Introduction

APA style and citations for dummies - Joe Giampalmi 2021


Introduction

If you’re a college student reading this book, you face the stresses of papers, readings, classes, commitments, and exhaustion — in addition to tuition, student loans, and transportation. Keep remembering that your college days are the best days of your life.

Writing assignments are the stress du jour for many of you. Add APA citing and formatting and it’s like starting the day with a flat tire and dead battery. Being the resourceful and intelligent person you are, you bought APA Style & Citations For Dummies to help yourself and your grade. Good decision.

You’re holding the solution to reducing a current stress and improving your research writing and citing sources — in addition to eliminating another potential stress, inadvertent plagiarism. Sorry I can’t help you with other stresses, that’s other For Dummies books, but I can help you charge your brain with APA and college writing skills.

If you’re a high school student reading this book, congratulations on the initiative and good judgment. You’re taking a major step toward developing your APA style and citation skills and preparing yourself for college writing and research.

About this book

APA Style & Citations For Dummies emerged from the need of college and high school students to interpret the APA manual. This For Dummies book isn’t a textbook or workbook. It’s a college-level (and high school) adaptation of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition. (Note the adjective “publication” in the title.) The APA publication manual is written primarily for professional scholars fulfilling requirements for advanced degrees and publishing their research in scholarly journals.

Only about 25 percent of the seventh edition offers direct guidance aligning APA with citing and referencing in traditional undergraduate research projects. This book offers 100 percent direct guidance for APA academic style writing and citing for most common undergraduate research projects.

I wrote this book based on my decades’ experience teaching APA at the high school and college levels and teaching and grading thousands of research projects. This book provides you APA fundamentals for academic writing, citing, referencing, and formatting. It provides strategies for

· Bias-free writing

· Revising

· Citations and references

· Front and back required and optional sections

· Title page and page layout elements

· Source engagement

· Summaries, paraphrases, and quotations

The APA manual is written in a formal and scholarly tone, appropriate for its content and professional scholars respectfully obsessed with their research. This book is written for the For Dummies audience, professional scholars-in-training who enjoy a road-trip more than a research project.

This book, like your laptop manual, wasn’t designed to be read cover to cover. Here’s a quick-start menu to help you locate topics you’re looking for:

· Plagiarism (Chapter 4)

· Citations and references (Chapters 10—12)

· Formatting (Chapter 14)

· Writing style (Chapter 5)

· Revising strategies (Chapter 8)

· Grammar and conventions (Chapters 6 and 7)

· APA and essays (Chapter 15)

· APA and response papers (Chapter 15)

· APA and reviews of literature (Chapter 16)

· APA and reports (Chapter 17)

Note: This book focuses on explaining the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition — in the For Dummies brand style. The For Dummies brand uses Chicago Manual of Style (like most book publishing does) and its own styles, so you may notice some formatting and such that doesn't look like APA. Just a heads-up that the text is consistent with the For Dummies brand except when it’s necessary to illustrate a point, and then I make sure the text illustrates APA formatting and style.

Specifically, you’ll notice formatting and style differences with these types of things:

· End punctuation with bulleted lists

· The use of contractions

· Font variations

· Book style page formatting

So basically when writing your research papers and essays, do as I say, not as For Dummies does.

Foolish assumptions

I assume you share similar interests with college students I taught for decades. When I wrote this book, I made the following assumptions about you, my dear reader:

· Your life is in your phone, which is more important to you than your keys.

· You appreciate your parents and family for their support of your academic goals.

· You have an active life, but next to your family, academics are your priority.

· Your interests include music, food, friends, road trips, college activities — and some of you even listen to Frank Sinatra.

· You prefer not to talk too much waiting for a class to begin; you’d rather text and post on social media.

In other words, you’re busy, but you find a way to achieve academic excellence.

Icons Used in This Book

The APA publication manual includes the organization and searchability of a smartphone, with every topic tabbed and numbered to two decimal places. It’s impressive construction. APA Style & Citations For Dummies — not as impressive, but half the cost — offers you four icons to help you explore points of interest:

Where to go from here

This book represents a starting point for verifying APA professor preferences. APA offers the standard for academic style writing, citing, and formatting, which are detailed for you here. But APA doesn’t award your grade, and it recognizes that departments’ and professors’ guidelines replace APA requirements.

Many professors, for example, require variations of APA’s title page, appendices, annotated bibliographies, and page number requirements with citations. To help you identify specific professor variations, chapters list questions to ask your professor. Similar resources include visiting your professor during office hours and visiting your writing center.

Feel free to start with Part 1 to get an overview to the APA or peruse the Table of Contents and Index to find a topic to pique your interest. You can then flip to that chapter and read more about what you want to discover.

For additional information related to adjusting to college life and college essay writing, check out the Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com. Just search for “APA Style & Citations Cheat Sheet” to reference whenever you need.