| Using Content
Notes in APA Papers
Using content notes is a good way to add depth to your
paper, to provide your reader with interesting additional material
and to impress your audience with the breadth and depth of your knowledge.
What Are Content Notes?
APA style makes use of parenthetical references to document certain
kinds of information (author and date). This system works well to
allow you to direct your readers to the sources from which you derived
your paper.
But you can add another, very impressive dimension to your paper
by using content notes to give your reader additional information
about your topic that might be interesting and important but that
might disrupt the flow of information if you include it in the body
of your paper--in APA style these notes are called footnotes but are
grouped together on a page after the main text of your paper. Use
footnotes in APA style to provide material that supplements or explains
the primary content of your paper or to provide additional bibliographical
information.
Footnote Example
The following example illustrates the relationship between the text
and the note. Superscript arabic numerals indicate the text that is
to be footnoted. The notes are numbered consecutively throughout the
paper. All the notes are then gathered together and presented in numerical
order on a separate page at the end of the text. This page is labeled
Footnotes and is numbered consecutively with the rest of the paper.
The following table presents an excerpt from the paper. You can see
where this author inserted a '1' to signal her first footnote.
|
This kind of authoritarian
dominion over wives had psychological as well as legal implications
according to
Thompson (1973). He contends that the pervasiveness of such attitudes
required reciprocal attitudes of subordination or deference in the
relationship. These attitudes were embodied in wife and child.1 Psychological
characteristics. . . |
**Disclaimer: This web-version of a footnote
example does not accurately depict what an APA-style example should
look like because of constraints with HTML coding. We urge you to
consult the discussion above the example and the APA Publication
Manual itself (available in the Academic Center, room 122 of University
Center) for a discussion of formatting.**
The table below shows an incomplete draft of the footnotes page from
this paper. Remember,
the page should be labeled Footnotes and numbered consecutively
with the rest
of the paper.
|
Footnotes
1 For a different point of view, see Ross, E. (1983). Survival networks:
Women’s neighborhood sharing in London before World War I. History
Workshop Journal, 15, 3. Ross contends that working class women
never learned the habit of deference from their middle class
counterparts.
2 The working class neighborhood in Edwardian London was a hostage
to its own notions of respectability. . .
|
**Disclaimer: This web-version of a footnote
example does not accurately depict what an APA-style example should look
like because of constraints with HTML coding. We urge you to consult the
discussion above the example and the APA Publication Manual itself (available
in the Academic Center, room 122 of University Center) for a discussion
of formatting.**
Uses for Content Notes
The list below shows examples of some of the common uses for such notes.
(We’ve single-spaced the list below to
save space. Your notes would be double-spaced.)
Provide a blanket citation:
3 For further studies supporting Jones’s conclusions
see Garrett (1999), Farmer and Willsson (1998, pp. 345-78), and Hart, Bennet,
and Karloff (1998).
Give Contrasting Information:
2 On the other hand, Smythone (1987) notes a different result
altogether in his work, contending that the overall outcome of Rommel’s
appeal was negative because external factors like the progress of the war
intervened.
Evaluate a Source:
4 While Berker’s (1996) summary implies that
Kohlberg’s theory
of moral development is universal and ungendered, he obviously fails to understand
or account for the impact of Kohlberg’s failure to include a representative
sample of females in his study.
Cite a Major Source Requiring Frequent In-Text Citation:
1All references to Huckleberry Finn can be found
in McMichael, et al. (1990), Concise Anthology.
Explain Methods, Procedures, Tools:
5 The original research group for this anecdotal
study of childbirth practices in the early twentieth century were women who
had practiced as midwives in
New York City between 1900 and 1920. They were limited to those who had registered
with the city to practice under the aegis of a licensed doctor.
In many cases, this information would be included in a section
of the paper rather than in a note.
This handout was created from information acquired from the
5th edition of APA Publication Manual and Turabian’s A Manual for Writers
of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th edition. For complete guidelines
on how to format the bibliographical information in notes, see the 5th edition
of the APA Publication Manual.
|
