I am getting around the 3-a-day rule, and responding to three
different comments in one :-)
David Epstein wrote:
On Thu, 22 Feb 2007, Harzem Peter went:
Papers in Psychology journals, shackled by the demand to follow the
APA style, are so very, very boring. From none of them would one
get the sense of excitement that may arise from and finding.
Hmm, compared to what?
Compared, for example, with almost all the writings of earlier
masters of psychology, such as James, Tichener, Boring, Angell,
and, indeed later, Skinner, Chomsky...
None in the list you give comes even close to them.
___________
Robin Abrahams wrote:
My dislike of writing in APA style, and of the epistemological
assumptions that it is based on (the subject of Madigan et al's
article), is a major reason that I am not an academic psychologist.
Learning to write in APA style made me feel like the Little Mermaid
(Hans Christian Anderson version, not Disney version), giving up my
voice for the dubious privilege of walking on dry land. Very dry
land, at times.
I completely agree. Writing in APA style destroys whatever skills
one may have had in what I regard "good" writing. There was/is a
time when students learning to sing opera were strictly required not
to sing pop songs etc. because it spoiled their voice. APA writing
does just that to a person who may have ambitions to write, for
example, science books for the general reader, let alone fiction.
_______
Christopher D. Green wrote:
... Yet still they intervene wherever they can (as though their very
job depends on finding "errors," even where none exist). I regularly
find myself writing "Please let the author write the article" in the
margin while I simultaneously have them restore passages they have
failed to grasp correctly. It is so bad that I have actually turned
to other publishers so that I do not have to go through the rigmarole
yet again.
For at least ten+ years now, I have not submitted an article to APA
journals and chose to publish in other journals that are not obsessed
with the APA style. The last straw (not solely due to the APA or an
APA journal) was when, commenting on a sentence in my introduction
that had referred to (Thomas) "Hobbes", the action editor wrote
"Like reviewer B, I am not familiar with this writer. Please give
reference." So, I have turned to obscure (in the US) publications
and I can boast: "I am free, I am free".
Peter
Peter Harzem, B.Sc. (Lond.), Ph.D. (Wales)
Hudson Professor Emeritus
Auburn University
AL 36849-5214
USA
Phone: +334 844 6482
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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