APA style and citations for dummies - Joe Giampalmi 2021

Developing lifetime literacy skills: writing for success
Achieving your personal best: student improvement plan
Earning applause: APA writing for the academic audience

The purpose of most college writing is to communicate ideas and information. But writing is also a tool to discover, learn, and develop ideas. To paraphrase English novelist E. M. Forster (1879—1970), you don’t know what you’re thinking until you see what you write. And sometimes you write information you didn’t know you learned. What follows are strategies for writing to learn.

Writing to learn

Because the brain likes to be primed like a water pump, writing-to-learn (WTL) strategies prompt the brain to create meaning. For example, if asked to list career choices, you might respond with salesperson, teacher, and manager. But if asked to respond alphabetically, you might instead respond with acrobat, barrister, coach, deckhand, and so forth. Try identifying careers beginning with E, F, and G.

The premise of WTL strategies is to prompt the brain to connect known information with unknown information. WTL strategies include the following:

· A hypothetical (or to hypothesize) suggests ideas based on assumed conditions.

(If …, then …) If people worldwide spoke one language, then the world would have fewer conflicts.

· Speculative (or to speculate) offers a theory based on fact… … … … … … … . (What if …) What if Leonardo da Vinci invented the airplane before the Wright brothers?

· What if the Earth’s rotation were one second slower?

· What if the Earth’s temperature increased by one degree?

· What if the same book were read by every person in the world?

· Application (or to apply) shows relationships, such as similarities and differences.

· Similarities: College freshmen are like books. They have a story to tell, and each day is a different chapter.

· Differences: College freshmen differ from college seniors. Freshmen fear coming in; seniors fear going out.

· Mythical (or a myth) is a factitious narrative with symbolic meaning.

· A conversation between Earth and Mars

· A diary entry of a comma travelling through freshmen essays

· A letter from Isaac Newton’s first law to his third law

· An obituary of the college essay

· Freewriting, an unstructured free flow of ideas from the brain, shows what your brain is thinking.

In ten-minute sprints, handwrite or type to data-dump your working memory. Begin with a prompt sentence such as, “What do I think about smart cars?” Or, begin with a self-greeting such as, “Hi, it’s me. What are you thinking about?”

· Mapping, a visual display of words and ideas, uses circles and lines to connect related ideas.

Write your topic in the middle of a piece of paper and circle it. Around that word, write major subheadings of that topic. Connect the major topic and each subtopic with a line. List other words related to the subtopics, and connect those related words. The map of your words is worth a thousand pictures.

These right-brain activities elicit uncommon information about the topic. Try an A-to-Z list on the topic of animals. Did you surprise yourself with your responses? Did you arrive at anaconda for “A”? Writing is a strategy for discovering information.

In addition to your daily functional writing (forms, lists, class notes, email, texts, and social media), write at least a paragraph a day, such as course note summaries, test preparation, a blog post, and other writing projects. Every minute of writing is another minute of thinking.

Putting together your writing improvement plan

The purpose of a writing improvement plan is to develop your college writing, and any level beyond that you desire to achieve. If your goal includes publication, work to make it happen. If your goal includes proficient college writing and career writing, such as writing a company newsletter, go for it.

Similar to college readers, college writers are also either lambs or lions, approaching writing passively or aggressively. And some lambs experience malnutrition because college writing requires more effort and more thinking than reading.

The good news here is that improving your writing improves your reading more than improving your reading improves your writing. Improving your writing is like a get-one-free coupon. Because you’re demonstrating college writing success by being enrolled in a course that requires the use of APA style and citation, you should view improving your writing as a DIY (do-it-yourself) project. The key to improving writing, similar to reading, is commitment.

A writing improvement plan begins with scheduling time and executing strategies. Various short-term strategies for writing improvement are detailed in Chapters 5 through 11. Long-term strategies (beyond semester workloads) for writing improvement include the following:

· Soliciting writing feedback from multiple sources

· Reading books about the craft of writing

· Exploring writing in a variety of genres

· Writing experimentally using various tones

· Publishing online

· Writing daily