APA style and citations for dummies - Joe Giampalmi 2021

Writing as a skill for lifetime success
Achieving your personal best: student improvement plan
Earning applause: APA writing for the academic audience

Writing is sometimes called the gatekeeper skill. It opens gates to your college admission, college degree, job interviews, and career opportunities. Currently, your college writing proficiency can help you to avoid becoming one of the 57 percent of students who start college and fail to graduate — 31 million over the past two decades who were also burdened with an average of $14,000 in student loan debts. Without college writing skills, gates are closed on degrees, job opportunities, careers, and lifetime financial opportunities.

Businesses are pressuring colleges today to place more emphasis on writing, resulting in an alphabet of programs: writing across the curriculum (WAC), writing in the disciplines (WID), and writing-intensive (WI) courses. Your campus has a writing center (WC), and you may have a Writing Department, separate from your English Department.

Writing, the pulse of the academic process, is difficult because it requires and shows thinking. Your writing products offer a window into how you analyze, problem-solve, implicate, apply, evaluate, and conclude. These critical thinking skills are revealed in research when you develop and support an argument using a research formatting style such as APA.

Writing is also visual evidence of understanding course content. College writing skills enable you to respond to an essay question such as, “What did the world learn about global healthcare from the COVID-19 pandemic?” The writing that you produce demonstrates your level of understanding of lessons learned about global healthcare….

Your college writing also demonstrates your persistence and resilience. In addition to writing requiring regular practice and revising, it also requires determination and confidence when facing every new challenge. Writers at all levels experience rejection and failure, including J. K. Rowling, Stephen King, and Agatha Christie.

You’ll face writing challenges and writing failures — and professors who don’t connect with your writing. If you do not experience some academic failures, you are not experiencing enough academic risk. The life lesson of writing is motivating yourself to turn failures into success. To paraphrase Thomas Edison, you haven’t failed, you’ve found many ways that it won’t work.