Product Description

The Concise Rules of APA Style, Sixth Edition 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 sixth edition of 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.

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 on the construction and formatting of tables, figures, and appendixes; and offers clear examples and models for citing sources and constructing error-free reference lists.

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 detailed guidance on publication ethics, journal article reporting standards, and the process of journal 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.

Available in a light-weight, spiral-bound format, the Concise Rules will travel easily from home to school to office. It will be an invaluable reference tool for all social science scholars who are serious about communicating clearly and effectively.

Key to this edition is an updated and expanded APA Style website, with many additional resources to help readers learn APA style, including free tutorials, on-line courses, frequently asked questions, sample papers, and the APA Style blog.

The sixth edition of Concise Rules has been revised and updated to include

-simplified APA heading style to make it more conducive to electronic publication;
-updated guidelines for reducing bias in language to reflect current practices and preferences, including a new section on presenting historical language that is inappropriate by present standards;
-new guidelines for reporting inferential statistics and a significantly revised table of statistical abbreviations;
-a new discussion on the use of online supplemental materials, including lengthy data sets and other media, to enrich the published article;
-significantly expanded content on the electronic presentation of data to help readers understand the purpose of each kind of display and choose the best match for communicating the results of the investigation, with new examples for a variety of data displays, including electrophysiological and biological data;
-an expanded discussion of electronic sources, emphasizing the role of the digital object identifier (DOI) as a reliable way to locate information; and
-a wealth of new reference examples, with a focus on new electronic formats.

New and experienced readers alike will find the sixth edition a complete resource for writing with clarity and precision.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1986 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 280 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781433805608
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Customer Reviews

Incomplete
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.

Good book, lacking in visual references
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.

This is a supplement, not a primary resource
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.