Review of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

For the IDT 510 course, Research Practices in Instructional Design and Technology, one of the four required texts was the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th Edition). This book is required for every class in the MSIDT program.
This course was my first experience with the American Psychological Association (APA) writing style, and it was an adjustment for me. When I was in college 25 years ago, we were told to buy the Random House Handbook, and format our papers according to its conventions. Well, APA is one of the common format styles now, and this book is its bible.
Why do instructors want papers in this format? Well, it makes gives all of their students’ papers a consistent construction and look so they are not difficult to read or sort through. Students can be creative, and can you image sifting through dozens of papers with goof fonts (Comic Sans MS), weird colors, or optimized margins and line spacing so that only half as many words need to be written? In a more cynical view, it also makes an easy grading point for them because they can see right away if a paper is not in the right format.
This 272 page manual is easy to use, with plenty of examples and clear-cut rules for how papers should be written (apparently there is only supposed to be one space after a period now, so that is one thing I had to fix). Unfortunately, the American Psychological Association is always changing the rules, so this book was outdated as soon as I bought it. There were errors or changes on 80 of its pages, so on their website there are seven pages of updates to this book.
Compounding this problem is that some instructors will refer students to other websites for APA standards, and they sometimes conflict with what the APA manual says – one notable area is in how running headers are formatted. That being said, one of the really good sites is Purdue University’s Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab, which might actually give enough information on APA formatting that buying this book might not be necessary. It can be found at: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/
But, the book is not terribly expensive either, with new copies selling on Amazon for around $28. Either way, program students had better study up on APA style, as they will be writing a lot of papers, and there is no reason to give away easy points for screwing up formatting.
Thanks for checking out the blog today, and we will be taking a look at other IDT 510 texts in upcoming posts.
American Psychological Association (2010). Publication manual of the american psychological association (6th ed.). Washington, DC.