Setting Up APA Styles in Word

This will be a short post. I’ve found it to be extremely useful to have APA headings set up in Microsoft Word so that when I write papers I have the headings already set as I go. This has the added bonus of allowing the “Navigation” view, which allows you to view by headings and quickly navigate to them. (I’ll explain more below). Here’s how to set up APA headings in Word:

Preface: All of this applies to a Windows system. But I think it would be similar with a Mac.

1. Open up Windows Explorer (or Finder) and go to View. Then click “Hidden items” under the Show/Hide menu.

2. Open Word.

3. Click the File tab and then Open, then Browse.

4. Navigate to C:users/YOURID/appdata/roaming/microsoft/templates/Normal.dotm and click “Open”

5. What will open is your template file. Create new headings in the Style section. Leave the document blank. I think the easiest way to do this is to type in text and then format it how you would for a given heading. For example, for Heading 1 in APA, I would want it bolded and centered (and Times New Roman, 12pt, double spaced). Then select it, and then right click on Heading 1 at the top and click “Update Heading 1 to Match Selection.” Do this with the normal APA text (double spaced, TNR 12pt, indent at beginning of paragraph). For my styles, I have Normal, References, and Headings 1-5. Word includes other style types but I deleted the rest.

6. When done, press Save at the top and close the document.

7. Open a new Word document and check to see if the template saved correctly.

8. For now on, every time you open a new Word document the APA format should be saved in there by default!

Below is what the Navigation function looks like when you have headings. It’s easier to use than scrolling, especially in a long document, as it allows you to instantly navigate to a particular heading. You can open this view by going to the View tab and then Show Navigation Pane.

Writing Papers

I hope that quarantine life is treating you reasonably well. I am definitely back in a work groove (as much as can be expected, anyway). I’m thankful for that. Today I’m going to do a fast post about something I alluded to in my blog post on reviewing and organizing literature: writing papers.

I don’t have the key to writing a good paper (does anyone?) but I have some good practices for keeping organized and expeditiously getting content on paper. As I mentioned in a previous post, I create thematic bibliographies where I take all of my annotations from the articles I’ve reviewed and arrange them into general topic areas or themes. For social justice leadership, these might be barriers (and then sub-themes), practices (and sub-themes), and preparation (and sub-themes). This is incredibly useful for writing literature reviews. Say my research paper focuses on barriers social justice leaders faced in the Chicago setting (where I live). I’d probably want to cover what is already known about barriers in my literature review. So here’s what I’d do:

• Save my thematic bibliography as a copy with a new title. I do this because in my process I delete text as I add it to the paper I’m writing. I wouldn’t want to delete from the actual primary thematic bibliography document.

• Put the thematic document on the left side of my screen and the document I’m writing on the right side. This is helpful so that I’m not going back and forth constantly. I know some people who do the same but with a second monitor. My computer screen is small but just using one screen works for me. Whatever works is fine. Picture below.

• Read through notes on the left side and begin to draft writing. Look at your notes and start writing topic sentences that sort of summarize the main point across the literature. Then add in more specific points from your thematic bibliography underneath. If many authors say the same thing, you don’t need to give that information multiple times, but can cite a few when making your point. This part of the process is really up to how you write best.

• Pull notes from the left side into the right side and delete text from the left side as you pull. This helps me know what I’ve already referenced/used. That way I won’t end up repeating myself.

• Finish once you’ve exhausted/deleted all of your notes. You may also find that some of your notes are not relevant or that you need more notes for certain sections.

That’s it! This has been a great way for me to get an initial draft on paper very quickly. After that, lots of editing needs to happen, but this really helps with getting the content down on paper.

The key to this approach is doing the initial legwork to build your thematic bibliography. As I said in my previous post, I do work to build mine constantly, basically adding in notes from articles I’ve reviewed as I go. For one of my big bibliographies (around 120 single-spaced pages of notes so far) on neoliberalism and education, I recently had to make a thematic bibliography from scratch. It did take a day or two of work. But it was 100% worth it. Now, as I review new articles, I’ll add them to the thematic bibliography every few weeks, which is much more manageable.

I hope this was helpful!

