My #1 APA Resource

Hey Hey fellow classmates!

This past spring I was in the Academic Upgrading program here at GBC and had a chance to get my feet wet with APA citation while working on a research paper. This is the website I used as a reference for most of my citation.

OWL @ Purdue Online Writing Lab

This website gives a very good breakdown of how to properly cite sources according to the APA. The order you put the quote & surrounding information IS important so what I did was write my whole project and then read it over while browsing the website to make sure I had everything cited properly.

There are a few tricky citation rules if you're quoting without knowing the author of a study or certain quotes from websites ect. I attended a workshop on tricky citation and will summarize my notes for the forum sometime soon. For everyone who is working on the APA assignment or any paper in the future my advice is to be diligent and take accurate notes of your sources DURING ALL OF YOUR RESEARCH. Don't wait to find out if you'll actually use a source in your paper, if it's relevant information get what you would need to cite it. It's better to reduce down from too much information than to have to go searching for books, pages numbers and specific pages on the internet because you forgot to write them down. Try to get the following information:

Books: author(s), title, year of publication, page number

Online: author or organization, article title, year of publication, full web address

Personal Communication (e-mails, surveys, interviews ect.): Date(s) of discussion, name of participants

---------------

Quoting, Paraphrasing & Summarizing

In the world of APA citation it is important to learn the difference between the three of these because they require somewhat different citation rules as well as different styles of writing. If you're confused about these, that same website has some guides and Google can provide other great resources, you can always go to the Peer Learning Center.

That's it for now, have a great weekend!

Adam-Cole

p.s. it's still not too late to join the Cross Country Team!

Very good recommendation (though spelled incorrectly). It is my #1 resource too.

Thank you very much for the link ! It helped me tons

When citing this website it required many names including:

Angeli, E., Wagner, J., Lawrick, E., Moore, K., Anderson, M., Soderlund, L., & Brizee, A. (2010, May 5)

With all the names, it causes the paper to look slightly sloppy, especially if you reference their information more than once. Just checking, this is still the right way to do it right? All the names and the year?

Jos,

It depends how many authors there are, there are slightly different rules for 1 author, 2 authors, 3-5 authors and 6 or more authors. But, don't panic because it's not super complicated if you read the rules slowly.

For your specific question you do not need to mention all the authors. You only need cite the first author and then add "et al., (publication date)" afterwards. So for your example an in-text citation could look like this:

"APA is super awesome!" (Angeli et al., 2010, para. 5)

But it's important to remember, if you want to make your paper read smoothly you can cite your sources in your lead-in sentence which would look like this:

Angeli et al. (2010) make the argument that APA style is super awesome.

It's all about which style fits best with your current sentence/paragraph/writing style. Mix it up, see what you like best.

Hope that helps.

-------------

I got my information from:

Paiz, J., Angeli, E., Wagner, J., Lawrick, E., Moore, K., Anderson, M., . . . Keck, R. (2011 October 28) OWL Purdue Online Writing Lab. Retrieved from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/03/