American Psychological Association (APA) Rules in Academic Writing

     The purpose of this paper is to analyze in depth the use of the American Psychological Association (APA,2010) rules for academic writing in a particular piece by Dalvit et al (2005) and to state if the APA conventions were applied to this text.

     Most of the citations the authors included in the mentioned piece follow the same in-text citation structure, that is, author´ s surname and year of publication between parentheses. Signal phrases could have been used more often to balance the reading and to provide a smoother, less rigid format.

     The reference list should be separated from the body of the text, in a new page. A number of mistakes regarding capitalization, use of italics, punctuation, etc. can be found. Let us begin from the top: the word Reference is not centrally aligned but to the left. It should not be followed by a colon, either. The authors wrote the sources in alphabetical order but they numbered them. Double spacing was not used or in any part of the text. No hanging indentation was used, what makes it more difficult to consult sources if a reader wishes to. According to Purdue OWL, (2013), all lines after the first line of each entry in the reference list should be indented one-half inch from the left margin.

     The names of the titles are title-cased and italicized. “Italicize titles of longer works such as books and journals [is advised].” (Purdue OWL, 2013). The same source states, “The title of the article is in sentence-case, meaning that only the first word and proper nouns in the title are capitalized.”  The names of the books or journals where the articles were taken from are not italicized, which are obvious mistakes when using APA rules.                     

       The electronic sources lack the authors´ name. Furthermore, they should have included the words retrieved from or available at before the link.  The year and the date are separated, and therefore, it is not clear when it was accessed. The two online dictionaries cited in the reference section, should have the entry word in the first position since the authors´ names are not usually included when citing dictionaries.

     When two authors are cited in the reference list, the use of the ampersand is required. The authors used the word and both in the in-text citation, where it is correct, and in the reference list.

     To sum up, after a thorough analysis and contrast with the APA guidelines, it is  concluded that the authors of this piece used some APA style conventions successfully but made a number of mistakes and omissions as well, particularly in the reference section.

References

American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication Manual of the American                 Psychological Association (6^th edition). Washington, DC.

Dalvit, L., Murray, S., Terzoli, A., Zhao, X., Rhodes University, South Africa, Mini, B., &     University Fort Hare, South Africa. (2005). Providing increased access to English L2 students of computer science at a South African University. US- China Education Review, Sep. 2005, Vol 2(9).

Purdue OWL (2013). Reference List: Basic Rules. Retrieved October 2013, from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/05/.