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In reviewing Michael’s Writing Style paper for APA formatting, I found the most errors in citations and
references. Michael seemed to struggle with the proper ordering and formatting of references when
listing a citation containing a number of references. According to the Publication Manual of the
American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition (APA Manual), multiple works in a citation should be
listed alphabetically by author, and individual references should be separated by a semicolon (p. 178).
Michael also located a number of citations improperly as the APA Manual indicates the citation should
be at the end of the sentence or phrase cited (p. 174). Michael also made a number of errors in the
reference list. The majority of those reference list errors were in capitalization or italicization of titles
(APA Manual, pp. 101, 202).

Michael made a number of redundancy errors in the text. The APA Manual states that language should
be precise and wordiness should be avoided (p. 67). In one instance, Michael listed “written prose” four
times in the text and the definition of “prose” is written language so “written” is redundant. The same
type of redundancy error was noted in the use of “educational institution academicians” as
“academician” implies association with an education institution, and is therefore redundant.

I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to find a majority of the errors or potential errors quickly in
one or two readings of the paper. However, locating the proper reference in the APA Manual and
verifying the errors and corrections were time-consuming and repetitive. I have been using the APA
Manual and rereading sections for the past two weeks, and my familiarity with the many rules and
guidelines is slowing improving. I have also found the Writing Center and the Scholarly Writing and APA
Style sections to be very helpful. I have printed out various examples and tips listed on the Writing
Center site and have begun to organize a loose-leaf notebook that should be easier for me to navigate.

However, in the pursuit of practicing sound scholarly writing practices, locating and citing the correct
APA Manual page was very tedious and time-consuming for me in this exercise. However, on the bright
side, the time spent certainly increased my knowledge about APA guidelines. This was also my first
extensive experience with the Microsoft Word Track Change feature, and it took me some time to
understand and effectively navigate the application.
As I noted in our first week’s assignment on our self-assessment, my lack of familiarity with APA writing
style is one of my major weaknesses. The only way I can see to improve my mastery of APA guidelines
and scholarly writing is to continually use the APA Manual and the Writing Center to improve my
knowledge of and comfort with the rules and preferred usages. The effort to print and file examples
and tips from the Writing Center will also help me better understand and access the citation and
reference rules as well as improve my writing methodology. I am someone who typically learns best by
reading and then writing rules or examples, so I have started to do that in a section of a spiral notebook
dedicated to APA. While my discomfort in this exercise certainly caused me some concern, it also
reinforced the fact that I need to embrace this learning opportunity to improve my proficiency in
scholarly writing (Barker, 2014).