Content planner and copywriter at TextPulse. Sara runs the blog day to day, from planning and drafting through to publishing. She writes the practical guides: clear explanations of academic writing problems, aimed at the person who actually has to hand something in.
AMA and Vancouver both number references in the order they appear, which makes them easy to confuse and genuinely not interchangeable. Here is what actually separates a proprietary, edition-numbered manual from a looser convention that delegates its own formatting detail elsewhere, and the practical rule that settles most real disputes.
The pattern is not universal enough to trust blindly: most universities exclude references and appendices from a word limit, footnotes are genuinely contested, and only the institution's own regulation settles it.
State the null first, then the alternative, one directional or non-directional depending on what the evidence already supports. A worked example carries both statements through one-tailed cost and exactly what rejecting the null does and does not prove.
Four ranked steps for cutting a thesis down to its word limit: filler phrases and nominalizations first, then paragraphs, then sections, with the argument itself never on the list.
A question, a hypothesis, and a thesis statement do three different jobs, and a paper only needs the ones that match what it is actually trying to do. This sorts out which combination fits a quantitative study, a qualitative one, and an argumentative paper.
Harvard is not one style with one rulebook. Cite Them Right is a specific, published implementation of the Harvard family, which is why two students both told to use Harvard can submit different-looking references and both be right.