As you prepare for your colloquia, you work to get your schedule down, your flight information, all of the important school work packed. Spending time at a colloquium offers you growth as a learner on many fronts. You’ll have the opportunity to work with faculty and learning colleagues while attending sessions that target the most important areas at the colloquium.
Many sessions are written specifically for your track, while others will be useful during any stage of your three colloquium experiences. The Writing Program’s APA session is helpful at any and all of your tracks and can be effectively supplemented with a one-on-one visit to Capella’s Mobile Writing Center. To help you better prepare for the APA session at colloquia, Capella’s Writing Program has created this five-part module. Completing the five sections of this module before attending the APA session will serve to highlight what you already know about APA while helping you to identify areas about APA on which you would like more clarification. However, you will find the session informative even if you don’t complete this module before attending the colloquia. Remember, this module is available to you before, during, and after colloquia. Additionally, these materials will connect well with several other sessions. Specifically, the two-part Academic Integrity presentations can be important during all stages of your journey and can be supplemented well with this APA module.
As you travel through each of the five sections, you’ll notice links to outside sources housed in Capella’s Online Writing Center. Additionally, the sections operate on the same logic as the APA tools in Capella’s Online Writing Center. The first section addresses general big-picture issues. Each subsequent section addresses more specific information. The final section includes an interactive quiz on basic APA formatting.
A journey through each section will give you a good foundation for attending the APA colloquia sessions while familiarizing you with all of the important APA tools that Capella has to augment your manual. Visiting the module before the colloquia, during the colloquia sessions, and after the colloquia gives you the tools to build on your APA editorial style knowledge – on your own time and on your own terms.
To get started on building your own APA tool kit, click on the link to the first section below.
Resources:
- Mobile Writing Center
- Academic Integrity
- Online Writing Center
- Writing Program
There are many reasons for using APA editorial style. The primary reason for citation is to ensure that all future readers, those of tomorrow and those two thousand years from now, can locate the original form of the writer’s cited sources. Citations from Ancient Greece are still valid and traceable, which is how we know what we know about the Academy’s origins. We also know that as the Ancient civilization of Greece declined, so did the culture’s citation methods. For example, subjective as opposed to cited objective scholarship and public discourse allowed leaders like Nero to lead the country into fiscal and intellectual bankruptcy.
Many times, writers feel anxiety and concern over using APA because the manual can seem so complicated – so daunting. Writers often express fears of making mistakes with APA that may prompt faculty to deduct points or to question the writer’s academic integrity. While plagiarism, or using the work of another without attribution, is a crime of intellectual property theft in the American culture, reasons for avoiding bad citation practices are far larger than getting a bad mark on a paper or being accused of plagiarism. Using APA properly allows you to ensure that your work will be credible, and, thus, will be accepted as part of the academic conversation in your field.
In the larger context of academic work, citations serve as the foundation for sharing information in a quick and concise way. Citation methods create a common writing style for a particular field. Varying from that common language can cause confusion for contemporary readers and for readers in the future.
The following examples show how faulty APA referencing can craft spurious paths for researchers. They also highlight how APA citation serves both the writer and the reader.
By using APA Editorial Style, the writer:
By using APA Editorial Style, the reader:
As academic writing is the official record of all knowledge in a field, one common citation method ensures that peers can review all material easily in a standardized format. If the reader cannot locate the origin of sources in an academic writing, that piece of knowledge must be discarded from the record and is considered a spurious source.
Review the scenarios linked in this section and consider the best practices for APA citation. As you work through them, remember – the major reason for citation is to guide the reader to the cited source, so always let that mission guide your APA choices.
