Throughout my doctoral program and all during the years that I taught at the University of Louisian
a at Lafayette, there was one book always by my side: the APA (American Psychological Association) Publication Manual. I remember the fourth volume when I first started out in my graduate program—a thick (too thick I often thought) brown book of rules and regulations on exactly how to write and format a paper for the social sciences (that included Communication). Sometime during the 14 years I spent at UL-Lafayette, the fifth volume of the Publication Manual came out. It had a cover with a snappy grey, black and red design (see example), and my copy quickly became dog-eared as I used it constantly to check formatting and stylistic questions for my many research articles, and also in teaching my students how to write a proper research paper.
Now
--drum roll--the brand new APA Publication Manual is out. It has a beautiful blue cover as you can see. I, however, will not be buying this sixth volume, not because I no longer need it to write papers or teach classes (which I don't--hurray for retirement!). No, I won’t be buying it because the new volume is evidently so rife with stylistic and formatting ERRORS that the APA has had to recall it. In their defense, the APA is promising to replace the faulty manual for any purchasers who contact them between November 2 and December 15.
If you think this is all a tempest in a teapot, imagine a newly released dictionary with a massive number of misspelled words. Imagine a popular cookbook with incorrect ingredients or amounts listed in many of the recipes. We wonder why students can’t write. Well, maybe part of it has to do with the fact that the people who write the writing manuals can’t write themselves.
If you’re interested in reading about the flap over the new APA Publication Manual, check out Jennifer Howard’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
a at Lafayette, there was one book always by my side: the APA (American Psychological Association) Publication Manual. I remember the fourth volume when I first started out in my graduate program—a thick (too thick I often thought) brown book of rules and regulations on exactly how to write and format a paper for the social sciences (that included Communication). Sometime during the 14 years I spent at UL-Lafayette, the fifth volume of the Publication Manual came out. It had a cover with a snappy grey, black and red design (see example), and my copy quickly became dog-eared as I used it constantly to check formatting and stylistic questions for my many research articles, and also in teaching my students how to write a proper research paper.Now
--drum roll--the brand new APA Publication Manual is out. It has a beautiful blue cover as you can see. I, however, will not be buying this sixth volume, not because I no longer need it to write papers or teach classes (which I don't--hurray for retirement!). No, I won’t be buying it because the new volume is evidently so rife with stylistic and formatting ERRORS that the APA has had to recall it. In their defense, the APA is promising to replace the faulty manual for any purchasers who contact them between November 2 and December 15.If you think this is all a tempest in a teapot, imagine a newly released dictionary with a massive number of misspelled words. Imagine a popular cookbook with incorrect ingredients or amounts listed in many of the recipes. We wonder why students can’t write. Well, maybe part of it has to do with the fact that the people who write the writing manuals can’t write themselves.
If you’re interested in reading about the flap over the new APA Publication Manual, check out Jennifer Howard’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Any thoughts, readers, about the APA's new Publication Manual?
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1 comments:
Ouch! That has to hurt. During my editing days (daze) I kept a style notebook. We had some quirks in our style that related to the technology that we dealt with. The New Collegiate Dictionary was our main reference.
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