Teaching students to write in APA format

[Sam_Rabbit]

Hello to all,

Do you have a specific course that addresses how to write correctly in APA 7th edition format or do students just learn it by trial and error throughout the curriculum? Do you offer any type of handouts or "writing bootcamp" during orientation? Finally, do you have any apps that you recommend to students to help them with APA formatting?

Thank you in advance for your responses!

[adventure_rn, MSN, NP]

D*mn, it's heating up in the citation management forums ?.

In all seriousness, though, I think that programs should briefly touch on APA and then recommend citation managers and trusted references like Purdue Owl.

I did my BA and BSN 10 years ago back when APA was hand-formatted, and I'm getting my NP degree at a well-respected school now. During orientation, the school had our research librarian explain how to use a free citation manager app. They have a lot of great benefits; not only can you insert references and bibliographies with a single click, but you can store and organize your journal articles and make annotations on the articles within the software. They can also easily flip back and forth between different formats (APA, AMA, MLA).

I think the absolute best thing that nursing schools can teach nurses is how to be wise, thoughtful consumers of technology that can make them more productive (in writing and in clinical practice). Now that we have the technology for citation managers, students' time is better spent learning how to compose a strong paper than memorizing where parentheses go or what section should be italicized.

Students should know enough to be able to check that the citation manager correctly cited the article, but that's not the focus. Learners these days are internet savvy--if you can give the the links to a trusted reference site (like Purdue Owl), between that and Google they'll figure it out. For what it's worth, I'm writing a paper for publication, and just yesterday I googled "how to cite the CDC in APA" to find the answer.  

[lars, BSN]

Oh jeez....I shudder to ask, just what is the 'APA' format? Yet another new demand from the government to add extra needless, redundant, and downright stupid paper work to make our job even more impossible? Or some way to torture nursing students to footnote rationales for all those care plans they will never use on the job and never have time to implement because of all the other impossible demands that are heaped on us from government hyper-regulation. In either case, sounds like a colossal waste f time to me. 

[JKL33]

lars said:

Oh jeez....I shudder to ask, just what is the 'APA' format? Yet another new demand from the government to add extra needless, redundant, and downright stupid paper work to make our job even more impossible? Or some way to torture nursing students to footnote rationales for all those care plans they will never use on the job and never have time to implement because of all the other impossible demands that are heaped on us from government hyper-regulation. In either case, sounds like a colossal waste f time to me. 

No.

It is a formatting style for the writing of formal papers.

Quote

This formatting style, developed in 1929 by the American Psychological Association (APA), is most widely used in writing academic papers in different fields, especially the social sciences.

https://apaformat.org/apa-format-overview/

There is nothing wrong with having style, organization and citation guidelines. There are others besides APA, some have been mentioned earlier in the thread.

[2BS Nurse, BSN]

We were given Purdue Owl as a reference, then sent to a "writing lab" within the school for help. You could set up a time and someone would go over your paper, check for grammatical errors, etc. Later on, when I had to write a paper, I'd watch a very brief YouTube video for a refresher. The citation generators available online today are AMAZING!

[2BS Nurse, BSN]

"Think about those of us who didn't have a computer word programs. We had to retype every version (one typewriter) ...but we were fully engrossed in our study, methodology, results and conclusions"

Those days of writing out a nutrition analysis by hand... ugh! No apps like Calorie King to keep track of what you ate!

It's my conclusion that our instructors were so nit-picky about grammar, punctuation, rounding to the millionth decimal place, etc, etc, because they were teaching us to pay attention to the details. Unfortunately, our jobs do not always allow the time to do so.