Wednesday 22 April 2009

APA or MLA?That is the question

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To be honest, at the beginning I felt a little bit confused about this topic (and I’m sorry, I know that it's useful but I found it quite boring). Anyway, I learned that MLA (Modern Language Association) and APA (American Psychological Association) show two different ways to cite sources. These two links give many detailed suggestions, from structure to the information you have to report. Let’s see them in short.
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MLA style

This is commonly used for humanities. Here you can use in-text citations putting references in brackets. This style gives you precise suggestions about the elements you have to quote and the way you have to do it. In this way you can see immediately the source for citations and you don’t waste time looking for notes in another place. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that if there are many different citations, the piece of writing presents lots of brackets and it becomes less fluent and easy to read and follow (for this reason, if you choose it, it is suggested to keep references brief). Talking about types, it prefers using underlining instead of italics in order to point it out.

APA style

You have to follow many different instructions for every kind of source and every aspect of quotation. It uses the year of publication of the source text (so you can see immediately if the source is recent, which is very important if you think that APA citation is commonly used for science). Moreover, APA style requires an abstract in order to introduce and summarize the object of your research.
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I didn't use one specific style in my BA thesis but, if I had to choose the most similar one, I would refer to APA style.

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