In this paper it is analysed the use
of American Psychological Association (APA,
2010) style for academic writing
in an article written by Dalvit, Murray, Terzoli, Zhao and Mini (2005). It is attempted to analyse deeply
how signal phrases, in-text citations and references list were dealt by the
mentioned authors.
First, the authors used signal
phrases twice throughout the article and they preferred the signal phrase
“According to” (University of Minnesota Center for Writing, n.d.). Even though they repeated the phrase instead
of writing two different ones, they seemed to have made proper use of them as
they were followed by the researcher’s surname, the year of publication between
parentheses and a comma. As for APA guidelines, page number is not necessary in
paraphrasing after a signal phrase but
they decided to include it.
As regards other in-text citations,
paraphrasing was again the format the
authors used (UMN Center for Writing, n.d.).
But this time, they mentioned the sources and the year of publication in
parentheses at the end of the sentence. Thus, they cited an author, a
dictionary or institutions like Department of Education and Department of
Communication or Council of Higher Education.
Considering short quotations, they did
not use them at all while they may have included some as they provided a good
argument (UMN for Writing, n.d.). They could have produced a more
appropriate balanced writing with the
use of both quotations and paraphrases.
The references list includes the
in-text citations in alphabetical order, makes a proper use of title-case for
names of books and internet sources, but it seems to have several
inconsistencies. It comes immediately below
the conclusion and not on a separate sheet. The word “References” is aligned to
the left while it should have been centered at the top without colon and bold
type is not needed. Each entry must have been double-spaced. Besides, they
should have used: ampersand before the last author´s name mentioned and not the
word “and”, sentence-case for names of titles,
proper title-case for titles of journals and not for titles of
articles, “retrieved” followed by year
of publication and “from” before URL address for web sources.
In conclusion, the text analysed
here even though it attempts to follow
APA rules, it does not comply with APA style properly. The most relevant
problems could be in the reference section while in the text itself they are
considerably less as the authors seemed to follow the APA criteria.
References
Dalvit,
L., Murray, S., Terzoli, A., Zhao, X. & Mini, B. (2005). Providing
increased access to English L2 students of computer science at South African
University. US-China Education Review, Sep.
2005, Vol. 2 (9).
University
of Minnesota Center for Writing. (n.d.). Quicktips: APA documentation style:
In-text citations. University of
Minnesota: Student Writing Support. Retrieved October 2013, from http://writing.umn.edu
University
of Minnesota Center for Writing. (n.d.). Quicktips: APA documentation style:
In-text quotations from sources. University
of Minnesota: Student Writing Support. Retrieved October 2013, from http://writing.umn.edu
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