APA (American Psychological Association) Style in a
Piece of Writing
Members
of the discourse community must follow certain rules in order to achieve
academic writing skills. The American Psychological Association (APA, 2010)
proposes pre-established academic conventions for formatting and writing style
as well as citations and reference lists.
(Prudue OWL, 2013 para 1). The aim of this paper is to analyse how Dalvit, Murray, Terzoli, & Zhao, 2005 article
follows some established conventions of APA style of
writing such as quotations, signal phrases and reference list.
As
regards in-text citations, APA style might be verified in different aspects of
the text: in-text citations, signal phrases and reference list. The authors Dalvit et al (2005)
only included paraphrased in-text citations identified by an optional signal
phrase, followed by a surname and date in between brackets, however, page
number of the quote is omitted. In the
article, there is no evidence of direct quotes or block quotations. In addition, the sources stated are varied,
article´s evidence is supported by books, publications done by universities and
websites; and online dictionaries and journals; and they are all acceptably pointed
out in the reference list.
In
view of APA style (2010), signal phrases are used to lead quoted or cited
material; but in this article, they are barely used and repeated along the
text. “According” and “According to” are written to introduce the citation,
which are quite similar. This may show a lack of academic competence from the
authors or it could have been required by the article´s publishing house.
Considering
reference lists according to APA style (2010), they must appear at the end of
the body of the paper in a new page. The title “References” must be centered-
aligned, not in bold, underlined or italics. (Prudue Owl, 2013a, para 2).
However, in the article analyzed, these
requirements are not fully accomplished. The reference list is not in a new
page, the title is on bold followed by colon and not properly aligned. APA
style, has also established that all “the sources that appear in the article,
must be cited alphabetically in the reference list” (Prudue Owl, 2013a, para
1). This is attained by the authors, but
they enumerated each source and they did not respect the double spacing
necessary, in the reference list and throughout the text. The sources are
indented and cited in the correct order: surnames, initials names, year of
publication followed by the title.
As
regards reference construction, titles and names of the books are in italics,
while APA style suggests that only names of books and journals should be
italicized (University of Minnesota, n.d). Online books are not cited with
author, although if there is not one, it might start with the title (University
of Southern Quensland, n.d). Besides, the signal phrases “available from” or
“retrieved” are also missing, so as to indicate the date and the link, since
there is no evidence of DOI. Furthermore, the reference to the online
dictionary must reveal the entry word at the beginning of the cite,
nonetheless in both allusions entry words are not mentioned.
So
as to conclude, the article written by Dalvit et al, 2005 follows most of the requirements
presented by APA 2010 style of writing. It attempts to be an academic piece of
writing but it reveals some inconsistencies as regards APA style conventions,
mainly in the reference list, although there is a worthy implementation of
quotes. Therefore it does not completely fulfill academic rules of APA (2010)
sixth edition style of writing.
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
(2013). APA style workshop Retrieved October 2013,
Purdue OWL
(2013a). Reference List: Basic Rules. Retrieved October 2013, from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/05/
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
University
of Suthern Quensland (n.d) APA Referecing guide
Retrieved October 2013, from http://www.usq.edu.au/library/referencing/apa-referencing-guide#How_to_cite_references_within_the_text_of_an_assignment
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