite{}:

• Narrative:
  • “Huron \parencite*{huron2006} argues that expectations are the main driving force in musical experience.”
• Parenthetical:
  • “Expectations formed from generalized past experience are distinct from those formed from specific past experiences \parencite{huron2006}.”

Notice that the citation commands are separated by a space from nearby words, but not from punctuation.