Using OneNote

I hope you, imaginary reader, are having a decent week so far. I have actually been doing good work this week and feel on top of things for the first time in a few weeks. Today I’m going to write about OneNote. I’ve seen a lot of reddit posts from students asking about OneNote, so I figure this could be useful. I wish I had known about OneNote when I was in undergrad and in my master’s program. Here’s what I use it for:

Organizing Notes for Class

Below is a picture of how I keep organized for classes. I typically create a notebook for each class. I then make a tab for each week or class meeting, as well as one for the syllabus. If there’s a final project I usually create a tab for that, too. Within each tab I’ll have one page with individual readings. More on the readings below. I’ll also often have a page for notes or other responses to the readings. It is so helpful to have readings and notes digital rather than in paper printouts. Not only does this make it easier to search quickly (and OneNote will search through PDFs as well), but this also makes it quicker and easier to get your notes into Mendeley or whatever citation generator you use. I often put notes on class readings into Mendeley because they come in handy later. Further, having all your notes digital makes it easier to get those notes into a paper.

Reading PDFs

To insert PDFs of readings, you can go to Insert—File Printout—and then choose the file. You can also send documents to OneNote through the Print function. Using the Draw function in OneNote, you can highlight, circle, underline, annotate—whatever you want to do. As I note above, PDFs are searchable in OneNote. Sometimes the program has issues with excessively long PDFs but typically it works quite well. Below is an example of some highlighting. I like to use different colors for different things. I also draw and annotate with text. Definitely far superior to highlighting in Adobe or on paper! Bonus points if your computer has a touch screen.

Organizing Other Notes

I use OneNote to organize many other notes aside from class notes. Here are some ideas:

• Weekly To-Do—I provide an example of this on my March 23rd post

• Running Training—I usually make a tab in my general tasks notebook with a big table that contains my running training plan. I really love using tables in OneNote.

• Methodology—I keep a big notebook that I continually add to with notes on research methodology. This usually comes from classes I take or other things I learn. This information comes from different sources but is really helpful to have all in one place. By keeping it in OneNote, it’s always accessible too.

  • I have similar notebooks for my dissertation research and for my other research projects. In the below image you can see how I keep that organized. There are multiple tabs for different stages of the dissertation, and pages within each. This is really easy to deal with.

• Generally, listing notes, to-do’s, ideas, and more. Literally, if you want to do it, you can.

Other Benefits of OneNote

• Everything saves automatically and also syncs with your Microsoft account.

• You can access it on your phone, tablet, or computer. This is a lot easier and better (in my opinion) than other systems, especially printed copies.

• It can be shared with others if you’d like to (though I don’t use it for this).

• It can be as complex or simple as you want. There are a TON of features that I don’t even delve into.

• OneNote comes with the Microsoft Office suite, meaning that you don’t have to pay for it like you would with other note-taking apps.

Reviewing and Organizing Literature

In my last post I talked about keeping literature organized. This post will describe all of that more in-depth. Here’s my process:

1. Locate the literature.

Do this by searching through the library, looking through reference lists of relevant articles, seeing articles in journal notifications, etc.

2. Save the citations in a to-read folder.

I use Mendeley but whatever system works for you is best. It’s best to do this in a citation manager because it saves you a step. I have a folder in Mendeley called “To Review.” I have other folders I file citations into after I’ve reviewed, like “Chicago News,” “Neoliberalism and Education,” and “Social Justice Leadership.” I also save the PDFs to my computer, though you don’t have to. I have a big folder called “Bibliographies” and then I save articles in folders within that. For social justice leadership, I have a folder with two folders inside. One is “Reviewed” and the other is “To Review.” It’s nice to have the PDFs easily available.

Below is an image of how I keep everything saved. A side note is that I also use Google Drive to save everything to my computer. It’s an app and I have it set on my quick access (the UIC folder is from Google Drive) rather than folders on my actual computer. So on the left side, the Google Drive, G Documents, and UIC folders are all auto-backed up to Google Drive and actually are Google Drive folders. I like doing this because I can easily access Google Drive anywhere, even without my computer. It’s nice to have everything auto-backed up. And I prefer Google Drive to other similar programs.

3. Review the articles!

I read the article and put notes in a document. Lately I just copy text directly from the articles. To do this easily, I keep Google Docs on the right side of my screen and the PDF on the left. I just copy and paste to Google Docs. I use Google Docs because for whatever reason it is much friendlier to copy/pasting from PDFs compared to Word.

