7.2: Introduction to American Psychological Association (APA) Style

Learning Objectives

1. Define APA style and list several of its most important characteristics.
2. Identify three levels of APA style and give examples of each.
3. Identify multiple sources of information about APA style.

What Is APA Style?

APA Style is a set of guidelines for writing in psychology and related fields. You probably learned MLA (Modernal Language Association) Style in your English classes, and maybe other styles in your history, sociology, or biology courses. However, many of the social sciencies and medical field use APA Style, so it's great to learn for everyone. The APA Style guidelines are set down in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition (APA, 2020). The Publication Manual originated in 1929 as a short journal article that provided basic standards for preparing manuscripts to be submitted for publication (Bentley et al., 1929). It was later expanded and published as a book by the association and is now in its seventh edition. TThe 7^th edition has a Professional style and a Student style. We will be discussing the Professional style. Many resources on the internet use the Student style, or even are still using the 6^th edition, so don’t trust them!

The primary purpose of APA style is to facilitate scientific communication by promoting clarity of expression and by standardizing the organization and content of research articles and book chapters. It is easier to write about research when you know what information to present, the order in which to present it, and even the style in which to present it. Likewise, it is easier to read about research when it is presented in familiar and expected ways.

APA style is best thought of as a “genre” of writing that is appropriate for presenting the results of psychological and social science research—especially in academic and professional contexts. There are formatting requirements, and writing expectations best described as technical writing (in comparison to creative writing or persuasive writing). This type of technical writing is not considered "good writing” in non-experimental fields. A literary analysis for an English class is not technical writing and would not use APA Style, even if it were based on psychoanalytic concepts; you would use MLA Style instead. And you would not write a newspaper article, even if it were about a new breakthrough in behavioral neuroscience, in APA style. You would write it in Associated Press (AP) style instead. At the same time, you would not write an empirical research report in MLA style, in AP style, or in the style of a romance novel, an email to a friend, or a shopping list. You would write it in APA style. Part of being a good writer in general is adopting a style that is appropriate to the writing task at hand, and for writing about psychological research, this is APA style.

The Levels of APA Style

Because APA style consists of a large number and variety of guidelines—the Publication Manual is nearly 300 pages long—it can be useful to think about it in terms of three basic levels. These levels can help you think about how you can use APA Style in your own writing:

• Organization: Order of sections of empirical reports
• High-Level Style: Writing and communication
• Low-Level Style: Mechanics and formatting

Organization

The first level is the overall organization of an article (which is covered in Chapter 2 “Manuscript Structure and Content” of the Publication Manual). As discussed in the chapter on literature reviews, empirical research reports, in particular, have several distinct sections that always appear in the same order:

• Title page
• Abstract
• Main body, which includes:
  • Introduction (unlabeled)
  • Methods (includes sub-sections)
  • Results
  • Discussion/Conclusion
• Reference page
• Appendices (optional)

High-Level Style

The second level of APA style can be referred to as high-level style (covered in Chapter 3 “Writing Clearly and Concisely” of the Publication Manual), which includes guidelines for the clear expression of ideas. There are two important themes here. One is that APA-style writing is formal rather than informal. It adopts a tone that is appropriate for communicating with professional colleagues—other researchers and practitioners—who share an interest in the topic. Beyond this shared interest, however, these colleagues are not necessarily similar to the writer or to each other. A graduate student in British Columbia might be writing an article that will be read by a young psychotherapist in Syria and a respected professor of psychology in Tokyo. Thus formal writing avoids slang, contractions, pop culture references, humor, and other elements that would be acceptable in talking with a friend or in writing informally.

The second theme of high-level APA style is that it is straightforward. This means that it communicates ideas as simply and clearly as possible, putting the focus on the ideas themselves and not on how they are communicated. Thus APA-style writing minimizes literary devices such as metaphor, imagery, irony, suspense, and so on. Again, humor is kept to a minimum. Sentences are short and direct. Technical terms must be used, but they are used to improve communication, not simply to make the writing sound more “scientific.” For example, if participants immersed their hands in a bucket of ice water, it is better just to write this than to write that they “were subjected to a pain-inducement apparatus.”

APA Style and the Values of Psychology

Robert Madigan and his colleagues have argued that APA style has a purpose that often goes unrecognized (Madigan et al., 1995). Specifically, it promotes psychologists’ scientific values and assumptions. From this perspective, many features of APA style that at first seem arbitrary actually make good sense. Following are several features of APA-style writing and the scientific values or assumptions they reflect.

APA style feature	Scientific value or assumption
There are very few direct quotations of other researchers.	The phenomena and theories of psychology are objective and do not depend on the specific words a particular researcher used to describe them.
Criticisms are directed at other researchers’ work but not at them personally.	The focus of scientific research is on drawing general conclusions about the world, not on the personalities of particular researchers.
There are many references and reference citations.	Scientific research is a large-scale collaboration among many researchers.
Empirical research reports are organized with specific sections in a fixed order.	There is an ideal approach to conducting empirical research in psychology (even if this ideal is not always achieved in actual research).
Researchers tend to “hedge” their conclusions, e.g., “The results suggest that…”	Scientific knowledge is tentative and always subject to revision based on new empirical results.

