Teaching students to write in APA format

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. 

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.

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!

"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.