What you annotate is up to you. In my annotations I list the citation. Then I paste the full abstract. Then I basically list sections in bullet format, so introduction, literature, framework, methods, findings, and discussion. And I copy/paste any text of interest. Then I take all of that and put it in a Word document. You can keep everything in Google Docs but I prefer having Word documents.

4. Organize all your annotations in a document.

I keep annotations in single documents related to a common topic. The primary two topics I review are related to social justice leadership and neoliberal education reforms. So, I have one bibliography of annotations for each topic area. Having everything in one document is nice because I can search for topics, like “culturally-responsive leadership.”

5. Put annotation into citation manager and mark as reviewed.

The citation manager also allows for searching, so it’s nice to have annotations within the system. I usually move articles to a new folder as well. Below is what my Mendeley looks like. There are a LOT of articles I need to read in my “Articles to Review and Sort” folder. Once I’ve reviewed, I enter my annotations in the “Notes” tab on the right side, then remove the article from the to-review folder and move it to one or more other folders as applicable. This is helpful because sometimes I look in a folder for specific topic areas or articles, so having them organized makes that easier.

6. Make thematic bibliographies.

Every so often I spend a bit of time taking the articles I’ve reviewed and moving annotations to themes. This is extremely helpful for writing. So for example, if I read an article on social justice leadership, the article may discuss barriers/risks, actions, and motivations of the leaders. These are also topics I might want to write about. I’ll take all of the annotations I’ve taken and then organize them into themes. I basically just copy and paste into a new document (including parenthetical citations) and add themes as themes come up. Then, when I want to write, I just look at the thematic bibliography and create sections from that.

In my social justice leadership bibliography I have the following themes:

• What is social justice?

• Terms for social justice leadership or similar leadership

• Contexts

• Methods

• Frameworks

• Motivations

• Skills, Dispositions, and Attributes

• Risks/Barriers

• Actions in Schools

• Actions in Community

• Impacts

• Preparation

• Literature Gaps

As you can imagine, organizing all the text I’ve reviewed really helps make writing much easier. Here’s a snippet of part of the In-School Actions section. You can see that there are multiple authors and that I’ve just taken notes and pasted them. Then, when I go to write, I just take different pieces that I feel are most relevant and useful. Sometimes I’ll notice a number of authors have said the same thing, and this also helps me be able to cite multiple authors easily.

And I think this is about it. The main thing is just keeping everything accessible and organized. It seems like a lot of work but doing this has made my life so much easier. It was helpful to do this beginning when I started doctoral studies, because now I’ve built up hundreds of pages of notes. Going back and organizing notes retroactively would be a pain, though it may be worth it. I am really thankful to my advisor for getting me on this path. I hope this blog post helps someone else out there too!

I did work today! And how I stay organized, even in crisis

I finished the conceptual framework section of Chapter Two! At this point I just have to add in writing I’ve already done about neoliberal reforms and how school leaders respond to those reforms. And then I’ll have to work on the final piece—writing a genealogy of social justice leadership. Then edits!

So, since I’m trying to do this blog thing I realized that I have some skillsets and knowledge that could help other doctoral students (or anyone) if this blog ever sees the light of day. I’ve also had numerous others help me along the way with advice and best practices; at least in our program, there is no set way of doing or knowing so it’s typical to get advice in a piecemeal fashion. I’d like to start writing about how I get work done and how I have managed parts of the program, with the hope that this is helpful to someone someday. Essentially, I’m thinking this is a more formalized way of passing on helpful information I received, as well as ways I’ve helped others.

To start off this series of trying-to-be-helpful posts, I am a pretty organized person and typically good at managing tasks. I’ve even been decent during the Covid crisis so far (when I can actually motivate myself to work rather than cry in a corner). Here are ways I stay organized:

• Write everything down. I have a PC and a Google Pixel so I use the Sticky Notes PC app and sync that to the OneNote app on my phone. I have lots of lists, like ideas for special meals to cook (my husband and I cook one special craving meal each week), goals for 2020, books to read, etc. I also just note things sometimes. I have one list of funny things friends have said. I like that I can access the lists from anywhere with internet by logging onto OneNote on the web.

