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

The aim of this paper is to examine how sources are cited in the article written by Iida (2010). Taking into consideration the APA (2010) style, this paper will firstly examine the use of in-text citation; it will secondly focus on signal phrases. And, it will finally give an account of the reference list.

           As regards the use of in-text citations, the author cites paraphrases: indirect quotations with parenthetical citation (University of Minessota, n.d.) can be spotted and indirect quotation with author/s as part of the narrative (University of Minnesota, n.d.) can be observed too. These quotations fail to referencing because commas are omitted and the use of & is replaced by and.  The author also cites direct quotations. In all of them the number of the page is included but p. is omitted.

            Concerning signal phrases, there are a variety of them to integrate quotations: according to, describes, said, states.

            Finally, regarding the reference list, it can be seen that all the citations in the body of the article are mentioned in the reference list and, all sources included in the reference list appear in the body of the article (APA, 2010). The reference list is arranged in alphabetical order and, for multiple articles by the same author the entries are listed in chronological order.  It is composed of internet sources, journals and books. The majority of the references are incomplete; they they do not include  year of publication, place of publication, publisher. The parenthesis in the year has been omitted and, the author has written and instead of & between parenthesis. The online dictionary references are incomplete. They do not include retrieval information.  The reference list is not written on a separate sheet of paper and the word reference is not correctly typed; it should not have been bold.  Also, it should have been centered at the top of the page. And, the entries should have been doubled spaced. (APA, 2010)

References

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

Iida, A. (2010) “Developing Voice by Composing Haiku: A Social-Expressivist Approach for Teaching Haiku in EFL Contexts” English Teaching Forum retrieved from http://caece.campusuniversidad.com.ar/mod/resource/view.php?id=29597

University of Minnesota Center for Writing. (n.d.). Quicktips: APA documentation style: Reference list. University of Minnesota: Student Writing Support. Retrieved October 2013, from http://writing.umn.edu/sws/assets/pdf/quicktips/apa_References.pdf