Thought Experiment: APA Style Has Been Abolished! Now What

Your anti-APA dreams have come true! You get to abolish APA style and create a new style guide of your own for scholarly writing in the social sciences. How will you proceed? Now What?

This hypothetical scenario is on my mind because when I lead sessions on APA style at Walden University’s academic residencies, my students often express their frustration with APA’s myriad rules. They seem arbitrary, even silly: why, for example, can’t I use underlined text? Why does the formatting of my headings matter? Isn’t it obvious that, if I mention an author in a sentence, I’m referring to the same source I mentioned three sentences earlier? These students, like many writers, have each developed a personal style of writing, and they wonder, with good reason, why that style isn’t good enough for their academic work. So, I want to ask them, if you could start over, what shape would your new writing style take?

Being a sensible person, you’d probably start by defining your goals for this new style. Because it won’t be used by only you—its purpose is to help scholars from a variety of backgrounds share their ideas—you’d probably establish some common practices that everyone using this style should follow. Just as all French speakers need to understand that oui means yes, all users of your style would need to understand some fundamental rules.

You might, for example, set rules for basic formatting. You start with margins: if they’re too wide they’ll overwhelm the page, but if they’re too narrow they’ll make documents excessively long. Let’s say, then, that you decide a one-inch margin is a good compromise between these extremes. You might set a similar rule for text: writers, you say, should make their text neither too large nor too small—12 point, probably—and, to make it easy to read, you require it to be double-spaced.

You might also address more nuanced issues. Because scholarly arguments can be very complex, you might make them easier to comprehend by allowing a text to be broken into smaller pieces using headings—that way, a writer can address just one topic at a time and clearly indicate how important those topics are relative to each other. You might also set some rules regarding tone. Your guide is for scholars in the social sciences, after all, so you don’t want a writer’s personal opinions and emotions obscuring their logic and evidence. You encourage writers to use clear, simple language and to actively avoid bias in their writing.


Because the scholars using your style will necessarily build on other authors’ ideas, you set rules for citing sources. Scholars in your field want to verify other authors’ sources, so they’ll need a simple mechanism for tracing an idea in a writer’s text to the source it came from (perhaps a combination of in-text citations and, at the end of the document, a list of the writer’s sources). Furthermore, because scholars in your field want to give and receive credit for strong writing, you require them to indicate, via quotation marks, their use of a direct quote. Because social-sciences scholars value new information more than old, citations in your style must also clearly present the date of a source’s publication.


You can see where I’m going with this. By drawing a series of conclusions based on the values and priorities of the scholars in your discipline (and the social sciences overall), you would inevitably produce something like APA style. Your style guide would likely look a bit different from APA—maybe you’d use italics rather than bold text in your headings; maybe you’d put citations in footnotes rather than in the body of your text—but it would function similarly to APA nonetheless, and over time it would accrue its own set of rules that an untrained outsider might find just as confusing as APA.


Keep in mind, the rules of APA style matter only because scholars in the social sciences follow them. There’s nothing magical about bold-text headings, but when you use them your APA-trained readers can quickly comprehend their meaning. Moreover, APA rules won’t obscure your individuality; they instead provide a shared context in which your individual ideas can be expressed and understood.

Matt Sharkey-Smith is a writing instructor and the coordinator of research and pedagogy in the Walden Writing Center. He also serves as contributing faculty in the Walden Academic Skills Center.  Matt joined the Writing Center in 2010 with a BA in English from Saint John's University in Minnesota. He earned an MFA in Writing from Hamline University in St. Paul in 2011 and has worked outside of Walden as a technical writer, fact-checker, copy editor, tutor, and writing instructor.

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