APA style and citations for dummies - Joe Giampalmi 2021

Avoiding anonymity: nouns
Creating a foundation: the principal parts of speech, structure, and usage
Earning applause: APA writing for the academic audience

Nouns would never be a candidate for a witness protection program. They talk too much, naming everything and everybody, including people, places, objects, and ideas. Lazy writers who choose general rather than specific forms frequently abuse nouns because general forms require less thinking.

· General noun: In anatomy class, we studied the thing between the neck and the abdomen.

· Specific noun: In anatomy class, we studied the thorax.

Nouns generate specific images in the reader’s brain. For example, when you write, An animal walked by the lake, the reader may visualize an animal such as a dog, cat, rabbit, or fox. If animal were replaced with a more specific form such as reptile, you’d create more reader urgency. And if animal were replaced with the more specific alligator, you’d create reader alarm.

Table 6-1 shows a continuum of nouns as they progress from general to specific. For example, “book” represents a general classification of reading, “novel” represents a less general classification of reading, and Moby Dick represents a specific piece of reading. Specific nouns impact readers more than general nouns.

TABLE 6-1 General to Specific Nouns