OK before we get into the actual writing, I want to give you some general pointers on how to write the
paper.
So first of all a very general thing is to write in past tense because the research that you're going
to describe in the introduction section happened in the past.
Your own research happened in the past
by the time that people read about it.
So write about it in the past.
Also try to use short sentences. Whenever you find that a sentence gets too long
try to see whether you can break it up into two sentences and you will find that this will make your
writing clearer and more concise.
Another recommendation is to use common scientific jargon. So a jargon that is common in your field. But
do explain in your text what it means at least for once to make sure that all of your readers can understand
you.
And the reason why it's a good idea to use scientific jargon is because it will enable you to express
a complex idea in just one word.
So that will help you to make your writing more concise and it will also look more professional. Then,
another recommendation is to add in-text citations using the Mendeley word plugin.
So let me show you quickly how that works.
OK.
Here I am in word.
And if you already installed Mendeley then Mendeley will have automatically installed a word plug-in, which
enables you to use Mendeley in Word... which is very very useful.
And where exactly you'll find this plug-in depends a little bit on the version of Word.
I find it under "references" and now after installing Mendeley I have a number of new buttons such as
"insert or edit citation" and using this button I can very easily create perfect in-text citations.
So let's say for example that I want to say that cognitive therapy works very well.
And I had a citation for that.
So I click on "insert or edit" citation.
Then I go to Mendeley and now Mendely is going to ask me what article I want to cite.
And I can type in any search term to find that article.
So I'm just gonna use "cognitive therapy" and there it is" "A meta analysis of the efficacy of cognitive
therapy for depression."
So I click on that and I say OK.
And now Mendeley sends me back to Word and it adds a perfect in-text citation and it's gonna make sure
that the formatting is perfect.
So for example if you have several citations it will order the citations in the correct order or if
you have used a citation before and that means that you need to change the citation in some way, it will
change the citation. So it will immediately create a perfect in-text citation. By the way, in my case I
need APA format. If you need a different format then you can go to this drop down menu and choose a
different citing format.
But I need APA so I'm going to stick to APA here.
And by the way you can also customize your citations.
So say for example that I want to use the name of the author in the text.
So say, I want to write that
"DOBSON showed that cognitive therapy works very well."
Well, in that case in APA format I'm not supposed to use the author name again in the in-text citation
but I'm just supposed to use the year.
So in that case I again click "insert or edit citation" then I go to Mendeley again I search the article.
There it is.
And now instead of clicking on "OK" I click on the citation again.
And now I can customize my citation.
So here for example I can add a page number which I would have to do if I wanted to quote something
from this article.
But in this case I just want to suppress the author so I'm gonna check that and I click OK and now it
gives me a citation using just the year.
So in this way without knowing exactly what the citation style is gonna look like, you're gonna get perfect
citations.
And best of all, if you add citations using this word plug-in then at the end of your article when you
want to add your references, you can just click on this button here "insert bibliography" and it will automatically
add all the references that you used in the text.
So I strongly recommend that you use the word plug in of Mendeley to add in-text citations.