APA style and citations for dummies - Joe Giampalmi 2021
Identifying your role in academic process
Capitalizing on consistency: APA and the academic classroom
Conforming to standards: APA and the academic environment
Early in your academic career, education was a partnership between you, your family, and your teacher. Your family provided guidance that resulted in your academic independence, enabling you to accept primary academic responsibility today. And as you discover in Chapter 9, many successful people educate themselves exclusively by reading. I emphasize the importance of reading throughout this book. You become educated by reading, such as learning about APA. In addition to reading, you educate yourself by committing to your schoolwork and satisfying curiosity.
To educate yourself in the academic environment, add two ingredients: commitment and curiosity. Your role as a college student is to bring your best effort, your A-game to every class, every assignment, every semester. That level of commitment requires work and sacrifice. College degrees are earned, not awarded. In fact, only about one-third of American adults have earned a college degree. Earning your degree requires sacrificing play time, social time, and social media time — and using that time for reading, writing, researching, and thinking. As a committed college student, you frequently need to say: “Sorry I can’t go. I have schoolwork to do.”
Becoming educated requires thinking and satisfying curiosity with topics you’re presented in the classroom. Your brain is wired with a natural curiosity to discover, a practice you began when you learned to crawl. That early curiosity was focused on objects, such as staring at your foot and wondering how it got there.
Stepping forward, your curiosity today is focused on ideas. For example, if you experienced your first view of the Grand Canyon over the South Rim, you wondered how such an expansive gash in the earth got there. When you started to talk, you had more questions than answers. Now as a college student, those answers result in more questions. The more you read and experience classes, the more you question. The more you write, the more you discover. When you write, question, and theorize, you’re thinking critically and becoming educated.
The role of APA in your life as a scholar is to provide stability and consistency as you commit to academics and satisfy curiosities. APA helps you navigate the language of scholarship as you write and read. APA is your GAS, your Guidance Activation System, that navigates you through the world of scholarship and provides you opportunities to be your best you.
Your role in the academic process includes continuing to develop your APA skills throughout high school and your college experiences. Gradually increase the complexity of your research reading so that you may apply complex sources to your research writing.
APA and high school classrooms
Your first introduction to APA in high school validates why school subjects are called disciplines. An early academic lesson (and life lesson) is that before you become a rule maker, your survival depends on being a rule follower. APA is the rule-maker, and you are the rule follower. Mastering APA requires academic discipline.
If you had the good fortune of being taught by a high school teacher obsessed with teaching you the details of APA, or MLA or CMoS, treasure them and express your appreciation to them for their passion towards academic protocol. That teacher helped inspire you to buy this book and learn additional strategies about APA.
A prerequisite for writing APA research papers requires completing the following:
· Write fluent sentences. Master writing clear concise messages that don’t distract the reader with compromised sentence structure, incorrect grammar, or misused language conventions.
· Integrate sources: Read to develop ideas to incorporate into your writing. College writing requires integrating college ideas into your writing — called source engagement (Chapter 11). College audiences demand more than your unsubstantiated opinion, they want opinions of experts and how your opinion integrates with experts’ opinions.
· Document with APA guidelines: Academic audiences expect you to document your sources consistent with standards in your field of study, APA.
APA and college courses
APA is the common denominator of writing in most college courses — similar to chocolate being the common denominator of most desserts. If APA is the standard documentation style throughout your university, you’ll master it easier because you’ll be practicing it more frequently. Until you experience that regular practice, applying APA will test your patience. It will be like trying to benefit from exercising by going to the gym once a week. Perfect practice produces perfect performance.
Your success and your degree require commitment and curiosity. Earn your degree one assignment at a time, one class at a time, one course at a time, and one semester at a time. And you already demonstrated your initiative and commitment by buying this book.
Critical thinking in college includes establishing relationships between ideas studied in different courses. For example, hypothesize answers to course-related questions such as
· What is similar about revising writing in a composition course and continental drift in a geography course?
· What is similar about textures in art and scales in music?
· What is similar about the scientific method in chemistry and quadratic equations in physics?
APA strategies help you achieve academic success as you fulfill writing course requirements — and accumulate credits — throughout your college experience.
APA and comp courses
Your most challenging academic commitment following high school will be your first-year writing courses, usually titled College Composition I (CCI) and Composition II (CCII), essay writing courses that require research. An unfortunate statistic is first-year writing courses result in as many as 30 percent of freshmen dropping out of college. In addition to learning college writing, you’ll also be learning APA standards with that writing.
Although 30 percent of first year college students fail first-year writing courses and drop out of college, 70 percent succeed in those courses and go on to graduate. Let me help you become one of the 7 out of 10 first-year students who graduates from college.
