Thoughts to Consider When Writing the Graduate Student Manifesto

I can certainly sympathize with people’s feelings about APA.  Students have heard me make jokes about APA and complain about having to learn (and relearn) rules that sometimes seem abstract. My personal learning/thinking style (the same synapses used for determining how to count-off students when forming small groups students) makes retaining and applying APA rules a challenge for me, as I am sure it does for others as well. While Meloni does a great job in her original blog post pointing out some of the seemingly illogical rules APA develops (usually dealing with citation issues and punctuation), a few points about writing manuals should be pointed while drafting the manifesto.

First, APA is more than just rules about citation and punctuation.  Within the pages of manual are formal rules about sexist, racist, and discriminatory language (APA refers to as “Reducing Bias by Topic”). Why can’t we all just agree not to use sexist, racist, and discriminatory language?  Because we all have different beliefs and opinions about them!  Having a manual that provides recommendations for proper language use helps establish boundaries for acceptable word use.  For example (a bit crude but I want to make a point), let’s say I write a manuscript and use the word ‘retarded’ through out. A reviewer, journal editor, or faculty member can say that this term is inappropriate, degrading, or out-dated.  However, I can just as easily turn around and argue that he/she is just being politically correct, overly sensitive, and restrictive over language use. What develops is a back-and-fourth about a word choice and not about the content of my manuscript/paper.  With APA in hand, anyone of these people can simply tell me that using ‘retard’ is biased and to follow APA.  The same is true for terms dealing with gender, sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age.  In this way APA helps establish standards across disciplines.  One reason the APA manual has grown so much in recent years is that APA has decided to make a stand on these types of issues.  

Second, APA (and each of the other manuals) provides established rules for adding structure to manuscripts, papers, and exams.  For many writers, experienced and otherwise, structure is necessary for their craft.  Let me share a personal example.  At one stage of writing my dissertation I had spent several weeks writing about 100 pages of analysis.  I shared this with an experienced writer who spent about 4 hours reading each and every word. The feedback I received was, ‘well you have something here but it is impossible to tell what.” This was difficult to hear.  But the next piece of feedback helped me understand what it was like for the reader to work through my document. “This is all over the place, you raise ideas in one part and raise it again 50 pages later, in other sections you introduce an idea but don’t actually address it until you have raised 2-3 other ideas. You are making it difficult for the reader and yourself.” My initial thought was that the reader just needed to figure this out for him or herself, and that I knew what I was writing. But this was bad thinking on my part. 

Reading an unstructured rambling pile of thoughts and ideas is frustrating and painful. It is the author’s job to write in ways that make it easy for the reader to understand.  None of us are Kerouac and writing novels is not our craft, at least not in this program. Our goal as writers should be to produce writing that is as organized and precise as possible.  This requires that we identify our topic and provide headings for each major idea and the various parts of the research agenda. What my paper needed was the type of structure that headings and subheadings provide, and that organize data analysis and arguments. Once I added these and moved every piece of writing to its proper place, my dissertation started coming together.  This problem existed because I did not use proper APA. 

From my experience, the writing of many graduate students suffers from the same lack of organization and structure. Once the basic tenets of APA are understood, it actually liberates writers.  Requiring that students use APA helps them to develop the structure they need to produce scholarly work, although they sometimes feel that faculty are simply hung up on some minor detail.  

The third point has to deal with APA citation and the seemingly overbearing emphasis we (peer reviewed journals, faculty, and the profession as a whole) place on it.   A starting place for thinking about citations is giving proper credit to those whose ideas we use to develop the arguments we make while writing.  But it is more than that. When we write an introduction to a manuscript we are developing an argument, largely based in the existing research.  The strength of our argument is derived partially from whose work we use and how we integrate it into our arguments.  The ability of readers (this applies especially to faculty and reviewers who often have to interpret what the manuscript is attempting to achieve) to follow a person’s writing is connected to being able to follow the author’s use of previous work. In this sense citations are road maps. Anyone who has driven in an unfamiliar city while needing to also read a map to determine which exit to use knows that trying to figure out new signs and symbols at this particular moment is a terrible idea.  And yet, that is very similar to what bad citations are…new signs and symbols that distract the reader and require he/she to spend time figuring out what the author really meant.  As people who may need to read 10-20 papers, many faculty members (myself included) and manuscript reviewers find these distractions interfere with their ability to actually focus on what the student is trying to argue in their paper.  Improper citations are a distraction. The use of incorrect citations, like the non-use of headings, makes reading a paper much more difficult for the reader.  

Do faculty and journal editors make a big deal out of proper in-text citations.  You bet! It is insulting if an instructor has discussed APA in class and students continue to make easily correctable mistakes.  Journal editors will often send back a manuscript with too many messed-up citations without ever sending it out for review. It is equivalent to submitting a paper with 2 inch margins and 24-size font.  

A final thought.  Part of graduate education is about socialization to the profession and instilling normative practices. If/when you decide to submit something for publication in a peer reviewed journal, you will need to follow basic APA guidelines (or those from another manual).  The general rules can be learned in 1-2 hours. Yes, you may need to relearn some new rules whenever the next version comes out (hopefully not for another decade). But the chances are good that as a professional, you will need to constantly be learning new rules and regulations, many which will seem arbitrary.  I am certainly not going to carry water for APA (I still want a refund for the last edition I bought) but hopefully I have pointed out a few reasons why instructors require students’ become proficient with it. I want to thank Meloni for raising the APA issue and getting me thinking about it again.