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The APA style guide is a citation system created by the American Psychological Association and used primarily in the social sciences. Using APA allows you to join a community of practice. Citing sources according to APA puts your research in conversation with other works in your field. In this way, your research can contribute to the broader base of knowledge.
Every complete APA entry consists of two parts:
“Thinking is a mental activity that is used to resolve doubt about what to do, what to believe, or what to desire or seek” (Baron, 1993, p. 193).
or
According to Baron (1993), “Thinking is a mental activity that is used to resolve doubt about what to do, what to believe, or what to desire or seek” (p. 193).
According to Baron (1993), “Thinking is a mental activity that is used to resolve doubt about what to do, what to believe, or what to desire or seek” (para. 4).
Participants in the study spent more time analyzing arguments that they disagreed with compared to those that they agreed with (Edwards & Smith, 1996).
Only the first author is included with the “et al.” notation.
Although human thinking is not always rational, it can be improved through training (Lilienfeld et al., 2009).
List the sources in alphabetical order.
Numerous researchers have inquired into the different dispositions of critical thinking (Ennis, 1996; Facione et al., 1994; Perkins et al., 1993).
Quotations that are more than forty words long still include author name, date, and page, but the formatting is slightly different:
Example:
According to Biesta (2006):
There is, however, another way to understand learning, one that does not think of learning as the acquisition of something that already exists, but instead sees learning as responding, as a response to a ‘question’.[…] Here learning becomes a creation or an invention, a process of bringing something new into the world: one’s own, unique response. (p. 68)
Zinsser, W. (1994). On writing well (5th ed.). HarperCollins.
Coffin, C., Curry, M. J., Goodman, S., Hewings, A., Lillis, T. M., & Swann, J. (2003). Teaching academic writing: A toolkit for higher education. Routledge.
Ennis, R. (2018). Critical thinking across the curriculum: A vision. Topoi, 37(1), 165–184. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9401-4
Bazerman, C. (1997). The life of genre, the life in the classroom. In W. Bishop & H. Ostrom (Eds.), Genre and writing: Issues, arguments, alternatives (pp. 19-26). Heinemann.
American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). Author.
Avramova, N. (2019, January 3). The secret to a long, happy, healthy life? Think age-positive. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/03/health/respect-toward-elderly-leads-to-long-life-intl/index.html
APA 7 has made several important changes from APA 6 with respect to style. These include the following:
For more information, you can consult the Online Writing Lab at Purdue and the APA website.
Writing Services, Wilfrid Laurier University, CC By-NC 2023
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