When looking at academic styles, we often focus on citation, but there is much more to style.
Style, in the context of composition, refers to just about everything that goes into writing. This includes concepts as broad as structure all the way down to the smallest bits of punctuation.
Students often ask why we can’t just use the same academic style when writing for all college courses. While this would be ideal, the reason is fairly simple: Academic styles are designed with specific academic areas in mind.
The style guide created by the American Psychological Association (APA) that works well in many academic areas has some guidelines that just don’t work well when studying something like literature. In the same fashion, the style guide created by the Modern Language Association (MLA) is particularly suited for writing about literature and languages. However, it is not well suited for completing research in the “hard” sciences.
Many attempts to create style guides that work for all academic areas have been developed. Perhaps the most popular has been Chicago style, which was created by, and for, the universities in the Chicago, Illinois area. However, APA and MLA largely took-over American colleges and universities when Chicago style was slow to adapt to computer word processing in the early 1990’s.
After you have learned one academic style, learning another is a matter of noting the differences. Very few people have an academic style memorized, especially when it comes to citation. The key is to know the basics and look up the rest. A handbook, like this one, can guide you, but you must know how to use it.
In this section you will learn:
- How to use a style guide to locate specific examples of citation
- How to apply the basics of an academic style to your writing
- The importance of citation
- The two-part process of in-text citation and Works Cited or refer- ences entries
How to use a style guide
A tool is only as effective as the person using it. This is just as true for a style guide as it is for a hammer.
First, be sure to identify which academic style you need to use. Often, your instructor will dictate this.
Next, determine what information you are looking for.
In this handbook, each of the academic styles included starts with an overall style guide. Use this for answers on things like grammar and punctuation specific to the academic style you are using.
Next is a chapter on format. This will help you with specific guidelines for setting up a document.
The next two chapters cover citation. In-text citation includes specific rules for giving proper credit to sources for material used in your written work. The Works Cited (MLA style) or references list (APA style) entries are used to give the full citation for a source so a reader can locate it.
Each beginning of the citation section has a table of contents. The key, then, is to identify where your citation appears (in-text or end list). Then identify what type of publication you are trying to cite and use the table of contents to locate the entry for that type of source.
Often you will need to mix-and-match entries to develop the correct citation. For example, to create the APA style reference entry for a journal article with 10 authors that was found in a database, you will need to look-up how to cite multiple authors in a references entry and how to cite an article from a database.
