What's "In Style" for Academia?

Okay, time for academic info.

For some of you this will be a review and for others who are anticipating writing a thesis or as some call it dissertation, this will be new. For all, it will be a helpful resource.

So, what is a dissertation? Simply put, a  student (author) presents a document that explains all of his/her research and findings. This document supports his/her application for a degree. And how do we begin our dissertation? Start by understanding your assignment, then think about research.

Before you begin your research, ask yourself these kinds of questions.

What do I want to be my great discovery?

How will I go about discovering it?

What types of people am I going to observe, speak to or survey?

How do I get to them?

How do I feel about this topic?

How do I keep my biases out of my research methods?

What are my expectations in terms of discovery?

Stay with me now; this is good stuff. So, after you’ve answered these questions then start you primary research. Chill out, don’t panic…easy definition. Primary research is just research that you go out and collect yourself. You know… interviews, surveys, observations, ethnographic research. See, just a logical approach. In addition to primary research, there is also secondary research (journals, magazines, books, etc). It is better to use both of them.

So after you have collected everything, you analyze it. Well done! Now how do you start you paper? Here are the steps:

Research

Outline

Draft

Revise

Edit

Proofread

Then you format it according to style.

For each discipline (arts, humanities, social sciences, psychology, etc) there is a specific way to format (arrange your paper). They call that "style" and they use specific styles so that readers have a familiar structure to help understand text. It helps them to follow ideas and locate information that interests them. Each discipline has a style manual. What is a style manual?

It is basically a handbook that shows you step by step the accepted format for citing (quoting someone or something that supports you argument or idea) references (source of information) in your document.

Still with me...?     Good, I’ll go on. There are almost as many style guides as there are disciplines, but I’m going to list the ones that are used by academicians.

AAA (American Anthropological Association)

APA (American Psychological Association)

ASA (American Sociological Association)

CBE (Council of Biological Editors)

Chicago Style

MLA (Modern Language Association)

Turabian

Harvard

In future journals, we’ll discuss each style guide and all their little differences. But don’t panic, you don't have to know them all. At least you guys just need to know the one that applies to you. I, however have to edit this stuff. So, let’s start with the APA style.

The American Psychological Association (5^th Edition) style is used for Social Sciences, such as Psychology, Linguistics, Sociology, Economics, Business, Nursing and Criminology. It sets standards for (1)organizing content, (2)writing style, (3)citing reference, and (4)how to prepare a manuscript for publication. It also spells out the names and order of headings, the formatting and organization of citations and references and the correct way to arrange tables (information in columns), figures (numbers or symbols), footnotes (information at the foot of a page) and appendices (additional information).

It uses Harvard Referencing or the author-date system of citations and parenthetical referencing which looks like this:

Smith, John. (2005). Playing nicely together. St. Petersburg, FL (USA)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_referencing

If you find the stylebook a little difficult, the internet has simplified a lot of the information. I found a link that will show you very specific steps in citing and documenting sources http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite6.html

I also really like Owl Perdue’s writing lab. I think it has a simple approach to explaining APA formatting; take a look http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/08/

Now some of you get confused about headings, so I’ll try to break it down for you.

Headings are used to give articles a formal, ranked order. Okay we are going to refer to the words superordinate and subordinate. Just substitute the words superordinate with higher rank and subordinate with lower rank. Here we go. This info is directly quoted from Wikipedia. It helps if you read it out loud and very slowly.

According to APA style, if an article has:

• One level: use Level 1 headings
• Two levels: use Level 1 (superordinate) and Level 3 (subordinate) headings
• Three levels: use Level 1, Level 3 and Level 4 (from superordinate to subordinate)
• Four levels: use Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 and Level 4 (from superordinate to subordinate)
• Five levels: use Level 5, Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 and Level 4

Now remember, you can’t use numbers or letters for headings and there are no guidelines for more than five headings. The following is the way the levels should be typed: (Also directly quoted from Wikipedia).

• Level 5: CENTERED UPPERCASE HEADING
• Level 1: Centered Uppercase and Lowercase Heading
• Level 2: Centered, Italicized, Uppercase and Lowercase Heading
• Level 3: Flush Left, Italicized, Uppercase and Lowercase Side Heading
• Level 4: Indented, italicized, lowercase paragraph heading ending with a period.

Here is a sample paper for our visual learners: http://depts.gallaudet.edu/englishworks/writing/apa_sample.html

The headings are level 1, but you get the idea. (example: What AD(H)D Is)

That’s it, guys. Good job. You stayed awake.

Had the greatest follow-up interview with Mrs. Berry (Death by Peanut) and can’t wait to post on the next journal. You are not going to believe what I was told.

See you soon,