Analyzing APA Style in an Academic
Piece of Writing
This paper reviews the
style used in an article written by Dalvit et al. (2005) and provides a
detailed account of the use of in-text citations and signal phrases, as well as
the structure of the reference list, in terms of whether the rules prescribed
by the American Psychological Association (APA, 2010) have been followed or
not.
In their article, the
authors have included some in-text citations of books, dictionaries, online
journals, publications by universities and software. Most of these are
parenthetical citations and signal phrases have been scarcely used. In addition,
the phrase “according to” has been repeated in the article instead of using a
different phrase. This would seem to show poor academic style. Other signal
phrases include research has shown that
and preliminary investigation shows that.
Even though the
excessive use of direct or block quotations is not encouraged in academic writing,
a few citations of these types might help support a point effectively. However,
the authors in this article have not included any direct or block quotations at
all. They have only resorted to paraphrasing to make reference to works or
ideas of other authors. It must be said, on the other hand, that all in-text
citations appear to have been correctly included and all of them were cited in
the references.
In relation to the
reference list, there are several issues to mention considering the guidelines
provided by Purdue OWL (2013a) on APA style. To begin with, this list should
have been included on a separate sheet of paper and, instead of being
left-aligned, the word "References" should have been centered on the page.
Furthermore, it is followed by a colon, which is not appropriate either if APA
style is to be followed. Instead, the word “References” should not be
underlined, italicized or highlighted in any other way.
Other
important points to mention are that the entries in the list have been numbered
and that they are not double-spaced. Additionally, in all cases, the names of
the titles have been title-cased when they should have been sentence-cased. In
relation to this, the Purdue OWL (2013b) guidelines state that “only the first
word of a title will be capitalized” (In-Text Citation Capitalization section,
para. 2). As well as this, in those entries citing journals, it is the name of the
journal that should be italicized and not the title of the article (Purdue OWL, 2013a). Italics should be used for titles
of books or journals.
The sources are properly
listed in alphabetical order but the authors should not have indented the first
line of each entry. Instead, it is the second and following lines of an entry
which should be indented five spaces, while the first line should be aligned to
the left (University of
Minnesota, n.d.).
Some
other deviations from APA style include the use of the word “and” instead of
the ampersand in the sixth entry, the missing final dot in the entries
corresponding to books, that is, entries 1, 3, 4, and 6, and the missing year
indicating when the document was accessed, as well as the indication
"retrieved from”, in entries where a website is cited. Finally, there is a
mistake in the year of publication of the eighth entry, which reads “2004” while the year of the cited source in the body of the article
is 2005.
As a result of the
previous analysis, it may be concluded that the authors followed APA style to
some extent. While they have used in-text citations according to APA rules,
other conventions have been disregarded, particularly those related to the
reference list.
References
American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the
American Psychological Association
(6th ed.). Washington, DC.
Dalvit, L., Murray, S., Terzoli, A., Zhao, X., Rhodes University, Mini,
B., & University of Fort Hare. (2005).
Providing increased access to English L2 students of computer science at a
South African University. US-China Education Review, Sep. 2005, Vol. 2 (9).
Purdue OWL (2013a). Reference
List: Basic Rules. Retrieved October 2013, from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/05/
Purdue OWL (2013b). In-Text
Citations: The Basics. Retrieved October 2013, from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/02/
University of Minnesota Center for
Writing. (n.d.). Quicktips: APA documentation style: Reference list. University of Minnesota: Student Writing Support. Retrieved October 2013, from http://writing.umn.edu/sws/assets/pdf/quicktips/apa_References.pdf
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