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, Terzoli, Zhao, and Mini (2005) complies with the standards issued by the APA (2010) in terms of in-text citations, signal phrases and references.

In their article, Dalvit, Murray, Terzoli, Zhao, and Mini have used mainly in-text citations of journal articles, dictionaries, books and studies belonging to universities. A thorough examination of such citations reveals that most of them are parenthetical quotations; i.e., the authors have used the paraphrasing technique. The University of Minnesota Center for Writing (n.d.) recommends using signal phrases when citing sources and varying the verbs used in such phrases. However, the article evidences very few signal phrases. Actually, one of them, “according to”, was used on the first page and then repeated on the second page, when other phrases could have been used to improve the academic style.

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. US-China Education Review, Sep. 2005, Vol. 2 (9), 72-75.

 Paiz M. J., Angeli E., Wagner J., Lawrick E., Moore K., Anderson M., … Keck R. (2013a). General Format. Retrieved October 2013 from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/

Paiz M. J., Angeli E., Wagner J., Lawrick E., Moore K., Anderson M., … Keck R. (2013b). Reference List: Basic Rules. Retrieved October 2013 from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/05/

The Portland State University Writing Center, 2013. Quotes, paraphrases, and summaries: What they are and how to use them. Writing Resources Library. Retrieved October 2013 from http://www.writingcenter.pdx.edu/resources/library

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