Yes, college essay writing with APA documentation is a difficult course, and you’ll be additionally enrolled in three or four other courses that also require writing. Welcome to the world of college where four years of hard work can change your life and the lives of your children and family.
Successful essay writing requires essay writing skills (refer to Chapter 15), and APA style, documentation, and formatting skills (check out Chapters 10 through 14). Successful research writing, CCII that usually follows CCI, requires intense research and more complex documentation. APA use in essay writing, your first college writing course, lacks the intensity of APA in CCII.
CCI is one of your first and most challenging college courses, especially if you weren’t an A-B essay writer in high school and especially if you aren’t an avid book reader. Success in your first-year composition course requires following these three points for successful college writing:
· Start writing assignments the day they’re assigned to you in class. Analyze the assignment and read extensive background material on the topic. Apply APA strategies as you read:
· Complete APA reference elements as you read each source (see Chapter 12).
· Identify source content (with page numbers) that you could use as summaries, paraphrases, and quotations.
· As you commit time and thought to drafting your essay, complete APA citations and references in your draft.
During my decades teaching first year writing students, I frequently tracked strategies of students who wrote model essays. They began assignments early, read extensive background material before drafting, and committed to revising (refer to Chapter 8).
· Commit to recurring feedback and revising. Source engagement (see Chapter 11) can significantly influence your grade.
· Allocate time to review APA documentation with your professor (during office hours), a peer, and your university writing center. Refer to Chapter 20 for more details.
APA and content courses
APA style and documentation that you learned in your composition and research courses can make you an expert-level student in your content courses. And if you earned Bs in your essays in composition courses, you should earn As in your writing assignments in content courses.
Here’s why. Most professors in content areas lack experience teaching writing like your writing professors. Consequently, their expectations for writing assignments are less than their expectations for content in their courses. Advantage you.
Stick to this three-step plan for writing APA essays in your content courses to earn a letter-grade higher than essays in your composition courses:
1. Nail APA guidelines such as title page, page layout (see Chapter 14), citations (refer to Chapter 10), and references (check out Chapter 12).
2. Reference four or five sources to support your thesis.
Engage with those sources as I discuss in Chapter 11.
3. Connect support of your thesis with class lectures, best-selling books, current events, and content in other courses.
As a reading tool (refer to Chapter 9), APA helps you identify the credibility behind ideas, the supporting details validated by scholars in the field. APA provides the skills to further explore citations and references. APA also provides the writing tools to stand out among your peers, tools such as source engagement and critical analysis like I discuss in Chapter 11.
Finally, use write-to-learn strategies to learn content and develop your writing. Chapter 9 includes explanations and examples. It’s like a two-for-one sale: You learn content and you develop your writing.
APA and online courses
You may have discovered from the pandemic that remote learning lacks the excitement (your friends) of classroom learning. And some of you discovered the convenience of remote learning and that it matched your learning style. More importantly, colleges discovered that online courses are an inexpensive and convenient platform to deliver instruction. Advantage university. You can expect online course offerings to grow.
If your student experience includes an online writing course with APA documentation, you have taken the first step toward success by buying this book. You face two challenges taking an APA online writing course and learning college writing. You miss
· The face-to-face support of a class
· The face-to-face support of a classroom instructor
Parts 2 and 3 help you with both challenges.
Here are a few tips for succeeding in online courses:
· Maintain regular email and platform contact with your professor. The easiest plan for an unsuccessful online experience is going MIA (missing in action).
· Use online office hours to answer your APA questions. As you complete your citing and formatting, identify your top two to three questions to email your professor during online office hours.
· If you’re unsure about APA documentation, plan to have your documentation reviewed by your writing center or a trusted peer. As you work on your research, record APA issues to review with your writing center and a trusted peer.
· Regularly utilize class tools available through your learning platform. This strategy not only provides you with course learning tools but also identifies your online presence for professors who use tracking tools to monitor students’ online participation. Focus on utilizing class handouts that contain models of APA requirements that you find challenging, such as citations and references.
· Don’t fall behind with assignments. Because professors’ recording of assignments requires more time for online courses, missing assignments may not be revealed until final grades. When life priorities interfere with completing an assignment, communicate with your professor well before the assignment due dates. Professors usually prefer visiting during office hours rather than emailing or phoning.
Utilize these strategies for improving your writing and online documentation in online courses. Here are some suggestions and their locations:
· The previous section provides background for succeeding in a writing course; almost all information is applicable to online courses.
· Chapter 5 strategies for APA style adapt to online writing assignments, including research papers. I explain essays and response papers in Chapter 15, review of literature in Chapter 16, and report writing in Chapter 17.
· Chapters 6 and 7 explain APA’s focus on parts of speech and conventions that support writing.
· Chapter 8 familiarizes you with a three-level approach for revising your writing. Don’t underestimate the importance of revising your college writing.