Concise Rules Of APA Style (Concise Rules of the American Psychological Association (APA) Style) (Spiral-bound)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The Concise Rules of APA Style offers essential writing and formatting standards for students, teachers, researchers, and clinicians in the social and behavioral sciences. This easy-to-use pocket guide, compiled from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, provides complete guidance on the rules of style that are critical for clear communication. Readers will learn how to avoid the grammatical errors most commonly reported by journal editors; how to choose the appropriate format for statistics, figures, and tables; how to credit sources and avoid charges of plagiarism; and how to construct a reference list through a wide variety of examples and sources.

How does the Concise Rules differ from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association? The Publication Manual remains the best source for broad background information about scientific publishing. It provides guidance on designing research, identifying the parts of a scholarly article, understanding the process of journal publication, and submitting articles for publication. The Concise Rules, by comparison, targets only those rules writers need for choosing the best words and format for their articles. It offers a comprehensive list of essential writing standards in a convenient, easily retrievable format.

In addition to guidance on grammar points that have challenged writers in the social sciences, the Concise Rules provides suggestions for reducing bias in language; reviews the mechanics of style for punctuation, spelling, capitalization, abbreviation, italicization, headings, and quotations; examines the preferred use of numbers as well as standards for metrication and statistics; provides guidance for the construction and formatting of tables, figures, and appendixes; and offers clear examples and models for referencing ideas and constructing error-free reference lists.

Available in a light-weight, spiral-bound format, the Concise Rules will travel easily from home to school to office.

Product Details

• Spiral-bound: 212 pages
• Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA) (March 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591472520
• ISBN-13: 978-1591472520
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #20,468 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

84 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Incomplete, October 10, 2005

By	Christopher D. Applegate (MI, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There's no rules for title pages, no examples of manuscript pages, no rules for pagination. It doesn't even tell you if the reference list belongs on a separate page or what its heading looks like. I consider these glaring omissions, particularly if you are expected to use pure APA and have no departmental style guide (like me). This book is basically a glorified guide to citation and syntactic rules. Avoid it and pay the extra five bucks for the complete book. Getting the cheap book as some kind of protest won't signficantly hurt the APA and it will just make things harder for you.

39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book, lacking in visual references, October 3, 2005

By	S. Thomas (Westminster, MD, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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While this is a great condensation of the main rules needed to write in APA style, this book lacks one major thing -- the practical examples of how to apply APA style in a document or manuscript.

The book would be greatly enhanced if in future editions the editors added the examples that are found in the full APA guidelines handbook.

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a supplement, not a primary resource, August 30, 2006

By	Zoey McWilliamson (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews

Hopefully this statement will help those of you who are trying to decide what to buy: If you do not own a full copy of the APA Publication Manual, then do not buy this book. This book is meant to be a pocket-sized reference guide that you can carry with you. It is meant as a supplement, but it is not the primary resource -- the APA Publication Manual is the primary resource.

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, here is my review: This book may have omitted a few things that I would have preferred they left in (you won't know what you need until you need it). But by and large they did a good job of condensing a large book into a pocket guide.