The language of psychology: APA style as epistemology.

Abstract

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (4th ed., APA, 1994 I t might be argued that all American psychologists, regardless of specialty, share at least two common educational experiences: a course in statistics and exposure to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. "APA style" (e.g., Gelfand & Walker, 1990a) has come to refer to this well-developed system of writing conventions that includes information on how to organize empirical reports, how to reference published works, and how to solve dozens of other technical problems that arise in the preparation of a manuscript. But the use of APA style has spread far beyond settings in which manuscripts are readied for publication. Psychology curricula typically require that competence in APA style be demonstrated in class papers, theses, and dissertations. Indeed, the use of APA style has become common even in disciplines outside psychology, such as education and nursing. Contemporary English composition textbooks (e.g., Hacker, 1992) present APA style as an established standard on a par with the venerable "MLA style" (Achtert & Gibaldi, 1985).Although fully appreciating its ubiquitous presence in the discipline, we argue in this article that APA style plays an even greater role in psychology than it might appear. We propose that APA style is not just a collection of arbitrary stylistic conventions but also encapsulates the core values and epistemology of the discipline. APA style is itself a model for thinking about psychological phenomena and serves as an important socialization experience for psychologists. We show in this article that the subtleties of APA style make its mastery a challenging task that is frequently underestimated by both students and professors. APA Style as a Writing GenreAlthough familiarity with APA style prose makes it seem unremarkable, it is nonetheless a specialized genre of writing that differs in many ways from writing found in other disciplines. Figure 1 shows a comparison of features of academic writing drawn from scholarly journals in literary criticism, history, and two areas of psychology. We obtained these data by examining the first 25 articles published in 1992 in representative journals of each discipline.Although these textual differences may seem minor, they have major rhetorical consequences that give each discipline its own characteristic voice. Subheadings are not common in literary criticism and history but are widely used in psychology. By announcing the next major topic, subheadings reduce the need for authors to incorporate transitional passages to connect major sections. When subheadings are standardized, as in most psychology journals, the organizational structure they impose contributes to the communication between writer and reader by creating specific expectations about forthcoming information. The extensive use of discursive footnotes in disciplines such as literary criticism and history has the effect of establishing a second, parallel text that the author can ...

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