PSYCH 599 Week 4 Academic Writing and APA Style Example

Rewriting One Paragraph Three Times: From Summary to Synthesis in APA Seventh Edition

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/599: Foundations of Graduate Study in Psychology

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The student, her draft paragraphs and the pharmacy setting are composites written for a model paper; writing research and APA rules come from the sources listed.

Graduate writing differs from undergraduate writing less in vocabulary than in structure. A graduate paragraph makes a claim and uses evidence from several sources to support or qualify it. This paper shows that difference by revising one paragraph from my own work three times and explaining each change with guidance from the APA manual and research on writing.

The Original Paragraph

After last week's search on text-message reminders for medication adherence, I drafted the following paragraph for a short literature review:

"Thakkar et al. (2016) did a meta-analysis of sixteen trials and found texting doubled adherence. Sumner et. al. (2014) found that press releases exaggerate health studies. Open Science Collaboration (2015) found many psychology studies do not replicate."

The paragraph has three problems. It has no claim, so a reader does not know why these studies appear together. Each sentence reports one study, so the paragraph is a list. And it contains APA errors, including a misplaced period in et al. and a slightly inaccurate summary: the meta-analysis found that texting roughly doubled the odds of adherence, not adherence itself.

Revision One: Adding a Claim

Guidance from the American Psychological Association (2020) advises writers to organize ideas so that each paragraph develops a single main idea, usually stated near the beginning, with following sentences that support it. My first revision added a topic sentence: "Evidence that text reminders improve medication adherence is encouraging but should be read cautiously."

That sentence gives the paragraph a purpose. The three studies now have a reason to appear together: one supplies the encouraging evidence and two explain the caution. Yet the sentences that follow still report studies one at a time.

Revision Two: From Summary to Synthesis

Gernsbacher (2018) offered guidance for writing empirical articles that are transparent, reproducible, clear and memorable, recommending, among other practices, that writers state their points directly, structure paragraphs so that each sentence builds on the one before and make the logic between ideas explicit rather than leaving readers to infer it. For a literature paragraph, that means linking studies through their relationship to the claim.

My second revision reads: "Evidence that text reminders improve medication adherence is encouraging but should be read cautiously. A meta-analysis of sixteen randomized trials found that texting roughly doubled the odds of adherence among adults with chronic disease (Thakkar et al., 2016), yet most of those trials relied on self-reported adherence, which can overstate benefit. Caution is also warranted because single striking results in health and psychology often shrink on repetition (Open Science Collaboration, 2015) and because public summaries of health research tend to inflate findings (Sumner et al., 2014). Pharmacies considering text reminders should therefore expect a modest effect and test it with objective refill data."

The revised paragraph now has a beginning, a middle that weighs evidence and an end that states an implication. The studies speak to one another: the replication and press release studies explain why the meta-analysis should be read carefully.

The same three sources, rearranged around one claim, turned a list into an argument.

Revision Three: APA Details

The third revision checked the paragraph against the seventh edition. For works with three or more authors, the manual requires the first author's surname followed by et al. in every citation, including the first, and the only period in that abbreviation follows al, which corrects the slip in my draft. Group authors, such as the Open Science Collaboration, are written out in full. Parenthetical citations place author and year inside parentheses at the end of a clause, while narrative citations work the author into the sentence; I used parenthetical citations in revision two so that the claim, not the authors, leads each sentence.

I also checked language. The manual recommends specific, respectful descriptions of people and asks writers to choose between person-first and identity-first language thoughtfully, following the preferences of the groups described. In the full review, I changed "diabetics" to "people with diabetes," which matches how the patients in my pharmacies refer to themselves.

Finally, I formatted the references with hanging indents, sentence case for article titles, title case and italics for journal names and italic volume numbers, and I included DOIs as links. Student papers in the seventh edition do not need a running head unless the instructor requests one.

Why Practice Matters More Than Rules

Learning these rules is necessary, but improvement in writing comes from practice. Kellogg (2008) described writing development as moving through stages, from telling what one knows, to transforming knowledge to fit an argument, to crafting text with the reader's view in mind, and argued that progress through these stages requires years of deliberate practice. Kellogg and Raulerson (2007) argued that college writing improves most through frequent writing with timely feedback, not occasional long papers. They also emphasized that writers need enough knowledge of their topic to free attention for planning and revision.

Both points match my experience. My first draft was knowledge telling: I reported what I had read. The revisions moved toward transforming knowledge into an argument for a reader. I plan to write a short paragraph each week, ask for feedback from the writing center and keep a list of my recurring errors.

Voice, Hedging and Concision

A final set of changes concerned voice. My early drafts swung between two extremes: sentences so cautious that they said nothing, such as "it could perhaps be suggested that texting may possibly help," and sentences so confident that they overstated the evidence, such as "texting doubles adherence." Graduate writing calls for calibrated claims. A hedge belongs where the evidence is uncertain, once, in the right place: "texting appears to improve adherence modestly." I also cut words that added length without meaning. "Due to the fact that" became "because," and "in order to" became "to." The manual's advice on concision helped, but reading my paragraph aloud helped more, since padded sentences are hard to say in one breath. Finally, I used first person where I described my own decisions, which the seventh edition permits, and kept it out of sentences about what studies found.

Lessons for My Own Writing

Three habits will guide my graduate papers. I will draft a topic sentence before searching my notes for support. I will combine at least two sources in every body paragraph, explaining how they relate. And I will check citations against the manual's examples rather than relying on memory or online generators, which often produce errors.

I will also save each graded paper with the instructor's comments in one folder and reread them before starting the next assignment, so that a correction made once does not have to be made twice.

Conclusion

Revising one paragraph three times showed me that graduate writing begins with a claim and grows through synthesis, and that APA style is a set of tools for clarity, not a list of arbitrary rules. These habits will shape every paper I write in the program.

References

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

Gernsbacher, M. A. (2018). Writing empirical articles: Transparency, reproducibility, clarity, and memorability. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 1(3), 403-414. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245918754485

Kellogg, R. T. (2008). Training writing skills: A cognitive developmental perspective. Journal of Writing Research, 1(1), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2008.01.01.1

Kellogg, R. T., & Raulerson, B. A. (2007). Improving the writing skills of college students. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(2), 237-242. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194058

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), Article aac4716. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716

Sumner, P., Vivian-Griffiths, S., Boivin, J., Williams, A., Venetis, C. A., Davies, A., Ogden, J., Whelan, L., Hughes, B., Dalton, B., Boy, F., & Chambers, C. D. (2014). The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: Retrospective observational study. BMJ, 349, Article g7015. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g7015

Thakkar, J., Kurup, R., Laba, T.-L., Santo, K., Thiagalingam, A., Rodgers, A., Woodward, M., Redfern, J., & Chow, C. K. (2016). Mobile telephone text messaging for medication adherence in chronic disease: A meta-analysis. JAMA Internal Medicine, 176(3), 340-349. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2015.7667