No doubt we have all been there: prepared our courses with the best of pedagogy and the noblest of content, with the deepest of thought and the highest of ideals. We enter seminar to be met by a barrage of questions, not about the noblest content, deepest thoughts, and highest ideals, but how many pages does the assignment really have to be, do we really have to use the library, can’t we just get everything off the Internet, and do you really double space with APA? The brilliance of idealistic preparation deflates in the shotgun blast of reality.
For many students there exists The Real World and then there is that strange place called Academia where they learn bizarre things like APA for which they see no relevance or application anywhere else in their known universe. Students dutifully memorize mantras about crediting sources and avoiding plagiarism mostly driven by cautionary tales to stay out of trouble. Deep down most of them know, and some will say out loud, “After I get out of school, I’m never going to use this again.”
Will students ever use APA again? Outside of graduate school, probably not. Are we then wasting our time? Are our hours spent painstakingly noting errors in manuscript formatting, in-text citations, and reference page faux pas an utter squandering of what few moments we have deemed on Earth? Absolutely not.
Why? Because at its core, the greatest value of APA has nothing to do with crediting sourcing and avoiding plagiarism. Its highest calling strikes far beyond Academia, and I argue, nay, I dare anyone to find anything in all of the halls of Academia, virtual or otherwise, that is more about the stuff of The Real World than APA documentation and formatting. How do I know? Because I am a veteran not only of Academia, but also of The Real World. I have managed a multi-million dollar budget, have hired, trained, and fired personnel, and have done all manner of everything related to Real World Business. APA is as Real World as it gets. Here is how. Here is what students need to understand, and here is what professors can explain to help students make those connections.
APA is About Learning to Apply a Format.
Any profession any student can imagine, from criminal justice to nursing to information technology to paralegal to transcriptionist or medical assistant or nursing, requires a plethora of formats. Some formats are simple, pre-set and easy to follow. Others come from the corporate headquarters, professional organizations, accrediting boards, or most daunting, federal agencies. Need I say more?
When I managed a medical practice, we had formats from Medicare, Medicaid, Department of Health and Human Services (HIPAA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC—CLIA regulations for labs), The College of American Pathologists (CAP), physician credentialing, separate processes and forms for the cytology and histology labs, entirely separate processes for administration—procedure forms and manuals, separate documentation formats for the information technology system, particularly backups, and separate documentation formats for risk assessment. That does not begin to address routine business processes for AR/AP, taxes, and auditing. Or the formats and processes for human resources, personnel, or employee health insurances. Then there were the contracts for physicians, other professional employees, service contracts for equipment, and so on. Certainly lawyers drafted many of the contracts, but it all required other documents in certain formats to track all the other documents to be sure everything was up-to-date and audited. We have not even started discussing the required protocols for the pathology reports themselves, which, if violated, could result not only in medical error and harm to the patient, but consequence to the practice. Formats matter. They matter greatly. They are everywhere.
What I discovered managing a business were distinct differences between employees who had a college education, particularly with a documentation system, and those who did not. Those who did have such a background were much better at picking up a new formatting system and applying with minimal to no error, the logic of the system. Those who did not have that background more frequently ignored obvious formatting requirements like margins, heading standards, indentations, and so on. In one stunning moment, I actually had a staff member say out loud, “Oh! This is just like documenting an essay, but with different rules!” Exactly.
What students need to understand is that they live in a world of formats, and all the more so in an ever more technological world. No matter where they go, what profession they seek, they will forever be awash in formats. The sooner they learn how to get inside the logic of a format and apply it correctly, the sooner they will be building a job skill valued by employers—even though those very employers may not be able to specifically articulate that value themselves. No, students may not use APA as a particular format, but they develop the skill of learning to use and apply a format.
APA is About Learning Attention to Detail.
All documentation systems, by necessity, are rife with detail. The very existence of a documentation system is to capture detail, to be about detail. Learning to pay attention to that detail is an obvious and critical skill, and students develop that skill in part when they learn to apply a documentation system like APA.
In The Real World, details can be measured in lives and dollars. Thousands become sick and many die every year because of medical errors, and those are most often missed details. Millions are lost in business or outright crimes are committed because someone was not paying attention to the details. Increasingly, institutions, systems, and individuals will need to be attuned to and accountable for details. An employee who is good with details is an accurate and a highly valued employee.
