Hell hath no fury like a style-guide user scorned. When the American Psychological Association published the sixth edition of its Publication Manual, in July, it didn’t take long for APA style mavens to pick up on errors and inconsistencies—and to start complaining on e-mail lists and blogs.
The objections became so loud that the organization has now agreed to replace the offending copies with a corrected second printing (Edition 6.1, perhaps?).
The APA’s Publication Manual is to writers and editors in the social and behavioral sciences what the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers is to students and researchers in literary studies. The manuals aren’t quite bibles—more like stern nannies whose rules must be followed, no matter how capricious they seem, if the household (or the discipline) is to keep humming along.
Just how seriously flawed the APA’s sixth edition is depends on whom you ask. Instructors and students tasked with compiling correct-to-the-last-comma citations were understandably peeved when the examples given in the manual didn’t always match up with the rules. Nobody wants to agonize about whether to add “Location: Publisher” to that book-chapter citation or use a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) or URL instead, but instructors and journal editors expect writers to figure all that stuff out. Disciplinary research protocols must be obeyed.
The association published online an eight-page list of corrections, along with a set of corrected sample papers. That wasn’t enough to satisfy purchasers who considered their new manuals faulty merchandise. At least one scholar, John D. Foubert, an associate professor in the School of Educational Studies at Oklahoma State University, called for a boycott of the edition by scholars, instructors, and journal editors.
The cumulative outrage finally carried the day. The association has just announced that it will “recycle” remaining softcover copies of the sixth edition. Anyone who gets in touch with the association between November 2 and December 15 and asks for a replacement will receive a free copy of the emended second printing, according to Rhea Faberman, director of communications. (She recommends that people contact the APA’s service center to submit those requests.)
“We heard loud and clear that there was disquiet about the number of errors in the book,” Ms. Faberman told me. “We understand that, although perfection is difficult to achieve, it is a style manual and therefore the bar is very high in terms of getting it right.”
‘Like Being a Marionette’
I called H. Allen Brizee, an A.B.D. graduate student in English, specializing in rhetoric and composition, at Purdue University, to find out how events have played out for students and instructors. He works as the coordinator of Purdue’s Online Writing Lab, the OWL, where staff members spend a lot of time compiling online user guides and other resources for writers.
Every time a new error comes down the line, Mr. Brizee and his colleagues have to hustle to update their resources. “It’s been a little like being a marionette,” he said.
The OWL’s online resource for APA style received about 3.5 million hits in September and October, he told me, while the MLA resource got about 2.5 million. Hundreds of messages in the past two months have asked for help with the APA Publication Manual and, to a lesser extent, with the MLA Handbook, the seventh edition of which came out this year.
Some problems are straightforward. Others require more diplomacy.
“There’s been some tension, especially with MLA and APA updating recently, when an instructor is familiar with the older style and makes it very clear to the student that he or she has to use that book,” but all that’s available to the student is the updated version, Mr. Brizee told me. “I’ve heard from OWL users and here in the Writing Lab that the instructor doesn’t care if the guide has been updated. Sometimes the student is left without resources to look at.”
One observer of the fray, Barbara Fister, academic librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, in Minnesota, thinks professors and students have gotten too tangled in these stylistic knots. “The time has come for faculty and librarians working with undergraduates to loosen up,” she wrote in an October 18 post on ACRLog, a blog run by the Association of College & Research Libraries. Professors should “stop spending hours trying to correct student work using new style manuals as unfamiliar to them as to their students and go play with the baby or take a walk instead.”
Was she joking? Not entirely. “I know APA has kind of undermined its authority by having many minor errors in the examples in their own manual, but it’s actually kind of a justification of what I believe—that being correct [in the minutiae of style] is not that important, but that understanding the rhetorical reasons for bringing good sources into your argument is,” she told me in an e-mail message. Students who visit the reference desk don’t ask, “Do you think this source is going to persuade my readers, or is there something out there that would be more powerful?” Ms. Fister observed. “It’s, ‘Is this part of the Web site the sponsoring organization or the title, … and are these words supposed to be capitalized or not? Do I use a comma or a period here?’”
“WHO CARES?” Ms. Fister concluded. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to shout.”
Hot Type is a regular column about scholarly publishing. Please send ideas to jennifer.howard@chronicle.com.
