So I’m spending yet another summer Saturday indoors editing. Here’s the APA style guide for a much more technical, scientific paper…

• Introduction: The introduction section of a paper does not include a heading labeling it the introduction (3.30).
• One’s vs. an Individual’s: Throughout the paper, the authors use “one’s” and “an individual’s” interchangeably. I standardized this to change “one’s” to “an individual’s.”
• Lists within a paragraph: If you have a list included within the text of a paragraph, they should be labeled (a) …, (b) … and so on. (Note that the letters are lowercase and not italicized.) If the list is separate from the paragraph, the list should be indented and numbered. (See 3.33 for more information.)

• Back to back parentheses: APA style tells us to not use parentheses back to back (see 3.08). It separates the two parentheticals with a semicolon.
• Full-time, part-time: Since APA doesn’t give any specific direction on usage issues, I revert to Chicago. (See the first part of Chapter 3 on APA Editorial style [p. 77 in my guide], which states that the APA manual “omits general rules explained in widely available style books” and refers us to Chicago). Chicago 7.90 states that “full” should be hyphenated when it precedes a noun. So it will always be “full- and part-time.”
• Parentheses & statistical material within text: This is a tough one because the stats material significantly affects the readability of the text. There is some direction in 3.07 and 3.08 of the Publication Manual. Section 3.08 directs us to not use brackets to set off statistics that already include parentheses and shows us the preferred example, which uses a comma to set off the material. I agree that it’s not the most reader-friendly solution, but it helps cut down on the material that is set off from the text.
• Interpersonal justice categories: Throughout the text, the author several different renditions of his categories (i.e. “high self interpersonal justice”). For standardization purposes, these will be written according to the following pattern: high/low self/others interpersonal justice. Note that there is no apostrophe in “others.” Since it is a category directly similar to self interpersonal justice, which isn’t possessive, I’ve changes the others category to make it possessive. Note that this applies only when talking about it as a category and not the interpersonal justice afforded to others. (Did that make sense?)
• Anchors on a scale: When writing a 1 to 5 scale, the definitions of what those numbers represent (also called anchors) should be included in parentheses and the text itself should be italicized. For example, “ratings scale from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent).” See 3.19 for more information.
• Statistical odds and ends: I’m not even sure what some of these symbols mean, but I did find examples of how to punctuate them. Here’s a list (taken from 3.18 & 3.19):
  • F(1, 53) = 10.03. Note the space between the comma and the 53.
  • 2 (self interpersonal justice treatment) × 3 (other interpersonal justice treatment) study design. (I don’t know if you can tell this here, but the x in the middle is a multiplication symbol, not the letter x.
  • SD for standard deviation (not lowercase sd)
• In justice literature: Because this phrase can so easily be misread as “injustice literature,” I’ve tried to avoid this wording whenever possible.
• Numbers expressed in figures: As per 3.42, figures should be used to represent the following. Bolded items are things that didn’t fall into my personal mental figure/word concepts.
  • time, dates, ages,
  • samples and population sizes,
  • scores and points on a scale,
  • exact sums of money,
  • numbers as having to do with math,
  • numbers that precede a unit of measurement, and
  • all numbers in the abstract of a paper.

And that’s about it for now.