Academic Writing and the Use of APA Style
The American Psychological Association (APA) Manual provides a set of requirements for those who wish to write under the scope of their format. The APA Manual includes guidelines both for including in-text citations and reference lists in pieces of writing. This paper aims to provide an analysis of the use of APA specifications for in-text citations and reference pages in the article Beyond Reflection: Teacher Learning as Praxis, by Hoffman-Kipp, Artiles, and López Torres (2003). Even though in the article mentioned above there are many instances of misuse of those specifications, this paper will only focus on the most significant ones.
According to the American Psychological Association (2009), “References in APA publications are cited in-text with an author-date citation system and are listed alphabetically in the reference list” (p.174). In turn, APA states that reference lists must be complete for the readers to be able to locate the primary source if necessary. For that reason, the APA (2009) states that each entry on the list should contain specific elements such as author, year of publication, title, and publishing data.
Even though the APA manual does not contain information about the accepted number of in-text citations, the seemingly overuse of this resource by the authors may turn the text challenging to read for the general audience. Although the previously mentioned characteristic may provide an overall impression of the arrangement of the text, this analysis is going to focus on those instances that may not be under the scope of cohesion and coherence but under the style realm.
On page 248 of the article, in the second paragraph, the following quotation can be found “‘integrat[ing] curriculum around concepts and issues’ that would be of current interest to both student and teacher, or ‘focus[ing] on inquiry and us[ing] literature to support that inquiry’ thus helping their students ‘not only to be problem solvers, but to become problem-posers’ (Crawford et al., 1994, p. 174)” (Hoffman-Kipp et al., 2003, p.248) where the authors link different short quotations with their words and insert the citation at the end of the paragraph; APA (2009) includes a clear guide to writing quotations and inserting the writer's opinion, a phrase to connect ideas, etcetera. “Use brackets, not parentheses, to enclose material such as an addition or explanation inserted in a quotation by some person other than the original author” (p.173). Furthermore, on page 250 of the article, in the fourth paragraph, readers can find a quotation cited in an ambiguous way; “Most teacher educators and professional developers do not have a history of reflecting on topics such as multiculturalism. Case studies of teacher education programs based on reflection reveal that issues of social and political curriculum transformation are generally avoided, misinterpreted, or resisted (Vavrus & Ozcan, 1996, p. 3)” (Hoffman-Kipp et al., 2003, p.250). This may lead the reader not to identify whether it is the case of a quotation, an inadequately indented block quotation, or a paraphrase improperly cited.
As regards the reference list, Cole’s work citation seems to be wrong as the name is incomplete and, as it is the case of a book reference, the title should have been written in italics. What is more, Cole wrote a series of books under the same title, so the reference is not clear enough for the reader to look for the book in case of need to resort to the primary source.
Hoffman-Kipp et al. (2003) do not comply with the American Psychological Association’s standards to write in-text citations and reference pages. The instances mentioned in this paper show that the authors did not consider the rules published by APA either when including in-text citations or when listing references, which may make the reading of the article a burdensome task.
References
American Psychological Association. (2009). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. 6th Edition. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
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