APA Style Simplified

Writing in Psychology, Education, Nursing, and Sociology

Bernard C. Beins

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119745273
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Master the fundamentals of 7th Edition APA style with this newly updated one-step resource

The newly and thoroughly revised Second Edition of APA Style Simplified: Writing in Psychology, Education, Nursing, and Sociology delivers a concise but comprehensive guide to writing clearly and effectively in APA style. It incorporates fresh guidelines from the Seventh Edition of the APA publication manual.

Distinguished psychologist, academic, and author Dr. Bernard C.Beinswalks readers through how to write objective scientific research papers using engaging prose.He explains how to develop ideas, connect them to what others have written, and express them clearly. The book also describes the differences between written, oral, and poster presentations and offers instructions for applying APA style to each one.

APA Style Simplified: Writing in Psychology, Education, Nursing, and Sociology2nd Edition goes beyond mere structural conventions and teaches readers the importance of choosing effective wording, the right and wrong times to use technical language, and avoiding commonly encountered mistakes in word and sentence selection. The author also includes sections on:

• How to write an engaging and informative introduction, including an interesting hypothesis
• How to describe your chosen experimental method, including participants and subjects, materials and apparatus selection, procedure, and design
• How to effectively communicate statistics and statistical concepts by keeping your mind on the pointyou'retrying to make
• How to show your results and relate them back to your hypothesis, including a few points about how to present your results to others

Perfect for students pursuing psychology, education, nursing, or sociology programs at any level, from undergraduate to postgraduate, APA Style Simplified also belongs on the bookshelves of working professionals in the same fields who hope to sharpen their APA-style writing, communication, and presentation skills.

1
Writing Professionally

Write what matters. If you don’t care about what you’re writing, neither will your readers.

Judy Reeves

I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.

James Michener

When people write professionally in the social, educational, or health sciences, they are telling a story about people. But scientists are people, too, complete with individual personalities, likes and dislikes, and ordinary human qualities. Their personalities affect what they do and how they do it. As such, “science writing is not so much about science, but about people—human problems and their solutions, curiosity and discovery” (Holland, 2011, para. 4). In this book, you will learn how to convey your thoughts on the important problems and solutions related to people.

It would be hard to overstate how important it is to write effectively. Writing constitutes one of the “3 Rs” of a basic education: reading, writing and ’rithmetic. In the world of business, success is dependent, in part, on effective writing. For high-level positions, “writing is a ‘threshold skill’ for both employment and promotion” (College Board, 2004, p. 3). In one survey, many companies noted that writing was important in hiring. One respondent asserted that, “in most cases, writing ability could be your ticket in … or it could be your ticket out” (College Board, 2004, p. 3). Potential employees who do not write well are unlikely to be hired and, if they are hired, they are unlikely to be promoted. Effective writing can also be important for empowering people and creating communities (Parks, n.d.). In the end, good writing will continue to be a critical skill in any professional career (Laurinavicius, 2017).

In a student’s progress toward advanced training, graduate school admission may also depend on writing effectiveness. Graduate programs routinely request essays as part of the application process. This writing is “often used to make final selections of students with similar GPAs and standardized test scores. If you are on the borderline of being accepted and the admissions committee could go either way, a sterling essay can increase your chances of success considerably” (American Psychological Association, 2001).

More immediately, the type of writing presented in this book focuses on the technical style presented in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association, 2020). In the end, you will develop skill in writing in APA Style, presenting your ideas with clarity and logic in a manner that will engage the reader. This book provides guidance on creating appropriately formatted papers, but you are likely to find that you become better at it by actually doing it rather than just reading about it. The organization of this book should facilitate development of your skills as you actually apply the guidelines presented here (Boysen, 2019).

Most of us find people interesting and are eager to learn why they behave the way they do. But readers do not want to fight through dull and meaningless writing. As writers, our biggest hurdle involves turning complex, technical concepts into prose that others can appreciate.

Writing successfully is not easy. It requires knowledge of the topic we are addressing; judicious selection of the best words, phrases, and sentences; and editing and revising what we have composed. If there were a magical formula that we could use to generate good prose, everybody would succeed in communicating even complex and hard-to-understand ideas. If you have read the work of scientists, though, you will have discovered that, much of the time, scientific writing is dense and impenetrable. Many writers hide interesting concepts inside packages of dull prose.

