APA Style in Academic Writing

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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