Scenario 1
Imagine that you are reading an article. You find common terms often used in your field, but the author does not connect those terms to leading scholars in the field who helped to define those terms. In academic disciplines, there are often many schools of thought on particular terms or issues. Readers familiar with the field will use the referenced names to define the writer. If there are two main schools of thought, for example, on a particular topic, citing an expert from one of those schools enhances the reading experience for those in the field because the referenced name indicates upon which school of thought the author is building the academic argument. Leaving the reader wondering where the writer’s definitions come from can be easily avoided by always referencing leaders in the field when introducing terms in the field. While the reader may have a general understanding of the term or concept without a citation, academic writing is not for a general audience understanding. Instead, academic writing is meant to be specific and concise, creating a trail of thought over time among leading voices in the field.Scenario 2
Imagine that you are reading an article. You find an interesting quote cited by the author, so you go to the author’s reference page to locate the source. When you get there, you find that there is not enough information included on the reference page to locate the source. Thus, you’ve hit a dead end, a dead end that could have been avoided if the author had followed APA format and offered the reader enough information to find the cited source. This scenario can be easily avoided by following APA best practices, which require including all relevant information on a source so that the reader can locate the original of all cited materials.Scenario 3
Imagine that you are reading an article. You find an interesting quote cited by the author, and so you go to the author’s reference page to locate the source. The complete reference information is included, but the page number from which the quote was taken is not included. The article is 45 pages long. You can read the entire article, but locating the quote will be time consuming and frustrating. This scenario can be easily avoided by following APA best practices, which require including page numbers for all quotes that come from a print or PDF internet source and a paragraph number for all non-PDF internet sources.Imagine that the quoted words cited by the author involve the use of a particular term. If that term is repeated throughout the cited article, how can you know that you are locating the exact use of the term that the author intended? Again, citing the page or paragraph number can guarantee that the reader knows exactly where the quoted information comes from; thus, the reader can retrieve the cited information and read it in the original context.
Resources:
Writing a Literature Review
Academic writing requires documentation of many elements. A quick look at an APA reference list demonstrates the large amount of information needed to ensure that the reader can retrieve the information. Author name and year of publication are just the beginning. The publisher information, virtual or print, often contains many pieces of information that will be necessary for the reader to track down that source. Putting all of that information in the writing would slow down the reading process.
Notice the difference:
Example 1: English only
In 2002, Suzie Smith wrote an article in Journal A, and that original article came out in print form, but when I did my research, I didn’t use the paper source; instead, I used the internet version, an html copy of the article that is maintained by the journal at www.journalx.org. Anyway, in that article, Suzie said “citation is important in academic writing.” I don’t have the page numbers because the internet version didn’t include it, but I found that quote about three paragraphs down from the introduction.
Example 2: English and APA shorthand
Smith (2002) noted that “citation is important in academic writing” (para. 3).
The APA version tells the reader the same information that the longer version conveyed. The name and year of publication lead the reader to the source information on the reference page at the end of the text, and the reader knows that this source was retrieved electronically because a paragraph number instead of a page number is included. Learning to read APA as a second language that supplements the written information saves time for the reader and makes the writer’s text much easier to read and understand. Every element of APA editorial style is meant to convey information in shorthand that is shared by everyone writing in the field. However, the manual is not meant to be memorized; instead, the manual is a reference tool.
Resources
APA Style and Formatting Module
As we read an academic text, APA editorial style helps us read that completed piece of writing. But best practice dictates that APA citation be a part of the writing process before the first words are written on the paper. Academic writers are also academic readers and researchers. Each idea that is read or discovered during the research process needs to be documented so that the writer can openly and honestly use APA to chart the path of research.
As APA editorial style touches all elements of academic work, Capella’s Library offers additional support for writers using APA. Library support offers an excellent orientation to the organizational tools provided by the Library to make citing as you read and research a streamlined and effective process. Specifically, the Capella Library provides information on organizing citations using APA and on using the databases to generate APA citations on the sources you are finding within Capella’s Library databases. These resources assist in building a personal library on research within a particular field.
As you read an article and take notes or highlight important passages, APA can help to consolidate those ideas into a form that can last throughout your academic writing career. Capella’s Online Writing Center offers a complete module on Academic Honesty that discusses how to use APA during the research process. Two particular sections of that module, Library Research and Taking Notes, discuss methods for citing as you go to complete an individual project and to build a larger database.
One common tool for using APA editorial style during research is the annotated bibliography. The annotated bibliography is a helpful tool for establishing a long-term database on a particular topic or subject. While there are many variations on how to compose an annotated bibliography, the basic components are a complete citation in APA format and a listing of relevant or important points within the source. On a smaller scale, taking the time to compose an annotated bibliography for each article or topic you read saves time; once you have read the article, noted the important points, and composed the citation, writing a draft with that source is already well on the way to completion. On a larger scale, composing annotated bibliographies for all research readings will help you to gather a large and well-documented study of the readings in your field.
As you progress through the research process, APA editorial style can help make the transition from reading and annotating to outlining and organizing. Creating an annotated outline for writing projects allows you to see all of your important summaries, quotes, and paraphrases from your research in a linear and logical format. Additionally, creating this type of outline offers an extra step to ensure that APA format for references and direct quotation is double checked for accuracy.