• Keep a to-do list for each day. I used to do this on the Sticky Notes/OneNote setup and that worked fine for me! But I recently got a free notebook from a grad student event and decided to try using paper to-do lists. I think it’s about the same. Each day, I just make a list of everything I need to accomplish that day. I also list appointments or events like “Teach” or “Tutor” because I love checking things off, so those are automatic wins. For things I need to be keeping an eye on but not necessarily do today, I usually have a little list going below the immediate to-do’s. The thing I don’t like about paper lists is that I can’t access them from my phone so I need to actually have the notebook with me.

• Keep a weekly to-do plan. In OneNote (which, again, I can access from my phone and computer) I keep a weekly to-do list. It’s below. Basically, on the left is what I try to do each day. You can see most days I try to focus on a single type of task. I don’t on Tuesdays because I usually tutor two students and teach class on Tuesdays, so they are fragmented and busy. But, that’s perfect for doing a bunch of smaller tasks that take up less time. I also have cleaning tasks each day—I am the cleaner of the house (my husband is the launderer) and I like to clean throughout the week. I italicize things that I’ve completed. I do often work on the weekends if I haven’t finished tasks but I try to maintain work-life balance. Having a reliable schedule and basic goal each day really helps me. Of course things change and sometimes I need to switch things around. For example, today I spent most of my time working on Chapter 2 of my proposal because I’m so behind on it right now. On the right side I list things I’m trying to keep an eye on. So my literature review (Chapter 2) should have been submitted by March 13. I have the final two classes I’m teaching, with one italicized because I’ve already created all the materials for it. I also keep my personal writing ideas listed to try to keep those in sight at all times. I have found this system generally to be incredibly flexible but also great at focusing my work.

• Keep a clean inbox. I check my email constantly. Any trash I mark as Spam. Anything else I read and address as soon as possible. Once it’s addressed, I archive it. I sometimes use folders. It really depends. So, anything in my Inbox currently (5 in personal, 1 in work) needs to be addressed in some way. The inbox is basically my own to-do list.

• Take notes in OneNote. I’m not really in classes now but when I am in classes I keep one notebook per class. I also have individual notebooks for my dissertation research, other research projects, methodologies, and my general to-do’s and notes. Once I’m done with a notebook (like when I finish a class) I close it to keep OneNote decluttered. OneNote is amazing. For classes, you can “print PDFs” to OneNote and then highlight text (WHICH IS SEARCHABLE!!!). It makes life incredibly easy. I wish I had used it in college. I might do a future blog to describe how I use OneNote. The imaginary people I think could be reading this may benefit from that post—I’ve shared this info on Reddit and people seem to appreciate it.

• Use Mendeley (or citation generator of choice). I am so so thankful I was told to use Mendeley (actually Zotero but it glitched for me) when I started at UIC. Writing papers is a breeze. I use the Mendeley Chrome plug-in and anytime I come across a paper that sounds interesting, I add it to my Mendeley. Usually I add to my “To Review” folder, which is far too huge right now. I also sometimes just add news or other articles for posterity, like some of the news happening right now on Covid. Mendeley also has a Word plug-in that allows you to enter citations and then the program will make a bibliography for you based on the citations you’ve entered. There can be errors so you should always check, but it does the brunt of the work. I also put my annotations of articles in Mendeley.

• Make bibliographies of everything you read. This should be another post. My advisor got me to do this when I first started. Again, I am so thankful. Basically, because I am running out of steam here, as I review articles, I add annotations (usually highly-detailed bullet points, which are often just verbatim quotes from the articles) for each section of the article. Right now, I have three main bibliographies: social justice leadership, neoliberal education reforms, and theory. Anything I read related to social justice leadership goes into that bibliography. I can search through the bibliography for key terms like “community” or “parents” and then extract notes. I also every so often will organize new annotations into bibliography documents that are organized by theme. So for social justice leadership, I have a thematic document with themes like in-school actions, motivations, challenges, relationships, and community actions. This makes it super easy to write because everything is already organized into topic areas.

• Generally, organize your computer files and have everything make sense. This one is a no-brainer.

