Analysis of APA Standards in an
Academic Piece of Writing
The American Psychological
Association (APA) establishes standards and procedures that regulate the
appropriate formatting, writing style, and source quotation in the academic
writing field. This paper is aimed at analyzing deeply whether an academic
article written by Dalvit, Murray
In their article, Dalvit, Murray
An apparently distinctive
characteristic of the article is the absence of direct or block quotations. Not
only does variation in types of quotations make the style of an article more
engaging and vivid, but it also conveys greater credibility and support to the
argument (The Portland State University Writing Center, 2013). The absence of
direct quotations, therefore, does not contribute to provide a better substantiated
rationale for the authors’ viewpoints.
Paiz et al. (2013b) explain in the
Purdue OWL electronic page that:
Your references should begin on a
new page separate from the text of the essay; label this page “References”
centered at the top of the page (do NOT bold, underline, or use quotation marks
for title). All texts should be double-spaced just like the rest of your essay.
(Reference List: Basic Rules, para.
2)
The article does not seem to follow
all the abovementioned instructions in its “References” section. First and
foremost, the section was not included on a separate piece of paper but instead
appears immediately after the “Conclusions” —it should be acknowledged,
however, that as the article was published in a journal, it is possible that
the format has been altered by the publishers. Nevertheless, the word References has not been centered, is
followed by a colon and has been printed in bold letters. Moreover, although
all the references appear in alphabetical order according to the first author’s
last name, they have been numbered and were not double spaced. The names of
journal articles were written in title case, in compliance with APA (2010)
rules, but these names have been italicized instead of the names of the
journals where they were published. This can be observed, for example, in
entries 2 and 12.
Another difference worth mentioning
in this section is indentation: The first line of each entry is indented, but
it is all the lines after the first one that should be indented. The first one,
however, ought to be left-aligned (Paiz et al., 2013b).
Some final deviations
from APA (2010) standards in this section are the absence of periods at the end
of the entries, the use of “and” instead of the ampersand before the name of
the last author in entry 6, the use of a period instead of a comma before the
date in entry 13, and the omission of years when specifying the date a website
was accessed. Besides, there is an inconsistency between entry 8, whose year
reads “2004” ,
and its corresponding citation, where the year reads “2005” .
As a closing
observation on format it could be added that the word “Keywords” which follows
the abstract should have been spelt as one word instead of two, and must be
italicized. Finally, the header contains a full version of the title when it might
portray a shortened version (Paiz et al., 2013a).
It could be concluded
that the authors of the article have followed some APA (2010) conventions but
have omitted or misinterpreted others, above all in relation with the reference
section.
References
American Psychological Association.
(2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th
ed.). Washington , DC
Dalvit, L., Murray, S.,
Terzoli, A., Zhao, X., & Mini, B. (2005). Providing increased access to
English L2 students of computer science at a South African
University
Paiz M. J., Angeli E., Wagner J., Lawrick E., Moore
Paiz M. J., Angeli E.,
Wagner J., Lawrick E., Moore
The Portland State
University Writing
Center
University of Minnesota Center University of Minnesota