Furthermore, when you write a paper, not only do you have to make your points clearly, but you have to do it in APA Style. This book will focus on writing effectively within those technical constraints. But it is important to remember that the first goal of any writing project is to communicate effectively. Writing that doesn’t inform the reader is as bad as (or worse than) no writing at all. It is wise to remember that technical writing doesn’t have to be obscure; that often occurs because scientists pay little attention to writing style. In fact, some research indicates that research summaries that undergraduates write are actually clearer than the summaries that professionals write (Brown, 2018). This book is a hopeful attempt to keep you from falling prey to confusing prose.

How Does Professional Writing Differ from Other Kinds of Writing?

If you are trying to write like a professional, your style will be unlike much of the writing that you have done in the past. When we write professionally, we usually attempt to convey specific information with a great deal of precision, minimizing ambiguity and the possibility of misunderstanding. The adage to say what you mean and mean what you say is highly appropriate for technical writing. You want your reader to understand the points you believe are important, and you want the reader to know exactly what you intend to say.

In other forms of writing, the emphasis may be on crafting artistic prose. The writer attempts to impress the reader with both content and style. The words that Shakespeare wrote for Macbeth illustrate the point. Macbeth lamented that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” These poetic words convey Macbeth’s despair. However, Shakespeare’s style would not be appropriate for a scientist because the style of science is to be straightforward and unambiguous so the reader does not have to puzzle through the words to find meaning in them.

Psychologists often receive training in how to write objective, scientific papers. Unfortunately, the writing style is often “bloodless” (Josselson & Lieblich, 1996, p. 651), meaning that it is not particularly engaging. Sommer (2006) has encouraged psychologists to learn to write with color and style for lay audiences without sacrificing accuracy. He also implied that the writing style in academic journals need not be dreary.

In scientific writing, we focus on the content of the message. The point is not to impress the reader with the prose, but to render the prose invisible while making the content foremost. This type of writing can be as difficult to do well as literary writing because you need to be concise without omitting important information; you need to choose your words carefully so they engage the reader without obscuring your point; you need to say enough to let your reader understand your message without being repetitive.

Another difference among the various types of writing is that, when we write scientifically or technically, we generally rely on a vocabulary specific to the topic at hand. Professionals understand this wording, but others are not likely to be as conversant with the terminology. This is one of the reasons that scientific writing has the reputation of being incomprehensible—you need to know the jargon. (The concepts are also complex and may be hard to understand, which does not help.) Actually, technical terms are helpful because they let us communicate complex ideas clearly in a few words, although if you do not know the meanings of the words, the prose is meaningless or, at best, difficult.

Using APA Style

A further difference between scientific or technical writing and less formal writing is that, in science, authors typically follow a specific format in preparing reports. In this book, you will learn the guidelines that appear in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association, 2020), commonly just called APA Style. To begin with, in APA Style, research reports usually include seven sections, as described in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Typical Sections in an APA-Style Research Report

Section of the report	What the section contains
Title page	The title of the paper, the names of authors, and the affiliations of the authors
Abstract	A brief overview of the entire project of about 150 to 250 words
Introduction	The background and logic of the study, including previous research that led to this project
Method	Minute details of how the study proceeded, including descriptions of participants, apparatus, and materials, and what researchers and participants actually did during the study
Results	A detailed statement of the statistics and other results of the study
Discussion	What the results tell us about thought and behavior
References	Where to find the work cited in the paper that relates to the present study

The path that you will take in writing a paper for a class parallels that of submitting a manuscript to a journal. Most of the time, if a writer submits to a journal editor a manuscript that deviates greatly from APA Style, the editor may reject the manuscript immediately as unsuitable for publication. In some cases, editors work with authors so that the final version of the manuscript is consistent with APA Style (Brewer et al., 2001). Similarly, in a class, instructors often insist on APA Style and often work with students trying to learn the intricacies of this kind of writing. Guidance about common errors appears in the appendices of this book, but you can see the types of errors psychologists, who are experienced with APA guidelines, frequently see and what they consider important (Cash, 2009; Hughes et al., 2017; Landrum, 2013).

In addition, editors have commented that deviations from APA Style often accompany problems with the content of a manuscript. So if you create a manuscript that fails to follow APA Style, an ins...