"Your Stolen Creation"
Imagine for a moment that you wrote a paper for one of the university courses in which you are now enrolled and posted it on the web for your friends and families to read. Five years in the future, you read a book that is on the best seller list or is a popular text book adopted for courses. The book makes thousands, or even millions, of dollars. When you read chapter 3, you find that it is almost an exact replication of the paper that you posted to the Internet. Your work was not cited as the original source. How do you feel when you read it? What would you do about it? What would you do about it if we had standards for citing or rules governing writing?
Plagiarism
is one of the many reasons that we have editorial style guides for writing. Can you think of other reasons?
Editorial style consists of rules or guidelines that a publisher observes to ensure clear and consistent presentation of written material. You will learn the uniform uses of elements in APA such as:
- punctuation and abbreviations
- construction of tables
- selection of headings
- citation of references
- presentation of statistics
- and many other elements that are a part of every manuscript.
There are different editorial styles adopted to present written material. They include:
- American Psychological Association (APA) Style
- Modern Language Association (MLA) Style
- Chicago Style
- Turabian
APA format is the style most often used for writing in the social and behavioral sciences. APA format is required for this course and the editorial style of choice for most publications in the disciplines of psychology, human services, and counseling. Thus, it is important for you to learn APA's style rules and guidelines.
APA's style rules and guidelines are contained in a manual book entitled the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th Edition), a publication of the American Psychological Association in Washington D.C. Learning to use the style form well demands having a copy of the manual. The manual serves as a principle reference guide (you need to obtain a copy of this manual), always at the researcher's and writer's elbow. It will be the reference used for this lesson, and page numbers and sections of the manual are cited throughout this lesson.
This lesson will not be exhaustive and in no way replaces the manual; however, it is intended to introduce you to, and for some of you provide a review of, the APA's style rules and guidelines to assist you in sculpting your writing masterpiece.
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MIND MOLDER |
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When researchers talk about APA style, they may be referring to APA's system of citations in text and reference format. If you are unsure, you should clarify with your instructors or editors how they define "APA style." |