Noting referencing information, important themes, and page and paragraph numbers during your reading and research process saves time and offers an additional method to ensure that your APA information is accurate and well documented. In the short term for an individual writing project and in the long term for a dissertation process, using APA editorial style to document as you go consolidates your efforts and improves the scope of accuracy.
Resources:
- Organizing Citations
- Using Databases to Generate APA Citations
- Academic Honesty Module
- Library Research
- Taking Notes
- Annotated Bibliography
- Annotated Outline
Many elements of APA editorial style are definitive. For example, when citing a source, the internal citation must include the author’s name and year of publication. Direct quotes must be cited with a page or paragraph number. Those rules are non negotiable. But how the writer includes that information is sometimes up for negotiation. Within the tenets of APA, the writer can make many choices about how to include the necessary information, and becoming fluent in the basics of APA makes those choices visible and clear.
Additionally, exercising choices for diversity in APA editorial style makes reading the text more compelling for the reader, just as using punctuation variety makes the text more compelling for the reader.
Here is an example:
I like red cars, and I like blue trucks.
This sentence can be changed in meaning when the writer makes different punctuation choices:
I like red cars; however, I like blue trucks, too.
In the second example, there is the implication that those who like red cars may not like blue trucks. Capella’s Online Writing Center offers more information on these choices in the handouts Basic Comma Rules and Punctuating Complete Thoughts.
Just as punctuation rules offer choices, APA offers options as well.
According to Smith (2007), cars are "important to the survival of the American economy" (para. 19).
This example can serve a different meaning should the writer choose to paraphrase, a decision that makes the cited author's work fit more closely with the register of the writer:
The argument for the importance of American cars in the country's economic survival has been noted by many leading voices in the field, including Smith (2007, para. 19).
In this example, Smith's words have been used to support the writer's contention. This choice differs from the first example in which Smith's words stand alone as evidence. In the second example, the author is weaving Smith’s words into an argument instead of using Smith to make the argument. Capella’s Online Writing Center offers a complete module on Academic Honesty that discusses how to put these choices to work in your own writing. One particular section of that module, Integrating Sources, discusses those choices in depth and offers examples to get you started in the process of making conscious choices about how to best incorporate sources in APA editorial style.
Resources:
- Internal Citation
- Basic Comma Rules
- Punctuating Complete Thoughts
- Academic Honesty Module
- Integrating Sources
While the APA Manual, 6th Edition, does cover a variety of specific details about APA editorial style, it does not and can not anticipate all citation situations. The manual was written for use in citation for academic journals, and that fact alone explains why many of the citation situations encountered during the comprehensive exam and dissertation process are not specifically detailed. Additionally, issues that arise from citing specific types of conversations, from discussion room postings to YOUTUBE entries are not named and demonstrated specifically.
The publishers anticipated the inability to address all citation situations specifically; organizing the manual by an APA logic intended to guide writers to the resources to cite all sources. Remember—the major reason for citation is to guide the reader to the cited source, so always let that mission guide your APA choices.
When you approach the manual, finding answers is best tackled by reading the table of contents at the front of the book and the index at the back of the book. Think about these sections much like you might approach a telephone book’s yellow pages. Key topics and words are used to guide users to desired information, but not every topic or question has been anticipated or documented. Instead of searching for specific words or concepts in the table of contents and index, work to locate general concepts. For example, if you are trying to locate information on citing a web-based multi-media source, you might begin with the Citing Electronic Sources section and work through that section to choose the citation format that most closely resembles the type of source you are working to cite.
As you work through the table of contents and the index, you will find that the answers to many questions are located in more than one place. You will also find that many of today’s newer virtual sources are not specifically named. Again, work to understand the logic behind the information presented in the manual, and always work to provide information that will best guide your future readers to the source being cited. For more specific information on APA, visit Capella's APA Style and Formatting module in the Online Writing Center.
To assist you in getting started on the journey to discovering the logic behind APA editorial style, the following quiz presents some general questions about APA style and formatting. As you read each question, work to locate the answer in your APA Manual, 6th Edition.
As you work through the quiz, remember—the major reason for citation is to guide the reader to the cited source, so always let that mission guide your APA choices.
Resources:
- APA Style & Formatting Module
- Citing Electronic Sources