APA Writing Style Reference

When you write papers--sometimes for high school and almost always for college, you will be concerned with writing according to a particular documentation style?APA writing style included. The rationale for using a documentation style is so you?the writer?can credit your sources where the ideas, findings, or exact wording are not yours and so your readers can if they wish research further using your source citations?which point to the original authors and titles.

First, here is a brief description and purpose for each of the major styles:

MLA (Modern Language Association) documentation style is used most often, for language, arts, philosophy, composition, and communications/media works. Bibliography, end notes, embedded citation, and more are the hallmarks of this traditional documentation style.

CBE (Council of Biology Editors) style is more for science and net citing, and is used for scientific, technological, and other empirical works. Bibliographies, in-text citations, and other documentation efforts are included, though formatted differently than MLA.

APA (American Psychological Association) writing style was originally primarily for psychology and some science documenting, but is now used for many disciplines?medicine, education, and more. Documentation is most rigorous here, and differs from MLA, for instance, in in-text citation, which requires all authors and dates be named in the parenthetical, etc..

Chicago/Turabian Manual of Style is least often used in academia, though some instructors require it?especially for news, magazine, and other reporting, and occasionally for history and humanities papers.

So next, while this page will not cover all of the specifics of the APA writing style, as they would (and do) fill a book, here are a few of the most commonly used APA writing style conventions:

IN-TEXT CITATION for APA WRITING STYLE

IN-TEXT CITATION?Whenever a writer quotes language not his/her own, he/she must acknowledge the original writer. This is done, in this case, by putting the citation information in parentheses…in the body of the paper.

In the same respect, there are numerous ways to use in-text citation. For APA writing style, for example, this can be done in various ways:

If you mention the author in your statement, use the date of publication in the parentheses:
Sanger introduced the concept of community online by displaying bulletin board, moo, and mud replicas (2003).

If you mention the author’s name in your statement and there is no date, use the author’s name in the parentheses, followed by n.d.?which means no date:

In five studies, researchers found that students were more likely to test well after a liver omelet breakfast (Bederby, n.d.).

If you are writing a technical piece that defines or denotes something, a process, a concept, a test, that would be interrupted by the he said/she said, you put the information in parentheses:
APA style, for instance, would look something like this:

Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (www.ipcc.ch.com).

NOTE how, for example, the period is after the parenthetical in APA style, whereas in MLA it is after the statement and before the parenthetical. (Such are the slight differences in documentation I mentioned above.)

In a larger sense, in-text citation is also done in additional two ways, depending on word count/length:

If the quoted material is no more than two lines of typed text, it is embedded in your body:
Studies also reveal that writers who incorporate famous quotations will reflect a more serious approach toward language and words. One writer who loves words includes a different quote in her email every day. On Thursday, she used Beckett’s brilliant comment, “I only know what the words know” (Beckett, Blowser, 2006).

But if the quoted material is longer than two lines of your typed text, it is what we call offset?or blocked text--(indented 10 spaces on each side, no quotation marks, and single spaced, with your text double-spaced still):

On Friday, she decided the zany and passionate comment was in order:
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits.
The rebels. The ones who see things
differently. They have no respect for
the status-quo. You can glorify or
vilify them, but the only thing you
can't do is ignore them. Because they
push the human race forward. The people
who are crazy enough to think they can
change the world, are the ones who do.
(Apple)

Her quoting methods were, though, consistent. She never failed to provide a fresh comment each day of the week!

FOOTNOTES?

Though the singular way to cite sources fifty years ago, footnotes are used less often today. Still, it’s good to know what they are (or were), and to use them when assigned to or when asides are too intrusive in your main text.

When a writer wants to add comments, cite the source, or explore/re-define terms?wants to add a passage that would be otherwise obtrusive in the text, he/she puts a superscript (raised) number (in order) next to the text and then, at the bottom of the page, completes the message/info next to the corresponding number.

While we used to type (with a typewriter!) these footnotes, at the foot of the page, according to exact specifications (margins, inches, abbreviations such as Ibid., for repeated info, for example), modern word processing programs do it for us: we just use the insert footnote function and type in the information necessary.

END NOTES?Like footnotes, end notes explain further, cite valuable sources (so the reader can do his/her own research if he/she wishes, using your great paper as a start). But unlike with the page-by-page 1, 2, 3, format, with end notes you can put all notes on one page?at the end of the paper.

Both footnotes and endnotes are formatted (with a name and a date reference, too) to look like this:

1 See Boccacio (1815) for a definition of duplicitous interventions.2 For interview transcripts, refer to Stern and Canada (2006) and CNN (2006).

REFERENCES LIST for APA WRITING STYLE

Also known as the works cited page (in MLA style) or the bibliography, the references page thoroughly records/identifies each and every source you used/quoted in your text (in in-text citations). It is specifically telling, in that every entry includes author, title, place and date of publication; and it is meticulously developed, in that the order of the entries must be alphabetical, and they must be punctuated, indented, and styled according to specific rules.

When the references page is completed, your readers can then read your text, note the parenthetical in-text citation, and go to the last page of your paper, and find all the information on that quoted source, so they can consult the source themselves!

That’s scholarship, and that’s the rationale for using in-text citations and a references page.

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