Another important element of high-level APA style is the avoidance of language that is biased against particular groups. This is not only to avoid offending people—why would you want to offend people who are interested in your work?—but also for the sake of scientific objectivity and accuracy. For example, the term sexual orientation should be used instead of sexual preference because people do not generally experience their orientation as a “preference,” nor is it as easily changeable as this term suggests (APA Committee on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Concerns Joint Task Force on Guidelines for Psychotherapy With Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Clients, 2000).

The general principles for avoiding biased language are fairly simple. First, be sensitive to labels by avoiding terms that are offensive or have negative connotations. This includes avoiding terms that identify people with a disorder or other problem they happen to have. Instead, refer to the individual, what the APA Publication Manual refers to as putting the “person first.” For example, people diagnosed with schizophrenia is better than schizophrenics. Second, use more specific terms rather than more general ones. For example, Chinese Americans is better than Asian Americans if everyone in the group is, in fact, Chinese American. Third, avoid objectifying research participants. Instead, acknowledge their active contribution to the research. For example, “The students completed the questionnaire” is better than “The subjects were administered the questionnaire.” Note that this principle also makes for clearer, more engaging writing. Table \(\PageIndex{1}\) shows several more examples that follow these general principles. For more information, the APA created the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: Inclusive Language Guide (APA, 2023), with an introductory page to identify additions in the second edition (Akbar, 2022) that links to the new guide.

Table \(\PageIndex{1}\): Examples of Avoiding Biased Language

Instead of…	Use…
man, men	men and women, or people
firemen	firefighters
homosexuals, gays, bisexuals	lesbians, gay men, bisexual men, or bisexual women
minority	specific group label (e.g., African American)
neurotics	people scoring high in neuroticism
special children	children with learning disabilities

Low-Level Style

The third level of APA style can be referred to as low-level style (which is covered in Chapter 4 “The Mechanics of Style” through Chapter 7 “Reference Examples” of the Publication Manual). Low-level style includes all the specific guidelines pertaining to spelling, grammar, references and reference citations, numbers and statistics, figures and tables, and so on. Much of the rest of this chapter will focus on these formatting issues.

There are so many low-level guidelines that even experienced professionals need to consult the Publication Manual from time to time. Table \(\PageIndex{2}\) contains some of the most common types of APA style errors based on an analysis of manuscripts submitted to one professional journal over a 6-year period (Onwuegbuzie, et al., 2010). These errors were committed by professional researchers but are probably similar to those that students commit the most too.

Table \(\PageIndex{2}\): Top 10 APA Style Errors

Error type	Example
1. Use of numbers	Failing to use numerals for 10 and above
2. Hyphenation	Failing to hyphenate compound adjectives that precede a noun (e.g., “role playing technique” should be “role-playing technique”)
3. Use of et al.	Failing to use it after a reference is cited for the first time
4. Headings	Not capitalizing headings correctly
5. Use of since	Using since to mean because
6. Tables and figures	Not formatting them in APA style; repeating information that is already given in the text
7. Use of commas	Failing to use a comma before and or or in a series of three or more elements
8. Use of abbreviations	Failing to spell out a term completely before introducing an abbreviation for it
9. Spacing	Not consistently double-spacing between lines
10. Use of “&” in references	Using & in the text or and in parentheses

This chapter is a resource for learning about APA Style, and how to write and format your reporting based on these guidelines. The last section of the chapter (Summary and APA Style Resources) provides additional resources from the APA and others to help!

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References

Akbar, M. (2022). Three key things you should know about APA’s new inclusive language guidelines. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/inclus...age-guidelines

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

American Psychological Association. (2023). Inclusive language guide (2nd ed.). https://pages.apa.org/edi-guidelines/ or https://www.apa.org/about/apa/equity-diversity-inclusion/language-guidelines.pdf

American Psychological Association, Committee on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Concerns Joint Task Force on Guidelines for Psychotherapy With Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Clients. (2000). Guidelines for psychotherapy with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/guidelines

Bentley, M., Peerenboom, C. A., Hodge, F. W., Passano, E. B., Warren, H. C., & Washburn, M. F. (1929). Instructions in regard to preparation of manuscript. Psychological Bulletin, 26, 57–63.

Madigan, R., Johnson, S., & Linton, P. (1995). The language of psychology: APA style as epistemology. American Psychologist, 50, 428–436.

Onwuegbuzie, A. J., Combs, J. P., Slate, J. R., & Frels, R. K. (2010). Editorial: Evidence-based guidelines for avoiding the most common APA errors in journal article submissions. Research in the Schools, 16, ix–xxxvi.