Documenting Sources –American Psychological Association (APA) Style: a Deep Analysis of In-text Citation, Signal Phrases and Reference List

Documenting Sources –American Psychological Association (APA) Style: a Deep Analysis of In-text Citation, Signal Phrases and Reference List

Garcete Marisol 

Ciampichini Carolina

Academic writing is not an easy task; not only do writers have to clearly display cohesive and coherent pieces of writing but they also have to follow certain writing standards established and regulated by the American Psychological Association (APA). It is the purpose of this paper to analyze and examine the use of in-text citation, signal phrases and the reference list that are cited in the article written by Dalvit, Murray and Terzoli (2005).  

As regards the use of in-text citations, the authors make use of paraphrasing. Examples of indirect quotations with parenthetical citation can be found as well. They can be divided into one work by one author such as (Boughey, 2002), (Sweetnam-Evans, 2001), (Barkhuizen, 2001), (Martindale, 2002); and groups as authors like Department of Education and Department of communication (2001), Council on Higher Education (2001) and Rhodes University-Information Technology Division (2004). The writers also cite specific sources such as Webster's online dictionary (2005) and High Tech Dictionary (2005).  

Examples of indirect quotation with author/s as part of the narrative (University of Minnesota, n.d.) can be observed as well. They can be divided into one work by one author such as Heugh (2002) and one work by two authors like Halliday and Martin (1993). 

Concerning signal phrases, it can be stated that there is a very limited use of them in the whole article since only two clear-cut examples are used to integrate quotations: according to Heugh (2002), according to Halliday and Martin (1993). It can be seen that there is not a variety of them to alert the reader that the information being mentioned is from an acknowledged source.

Dalvit et al. include a Reference List arranged in alphabetical order directly at the end of the article and not on a separate sheet of paper. The word reference is not correctly typed; it should not be in bold and it should be centered in the page. All in all, the general structure of the reference list included is: author's surname, author's initial, publication year, title of work and publisher. The writers include different types of sources in the reference list like books, reports, journals and websites. The latter includes retrieval month (day), year, from http://Web address.  For example: Boughey, C. (2002). Naming Students’ “Problems”: An Analysis of Language-Related Discourses at a South African University. Teaching in Higher Education,7, 295-307.  The entries are not double-spaced but the reference list includes all the necessary information. 

To conclude, it could be stated that the authors show some attachment to the APA reference style, avoiding plagiarism and acknowledging the sources though they do not fully follow all the established requirements in the analyzed article. 

References

American Physiological Association. (2010) Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.

Dalvit, L., Murray, S. and Terzoli, A. (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)