Quarantine life a week in and a general update

I’ve wanted to start a blog on this website for a while but haven’t made the time. Although I don’t necessarily have more time during the day, the fact that I’m no longer going out or doing much at night certainly clears up time. And given all that’s happened in the past few weeks, now would be a good time to start recording for posterity if nothing else. If anything good comes of Covid-19, it may be that people have more time for creativity and for long put-off projects.

Quarantine hasn’t been super different for me. My work has mostly been from home other than the two times per week I go to campus. Now we are teaching classes online. I taught our first online class (on Blackboard Collaborate Ultra) and I actually, shockingly, loved it. Students who I have never heard from were responding to questions. The class is 100 people but I (and the two other TAs and professor) usually include a good amount of talk-and-turns and whole-group discussion. For class, I showed my presentation and spoke, and then paused and asked students for respones in the chat box. Then I responded in real-time to their questions. It went really well. We also used a breakout session. There’s no replacement for in-person classes but I honestly wouldn’t mind staying online because it seems to allow shy people to speak out more. The main issue is that not all students can access the technology.

My husband has been home with me—he manages equipment rentals for music venues and bands, and obviously nothing is happening music-wise right now. (At least not in person; I’ve been loving all the Instagram Lives with artists.) That’s a bit weird for me, since I’m used to being alone home each day with our dog. It’s hard not to just go join my husband on the couch when I see he is playing a video game or watching a movie. We made a schedule to try to stick to and that’s helped somewhat. He does have individual “work” time too—making music—but I think it’s hard to force yourself to be creative for eight hours per day.

Most substantial is that it’s been hard to focus in general. I see a lot of others saying the same on Twitter. I’m constantly reading the news and watching press conferences. And if I’m not reading those things, I am thinking about them. I’m thinking about whether our capitalist society will be able to survive this disaster and, if not, what will happen. Not that I necessarily want capitalism to survive (and maybe this virus will help reveal how insidious the big-C is). It’s just scary to think how society will address all of these problems and, if capitalism fails, how will it be replaced? I feel that there are a lot of possibilities for positive change, but I am just so doubtful that, even in the face of this disaster, the general public and politicians will embrace more collectivist-oriented solutions. And after reading studies like the Imperial College Report, I can’t help but wonder if any of my work even matters. Will things just fall apart? I don’t know. There’s a lot of dread for society in my mind right now and it makes me feel a bit crazy. But eighteen months of people not working and stuck in their homes? We’ll need to have a major change in society to allow that to happen. We’ll see what comes.

For my work, since that still matters I guess, I am mostly focusing on chapter two (literature review and conceptual framework) for my dissertation. It’s been a slog. Honestly, it shouldn’t be, but the news has been distracting. My husband was temporarily laid off until things go back to normal in the music industry (we’re okay though) and that was a huge distraction to deal with and figure out. We’re finally getting into a groove so now I’m trying to finish chapter two. I have all the writing for it. I just need to organize it into one long essay. So far it’s about 40 pages but I’m thinking it will end up around 70. It’s a horribly slow document given that it’s linked to Mendeley as well. Maybe I can use this blog function each day to put pressure on myself to do work. We’ll see. I’ve written about social justice leadership but now I need to organize my writing on school leaders in market environments, and what market environments are more generally. It’s tough because there’s SO MUCH TO SAY about market environments especially. One committee member asked me to describe mercantilism in my writing, which is interesting but also seems way out of scope, so I am trying to manage how much is too much. I’ve also been doing research for my advisor on school leadership in international contexts, and I’ve been working on rewrites for a manuscript (which I think is very close to being done at this point). Next up will be finishing a rough draft of my manuscript on school leader speech rights. I have been thinking now is the perfect time to do some research on how school leaders serve the community (and how integral schools are to the community) given all that’s happening, but I think the last thing school leaders would want to do right now is be interviewed or observed. Perhaps a content analysis of newspaper articles would be more viable. So I have been thinking about and trying to work, it’s just been rough-going.

For future posts not related to my own freaking out about Covid, maybe I will finally get myself to start re-learning R. I used to know it quite well. I have had the idea for a while to get some data and start analyzing it in R, and then post how to do that on my blog. I figure this will help me in that it will give me practice and a clear set of how-to steps for future use, and it should help others as well. I might do the same for Stata, which I also used to frequently use but now tend to stick to SPSS. Similarly, ArcGIS would be a good one to work on. Hopefully more to come!