University Writing Skills

Summary of APA Citation Style

The majority of professional writing in the social sciences (anthropolocy, history, cultural studies, sociology, psychology, and related fields) uses style guidelines set by the American Psychological Association (APA). This brief summary gives guidelines primarily for use in writing papers for your Cultural Studies classes in the English Department. Consult your professor regarding course-specific requirements when documenting sources.

• What follows is an abbreviated review of APA style guidelines, the particulars of writing a paper. Many details have been left out for the sake of brevity. For more details refer to the current edition of the APA Publication Manual.
• Typing. All manuscripts must be typed and double-spaced on only one side of the paper. Margins should be at least 2,5 cm on all four sides. (Some instructors prefer that the margin on the right side be considerably wider, to leave room for comments.) Page numbers and a header (the first two or three words of the title) go within the margin at the upper right-hand corner of each page. Justify (align) text on the left only (like this). Indent the beginning of each paragraph five spaces.
• Headings. Headings are helpful in guiding readers. Three levels of headings are usually enough. The first level heading is centered on its own line in upper- and lowercase. The second level heading is on the left margin on its own line, underlined, in upper and lower case. The third level heading is indented, underlined in lowercase, and followed by a period and the text.

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Example:

First Level Heading

Second Level Heading

Third level heading. The text continues here . . .

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• Writing style. The APA Publication Manual gives suggestions for writing that is clear, accurate, and easy to read. Of course, proper spelling, sentence construction, and paragraph organization are expected. The APA gives four specific guidelines, ranked in order from most to least important: orderly expression of ideas, smoothness of expression, economy of expression, and precision and clarity of word choice. For instance, writers should be frugal with words, avoiding redundancy and wordiness (economy of expression). However, brevity should not be at the expense of smoothness of expression or the orderly expression of ideas. APA style requires avoiding language that might imply bias on the basis of gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability. Generally this can be done with sentence phrasing. Try to avoid awkward constructions such as "he or she" and "he/she." See the APA Publication Manual for many suggestions on how to avoid bias in manuscripts.
• References. References allow authors to document their information and credit others for their ideas or work.

  Citations in the text. The APA format is very specific about how previously published work is to be cited. Typically, the author's last name and the year of the publication are given in the text, and full publication information is given in a Reference section at the end of the manuscript. Only works cited in the text of the manuscript are listed in the Reference section. To cite a work in the text of the manuscript, put the author's last name and the year of publication in parentheses (Goleman, 1987). The author's name may be part of the sentence with the year in parentheses, like this: "Maslow (1962) found that..." With three or more authors, all authors are generally listed the first time the work is cited (Lukoff, Lu, Turner, & Gackenbach, 1995) and thereafter, only the first author followed by "et al." (Lukoff, et al., 1995). Generally, the title of the article, journal, or book, and authors' first names or titles (Dr., Professor) are not given in the text.

  Quotations. If the quoted material is less than 40 words in length, use double quotation marks (English style!) and include the quotation within the body of the paragraph. However, if the quotation is more than 40 words long, indent the passage 1 cm from both left and right margins and omit the quotation marks. Extended, indented quotes should use the same font size and spacing (i.e., double-spaced) as the rest of the text. Page numbers are given only when a direct quotation is used. Page numbers go after the publication year in the text following the quotation mark symbolizing the end of the quote (e.g., Wilber, 1980, p. 182).

  Reference section. Make sure that all citations are correctly referenced in the Reference section. The Reference section goes at the end of the manuscript on a new page and is headed with the term, References, centered on its own line. Entries are listed in alpha-betical order. The first line of each entry is to be indented as if it were a paragraph. Below are examples of the most common types of references-books, articles, chapters from an edited book, and URLs from the World Wide Web.

  In referring to journal articles, the journal title is followed by the volume number underlined, issue number in parentheses, and page numbers. Citation style for Web-based resources has not been established by APA yet. One acceptable way which follows the general structure for all references is given below.

References

American Psychological Association. (1994). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (4th ed.). Washington, D.C.: Author [Explanation: The book is published by an association and the publisher is the "author."]

Goleman, D. (1987). The meditative mind: The varieties of meditative experience. New York: St. Martins. [Explanation: This is a book reference for a book with a single author.]

Lukoff, D., Lu, F., Turner, R., & Gackenbach, J. (1995). Transpersonal psychology research review: Researching religious and spiritual problems on the Internet. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. 27, 153-170. [Explanation: This is an article with several authors, published in a journal. Reference is made to volume and page numbers.]

Maslow, A. (1962). Lessons from the peak experiences. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 2 (1), 9-18. [Explanation: This is a journal article with a single author. Reference is made to volume, issue and page numbers.]

Wilber, K. (1980). Eye to eye: Science and transpersonal psychology. In Walsh, R. N. & Vaughan, F. (Eds.), Beyond ego. Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher. [Explanation: This is a reference to a chapter in a book edited by Walsh and Vaughan.]

Fanderclai, Tari Lin (1999). Getting started on Connections. URL: http://web.new.ufl.edu/~tari/connections/getting-started.html (date accessed: 16 March 2000) [Explanation: This is an example of an electronic citation. The page's author, date of web publication, title, complete URL and date of access are included.]

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