Unit 3 – My Relationship With APA

Part 1

My previous experience with APA style is almost non-existent other than what I learned in our Introduction to Leadership course last term.  I used MLA style in both of my prior undergraduate degrees in English and Education.

Today, I had the opportunity to hear author and educator, Tom Schimmer speak on balanced assessment.  At the end of his keynote address, he provided the audience with a list of 13 references, two of whom came from his own books on the subject.  Tom’s scholarly writing  added credibility to his educational leadership role as he not only had a philosophy to share, he was able to provide data to back it up.  It became clear that both quantitative and qualitative data were an essential piece in motivating teachers to examine their assessment practices.  I would like to improve my professional communication skills and believe that learning how to research and write scholarly papers will aid me in this.

Part 2

At the moment, despite doing well on the online quizzes, I feel wholly inadequate in my scholarly writing skills! I am grateful for the online resources and videos that are available by OWL Purdue but also for the detailed examples provided in the American Psychological Association Manual (2010).  These resources will be beneficial in setting up proper formatting and referencing citations.

The areas that I struggle with the most are:

• Writing in a passive voice instead of an active voice. To help combat this, I am going to try really hard to keep asking the question, ‘by whom’ to determine if I am using a passive voice as prompted by Lee (2016) in her blog post on the topic.
• Wordiness and redundancy in my writing. To aid me with this, I will incorporate Dr. Hatala’s (2016) method of crossing out unessential words or areas where I repeat points during the editing process.
•  Ensuring that ideas logically flow from one section to another when beginning new paragraphs. I will ask for feedback from a colleague when editing.

Questions for Dr. Strong

• As part of the check list of what you are looking for, you mention that, “all sources listed in the References have at least 1 corresponding in text citation” (Strong, 2018).  Does that mean, if we read published journal articles or books that relate to our topic but don’t end up directly quoting or paraphrasing from them that we are NOT to include them in our Reference list?
• What are the most common errors you see made by your students when writing scholarly papers and what are your personal tips in avoiding these?
• Is writing in first person discouraged other than when it involves a study that the writer was involved in?  Is sharing personal experiences discouraged?
• When referencing a YouTube video, after the title, should we be putting in brackets …  [Video podcast]?

References

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

Hatala, M. (2018). Learn APA Style – Section 3.01-3.23 – Writing Clearly and Concisely. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRu1UPPubMY

Hurley, G. & Jones, B. (2012, May 9).  APA Formatting -The Basics. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdAfIqRt60c

Strong, H. (2018). Unit 3 Learning Activities. Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/ldrs591/unit-3-learning-activities/