APA6 LaTeX template for the Linguistics student

LaTeX is truly a god-sent. As much as I enjoy writing everything in Markdown and then converting that to lightweight HTML documents, academic writing comes with some conventions – plus, drawing syntax trees in ASCII is painful and not even worth it.

So I decided to take this seriously and learn LaTeX, a software collection that proved to be more fun than I ever expected. Below you can find the template I put together to use for my Linguistics manuscripts. Make sure that the packages invoked are installed in your system – I use XeTeX, Polyglossia, Biber, and a series of Linguistics-specific macros.

The template, to the extend it is even copyrightable, is released to the Public Domain, with no rights reserved. Where this waiver isn’t possible, it is instead released under the Creative Commons Public Domain license. 

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% APA 6 manuscript template for Linguistics students    %
% Distributed under CC0 - No Rights Reserved            %
% (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)  %
% To be used with XeTeX, due to its Unicode support     %
% You are encouraged to share any improvements publicly %
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

% `man` formats document as a manuscript, use `jou` for
%  journal style
\documentclass[man,a4paper]{apa6} 
% loads necessary macros
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage[variant=british]{english}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage{fontspec}
% use a font with good IPA support
\setmainfont{Linux Libertine O}
\usepackage[style=apa,sortcites=true,sorting=nyt,backend=biber]{biblatex}
% this should point to your `.bib` bibliography
% database (path relative to document)
\addbibresource{biblio.bib}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{tikz-qtree}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{covington}

\title{}
\shorttitle{}
\author{}
\affiliation{}
% for manuscripts requiring day of submission
\note{\today}
\abstract{}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

% Content Goes Here

\printbibliography
\end{document}

I’m also working on an MLA template for some other courses I’m taking.