Writing and LaTeX
"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do." (Thomas Jefferson)
I am a big fan of the typesetting system LaTeX and recommend its use for any type of academic writing. Regardless of the discipline you are in. It is especially great for referencing and bibliography management, but the result will also look much nicer than your Word document (or this website).
Course Materials
From time to time, I am teaching a LaTeX course to the philosophy students of the University of Turin (but it is open to anybody) and I explain why you should stop writing your papers in MS Word and use LaTeX instead. People also ask me about the course materials and so I have decided to make them available here for download. You can use them freely and modify/develop them with a CC BY-NC license.
Thesis Template
You are a student thinking about writing your thesis in LaTeX? But you are not looking forward to configuring the layout a complex document like a thesis? Fortunately, there are thesis templates. Below I suggest my own template and a template developed by the UniTO computer science department. Choose yourself! Comments for further improvement welcome.
Overleaf & Co.
Some of my colleagues use the Overleaf server for writing all of their papers in LateX. While I can see the point of this when there are many authors, I advise against it for single-authored papers, and for papers with few authors. Instead, you should install LaTeX on your computer. The reasons are that Overleaf has restrictive terms and conditions (e.g., on the number of projects you can simultaeously work on), that updating the bibliography and other supplementary files is a mess, and that its internal debugging mechanism hides problems with your source code. Also, you cannot work offline. So I recommend a filesharing system like Dropbox or Box, and splitting the LaTeX file if necessary.
Overleaf's main advantage is that you can work simultaneously on the same parts of the document. If you need this feature, it is a useful tool.
Referencing and Bibliography Management
For managing the bibliography, I recommend the use of JabRef. It is rather simple and low-level, but it won't mess up your bibliography as Mendeley and Zotero sometimes do. Also, it has some advanced functions, like automatic extraction of the full reference details from the DOI, that greatly simply your life.
A note for advanced users: regarding the notorious bibtex vs. biber and natbib vs. biblatex controversy, I am a fervent supporter of the combo biber/biblatex. You should do the same (and you can still continue to use your old files with natbib commands). The handouts explain why.
Below some of my .bib reference files---feel free to use them without asking. Ted Sider also has good .bib files with an emphasis on topics in modal logic and metaphysics.
For Students: Editorial Standards and Citation Guidelines
If you write a paper in my course, or a thesis with me, you should have a look at the documents below. The first explains the editorial standards that your thesis should follow, but most guidelines apply to terms while the second explains citation conventions and the principles for composing a bibliography.
General guidelines for writing a philosophy paper can be found here, here and here.