More APA Resources (headings)

In an earlier post I asked you to provide comments with advice and words of wisdom for our new ALOP students. There's one piece of advice so far and it's about the importance of learning/using APA. Of course I agree with that :-) and I want to remind you we had an earlier post with some great APA resources.

(By the way--why is there just one piece of advice for Elisia and Jason and the rest of the new ALOP students? Surely there are more tips you can pass along...share your wisdom!)

Back to APA: In my experience, one of the toughest things for students to wrap their brains around is how to use and format subheadings in papers. The purpose of subheadings is to organize your paper into "chunks" to make it easier for the reader to follow along and grasp what you're writing.

Think of the papers and books that you've read: it's likely that whatever it was did not contain one giant section...more likely, it was broken down into chapters, sections and maybe even subsections under that, which gave an organization or structure to the writing that made it easier for you to follow along with the author. What's the right number of sections? There's no definitive answer for that question...it's whatever makes sense for that paper and what will make it easier for the reader. What's the best way to format headings? There IS a definitively correct answer for that...and the answer is explained in sections 3.31 and 3.32 in the APA manual. (APA is like the I Ching...if you look hard enough you can probably find the answer to all of life's questions in the APA manual! :-)

Here's comes a tip...not only is formatting headings in APA sometimes tricky for students; but it's also one of my pet peeves when it's not done right (after the second time, or third, or fourth, or fifth, or sixth, or seventh....well you get the idea). Seriously, if you take a little time to understand it, it will be easy for you after that.

So here are a couple additional APA resources for you:

• The first is a little powerpoint tutorial I put together. It describes how to format headings in APA and walks you through sections 3.31 and 3.32 of the APA manual. Beware...it launches automatically and has sound, so you'll want to know where your volume control is before you start (or wear headphones!)
  
  Besides the APA information, I think this tutorial is a good example of two other things: (1) how you can put together a little online tutorial pretty quickly if you just want to lecture with some powerpoint slides to create a brief learning situation that students can continue to access and, (2) that this is probably not the most compelling bit of learning you'll ever experience (nor is the narration "flawless" when you do it without a script and just talk off the top of your head!) But it reminds us of the tradeoff we always face in training and other performance improvement interventions: that balance between optimal learning/engagement and speed/getting it done. There are advantages and disadvantages of tipping too far to one side and in tipping too far to the other side of that balance. Anyway...consider taking a look at the tutorial if you need to brush up on your APA heading formatting.
  
  
• If you want to skip the tutorial and the APA manual, here's a great website that let's you click on the number of heading levels you have in your paper, and it will show you how to correctly format the headings.
  
  
• And, of course, you can always ask me or any of the faculty any of your APA formatting questions!