Many teachers and professors require that their students use a style guide, such as APA or MLA, This article discusses why style guides are useful. Professors, instructors, and teachers in high schools, colleges, and universities often require students to adhere to a style guide when they write and not just search for “pay to write my paper” services on the Internet.
These guides are useful for authors who want to publish their scholarly work. But students may wonder why their instructors insist that students learn to use a style guide.
There are several reasons why a style guide, such as the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (MLA) or the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) is important if the paper is not destined for publication in a journal or book.
It’s a good question to ask. Though there are many reasons, this article explores four:
- Using a style guide improves communication.
- Using a style guide helps students work with important ideas in the field.
- Using a style guide increases students’ ability to read complex texts.
- Using a style guide helps writers to be precise and accurate.
Style and Communication
Perhaps the most important reason for learning to use the style guide your professor or instructor requires is that it improves communication by reducing details that can be distracting. Scholarly writing in high school or at university means working with the ideas of many other authors.
A style guide, by standardizing the format of things such as attribution to a particular source, using italics and punctuation, and having a standard format for organizing data means that your thinking is clear to you as a writer and to those who read your paper.
As important, it makes it possible for the reader to attend to the ideas rather than writing out the article title, journal title, and so on each time, the work is cited.
An example may help here, though there are many possibilities. Instead of indicating in writing that a particular source is a journal article, the format and order of elements automatically let the reader know.
At a glance, readers can tell quite a bit about this APA reference entry without detailed explanations about it:
Achugar, M., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2005). Beyond connectors: The construction of cause in history textbooks. Linguistics and Education, 16, 298-318.
It is an article in a scholarly journal that is continuously paginated (the pages do not start over with each issue). The article title is mostly lower case letters, so without saying it is an article, the reader knows.
The reference entry does not say it is a journal, but readers who know APA style do not have to ask. Because the title is in italics and includes capitals for all main words, the reader knows it is a scholarly journal. No extra words have to explain this.
By contrast, this reference entry conveys different information even though it looks similar to the entry above:
Graff, G., & Birkenstein, C. (2007). They say I say: The moves that matter in persuasive writing. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
It is a book; readers know instantly because the title is in lower case (except for the first word) and is in italics. If it were a journal, there would be an article title in plain text and the title would include other words with capitals throughout the title.
Working with Ideas
Students might wonder why sources are so important. Instructors insist on attributing sources using a specific style format because doing so goes well beyond just determining if the assigned reading was done.
By knowing sources and attributing those sources, the essay writer learns to evaluate the quality of the source and works with the big ideas of others while working their ideas into the fabric of this grand scholarly discussion.
Reading Complex Texts
The more familiar students become with style guide formats, such as APA or MLA, the easier it becomes to read scholarly texts and understand the sources and big ideas the writers of those texts relied on making their contributions to the scholarly community.
This makes it easier for readers to think about the ideas rather than focus just on whether something is italicized or punctuated correctly. Of course, this takes time and practice with knowing the conventions of the style guide.
Precision and Accuracy
Finally, using a style guide encourages student writers to think about how they have characterized or incorporated the ideas of others in their work.
Two criteria valued in scholarly writing are precision and accuracy (APA, 2009), and style guides encourage writers to attribute sources, characterize them correctly, and provide a means for others who read the paper to go to the source to verify ideas and expand on them for themselves.
It may help to think of using style guides as a way to become more proficient in understanding important ideas. Many schools and universities have writing centers to help with the difficult aspects of using a style guide, and the teacher or professor can help, too.
Always be sure to find out if your school or university has exceptions or a house-style sheet, as well.