An EasyGuide to APA Style. Regan A. R. Gurung
more than 300 research assistants and taught more than 18,000 students in 28 years at Boise State. During summer 2008, he led an American Psychological Association (APA) working group at the National Conference for Undergraduate Education in Psychology studying the desired results of an undergraduate psychology education. At the 2014 APA Educational Leadership Conference, Eric was presented with a presidential citation for outstanding contributions to the teaching of psychology. With the 2015 launch of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology journal, he served as inaugural coeditor. He is a member of APA, a fellow of Division 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology), and a fellow of Division 1 (General Psychology), and he served as STP president (2014). He served as the 2015–16 president of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association. He is a charter member of the Association for Psychological Science (named fellow in 2018). During 2016–17, Eric was president of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, and he was president of Psi Chi, the international honor society in psychology, in 2017–18. In August 2019, he received the American Psychological Foundation’s Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award, the highest award given to teachers of psychology in America.Regan A. R. Gurungis professor of psychological sciences, director of the General Psychology Program, and interim executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University. He was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay (UWGB) for 20 years, where he was the Ben J. and Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Human Development and Psychology. He received a BA at Carleton College (Minnesota) and a PhD at the University of Washington. He then spent three years at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published articles in a variety of scholarly journals, including Psychological Review and Teaching of Psychology. His textbook, Health Psychology: A Cultural Approach (SAGE, 2018) is in its fourth edition, and he has coauthored/edited 15 other books, including Doing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2014) and the Handbook of Health Psychology (Routledge, 2018). He is completing Study Like a Champion: A Student’s Guide to Using Cognitive Science (with John Dunlosky) and Getting Savvy: Research Methods in Psychology. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the Midwestern Psychological Association. He has won the Founder’s Award for Excellence in Teaching as well as of the Founder’s Award for Scholarship at UWGB, and he was also the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Wisconsin Professor of the Year (2009) and the UW System Regents’ Teaching Excellence Award winner. In August 2017, he received the American Psychological Foundation’s Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award, the highest award given to teachers of psychology in America. He is past president of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology and past president of Psi Chi, the international honor society in psychology. He is founding coeditor of the APA journal, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology.
1 APA Style Versus Format:Why It Matters to Your Audience and Why It Should Matter to You
If you are in college, congratulations—we think you made a good choice! That means you have many papers to write in your future. This book is about helping you become a better writer and helping build your confidence in your writing ability. In particular, this book is about helping you learn how to write a scientific paper with precision and objectivity, one in which you are able to communicate accurately your ideas, findings, and interpretations using the type of writing style and format published by the American Psychological Association (APA, 2020). This is a writing style very different from what you likely learned in a high school English class, where you might have learned about narrative, expository, or descriptive styles of writing. Here, we are all about writing in APA Style. To help you become APA-Style compliant, we use plenty of examples, clever subtitles, and any trick we can think of to get your attention so you can learn from this book. In fact, the book is purposely spiral bound so it can lie flat on your desk next to your computer or in your lap as you work on your APA papers. Note that the spiral binding has been a feature of our book since our first edition.
Regardless of whether you are writing a paper as a psychology, sociology, or nursing student, if a professor asks you to write in APA Style, you are asked to do so to help communicate your ideas in writing in a way that will be more easily understood by others in your field. APA Style reflects the scientific method in that its goals are precision and objectivity in writing, as well as standardization of style and format. Using APA Style helps keep our personal style and eccentricities from affecting our writing and reporting of research. It helps maintain the goal of objectivity in science. Specific content is placed within specific sections and in a particular order, allowing the reader to know exactly where to find particular pieces of information about your research. Following APA Style and format, you will be able to provide the reader with a convincing argument that features clear and concise statements and logical development of your ideas. You will find a greater appreciation for the APA Publication Manual once you start reading articles for your assignments. Then you will start to notice how helpful it is to have a particular type of writing style and format from one paper to the next, expediting your reading and understanding of the material.
Let us introduce two of the more common terms applied when using the APA Publication Manual to write your papers: APA Style and APA format. For some assignments, you might be told to “write in APA Style”; others might say to “use APA format,” or you might just hear, “Follow the Publication Manual.” You may be confused by these different instructions. What does it all mean?
What Is the Difference Between APA Style and APA Format?
These terms can be confusing because they have no clear, set definitions. For instance, APA Style has been characterized by these writing elements: clarity, literal writing, and brevity (Vipond, 1993). But other types of writing could share these characteristics; for example, would you not want an owner’s manual to be clear, literal, and brief? Sure, but owners’ manuals are not written in APA Style (at least not the manuals we have read). For clarity here (and for our purposes), we define APA Style as a writing approach that embodies objectivity, credibility of sources, and an evidence-based approach. For instance, objectivity implies a certain level of detachment and formality; APA Style does not typically involve passionate stories written to resemble the dialogue between characters in a play or sitcom. Objectivity also implies distance and balance in approach. Scientists writing in APA Style address variables, hypotheses, and theories (which could involve studying emotion and passion) and how they affect behavior generally. Scientists do not typically write about specific individuals (with the exception of descriptions of case studies). Objectivity in APA Style also obligates the writer to avoid biased language and to respect the power of language and labels.
APA Style necessitates an approach that respects and preserves the chain of evidence and how science builds on previous findings and refines theoretical explanations over time. An example is the citations an author uses to support claims made in scientific writing. When you see the flow of a sentence or paragraph interrupted by names and years in parentheses, this is the author giving credit for ideas—exemplified by someone writing about how to optimize teaching and learning (Gurung & Schwartz, 2009). Listing the last name of the author (or authors) and the year when the work was published provides evidence for the writer’s claim and makes readers aware of the continued refinement of theories from one scientist’s work to the next. Giving credit where credit is due also helps avoid plagiarism (see Chapter 5 for details on avoiding plagiarism). Taken as a whole, APA Style is one important component of what helps the author of a journal article—and, correspondingly, the research presented in it—reflect scientific objectivity.
For our purposes, APA format is what makes a journal article “look” scientific. APA format refers to the precise method of generating your article, manuscript, or term paper by using the rules set forth in the Publication Manual. When we refer to “APA format,” we mean the nitty-gritty details of how your written work will appear on paper: the margins, the font, when to use an ampersand (“&”) and when to use the word “and,” inserting the correct information in the top 1-inch margin of your paper, when to use numerals (“12”) and when to spell out numbers