Unfortunately, when confronted with the details in APA, many students see them as meaningless gibberish. This is generally compounded by the failure of most APA instruction which does little more than describe what to do, but does not take the next step to explain the meaning or purpose behind the details, or even note that the details have substantive meaning or purpose. As I point out to students, the folks at APA did not sit around a grand table to see how many sneaky and nefarious ways they could come up with to torture the hapless student. When they decided, for example, to come up with a different format for volume, issue, and page numbers it is precisely so each one does look different. Not every source has all three pieces of information, and if a source has only one or two, the format tells us what that number represents without having excessive clutter of “vol.” or “issue” taking up space in longer research projects. Details are not random or irrational, but have meaning and purpose. Knowing that makes the system easier to learn as well as heightens student awareness that details matter.
APA is About Learning There are Few to No Shortcuts.
As soon as students see the massive details and all the rules of APA, the first strategy many try is templates and online shortcuts. In a technological world that is a reasonable approach. Or is it? To always default to a template or assume that there is a technological shortcut or assume that one can truncate the process is a dangerous assumption. In fact, to date, of the online automated citation tools or “machines” that I have tested, not one is accurate. One may have been developed unbeknownst to me that has managed to solve all the intricate what ifs and complexities of names, article titles, and the like, but I remain skeptical. (Likewise, the APA function in Word 2007 is riddled with errors.) For example, APA requires specific treatment with capitalization of titles, and that is rather complex coding—or at least not simple input-output of whatever has been pasted into the field of most online tools. The other notable problem with such tools is, as I term it, garbage in, garbage out. Students are too tempted to mindlessly drop data randomly into fields and assume that whatever comes out is magically “correct.” Have we not heard their protests? That they used such-and-such online, so it MUST be right! Oh, the befuddled student: what could the professor possibly be marking down on their citations? The used technology, the Internet, my goodness, what could have gone wrong?
The faulty assumption is that a given problem (all those rules and details of APA) has a quick fix and one does not really need to fully learn anything because Microsoft and the Internet— to the rescue!—have solved all the menial work of the world. Not so fast. My assurance to students is nothing yet has replaced the human brain. Theirs still has value and must be used. This, I remind them, is good news, because the computer has not yet entirely replaced them. (Context is everything, and students, by this point, have acclimated to my humor.)
Can they use something like Word 2007 to assist? Certainly, but as I point out, they still have to fully understand APA in order to know where the errors are and what they will need to correct the citations. By the time they have done all that, would it have not been simpler to have done it themselves, I ask? Students make different choices on this point, some preferring to correct the errors, others not trusting themselves to catch the myriad of inserted mistakes. Regardless, how they think about and use the technology has changed. The hard lesson is, in The Real World, one cannot delegate responsibility to a technological default, although some try. Thinking still rules.
APA is About Learning to Build Skills in Knowing Where/How to Look Up Details in a Systematized Format.
When confronting the monstrous whole of APA, many students become dismayed, overwhelmed thinking that they somehow have to learn it all. They need assurance that no sane person accomplishes the feat. Certainly they can and should learn the pattern of the basic format, and through repetition they will learn the most common citations as well as the basic manuscript form; however, as for all the details, the skill they need to build is knowing how to find one’s way quickly through a structured, hierarchical system such as APA reference handbooks or online reference tools. The logic of the organization is echoed in many professional disciplines from the law codes police and paralegals use to the billing and diagnostic coding systems in medicine to the tax codes faced by businesses and accountants—just to name a few examples.
Using a structured system that sets up logical relationships between the parts with logical fine-tuned differences, where the user has to carefully select and apply the correct portion in a given situation is frequently expected in professional settings. APA is excellent preparation for that kind of thinking skill. But is the skill transferable? In my observation, whether students realize it or not, it is. APA contributes to developing a particular type of thinking, a mindset, an approach. Students can best take advantage of this if they are directly told such and have the connections made overtly.
Yes, if students want Real World preparation in their college experience, there is nothing like a good old fashioned dose of APA documentation and manuscript formatting. APA formatting demands they follow an example, pay attention to details, follow all the steps, and understand how to use a structured system of reference material.
Students are right to expect practical application, to demand connections between their education and their future professions. What they may not expect is how close and how real those connections are. And here is the most delightful pay off: if APA is about The Real World, I posit, how many other Academic exercises might they have overlooked that are just as relevant to The Real World? Ah, yes. Welcome to The Real World. Academia is it.
Did you know…
That Christie Zgourides worked in the banking industry, and being the detail-oriented person that she is, became suspicious and collected evidence that the Portland police used to crack an Asian gang case that involved arson and insurance fraud? Now that’s using those APA skills! Christie is a Composition Professor in the School of Business and Management at Kaplan University.
[This article was originally published in our September, 2009 issue.]
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