NR 103 Week 4 APA Formatting Exercise Example

APA Formatting Exercise: A Two-Page Paper on Missed Nursing Care, Built From the Reference List Outward and Checked Both Ways

Student Name

College of Nursing, Chamberlain University

NR 103: Transition to the Nursing Profession

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

APA Formatting Exercise: A Two-Page Paper on Missed Nursing Care, Built From the Reference List Outward and Checked Both Ways

The Title Page as a Checklist

The seventh edition of the APA manual sets out a student title page that differs from the professional one (American Psychological Association [APA], 2020). The title page of this exercise was built from the following checklist, item by item, rather than copied from a paper written under the sixth edition, which required a running head that student papers no longer carry.

Page number in the top right corner of every page, starting with 1 on the title page. Title in bold, centered, a few lines down from the top, in title case. A blank line, then the student's name. The affiliation: department and university. The course number and name, as the course lists it. The instructor's name. The due date, written out as month, day, year. No running head, no abstract and no author note, since the assignment did not ask for them.

Every item above was then checked against the title page itself, one tick at a time. Two errors were caught this way in my first draft: the course name had been shortened, and the date had been written as numbers only.

The Reference List, Built First

The reference list for the exercise was written before the body, because a list built first makes it harder for a citation and a reference to drift apart. Each entry was taken from the article itself and its DOI record, not from memory or a citation generator, and each DOI was opened to confirm it led to the right article. The entries were then alphabetized by the first author's surname, double-spaced, with a hanging indent of half an inch, and each DOI written as a full https://doi.org address. The finished list appears at the end of this paper.

The Sample Body, With Citations That Arrive With the Idea

The body of the exercise is a short passage on missed nursing care, written to practice citation and paraphrase. It reads as follows.

Missed nursing care is any part of the care a patient needs that is left undone or delayed, in whole or in part (Kalisch et al., 2009). In their concept analysis, Kalisch et al. (2009) describe several groups of factors that contribute to it: pressures that force a nurse to decide between competing priorities, elements of the nursing process itself, and the nurse's own perceptions and values. Delegation is one of the places where missed care begins. Bittner and Gravlin (2009) reported that registered nurses expected assistive personnel to report significant findings and to show assessment and prioritizing skills, and that nurses described frequent instances of routine care being omitted. The two studies suggest that when a nurse hands work to someone else under time pressure without clear instructions, the care is at greater risk of being missed.

Three choices in this passage are deliberate. First, every borrowed idea carries its citation in the same sentence as the idea, not at the end of the paragraph, so a reader can tell which claim comes from which source. Second, the sources are paraphrased rather than quoted, because the ideas matter more than the authors' exact wording and because a paraphrase shows that I understood them. Third, the citation for a work with three or more authors uses the first author's name and "et al." from the first mention, which is a change from the sixth edition.

Paraphrase Over Quotation, Shown Side by Side

To practice the difference, the exercise sets a quotation and a paraphrase of the same idea next to each other. The quotation, with the page number that APA requires for a direct quote, reads: Kalisch et al. (2009) wrote that missed care covers required care that is "omitted (either in part or in whole) or delayed" (p. 1509).

The paraphrase used in the body reads: Missed nursing care is any part of the care a patient needs that is left undone or delayed, in whole or in part (Kalisch et al., 2009).

The paraphrase keeps the meaning and the citation but changes the structure and most of the words, and it does not need a page number, although APA encourages one when it would help a reader find the passage. I chose the paraphrase for the body because the definition is short and familiar enough to restate, and because a paper built mostly of quotations shows that the writer found the sources but not that the writer understood them. A quotation is reserved for the rare case where the exact wording matters, such as a definition being contested or a phrase that cannot be restated without losing its meaning.

One error the side-by-side caught: in my first paraphrase I had written "care that is forgotten," which changed the meaning. The authors' definition includes care that is consciously delayed or left undone because of competing priorities, not only care that slips a nurse's mind. The corrected version kept their broader meaning.

Headings at the Levels the Assignment Specifies

The assignment asked for two heading levels. Level 1 headings are centered, bold and in title case; Level 2 headings are flush left, bold and in title case, with the text beginning on the next line as a new paragraph (APA, 2020). The paper's title is repeated at the top of the first page of text in bold and centered, and it does not take the label "Introduction," because the opening paragraphs are understood to be the introduction.

The Two-Way Check

The last step is the check that catches the errors graders find first. It runs in two directions.

From the body to the list: every in-text citation was highlighted in the draft, and for each one I found the matching reference and confirmed that the author names were spelled the same way and the year was the same. Kalisch et al. (2009) and Bittner and Gravlin (2009) each matched.

From the list to the body: for each reference, I searched the draft for the first author's surname to confirm the work was cited at least once. An earlier draft had a third reference, on nurse staffing, that I had cited in a paragraph I later cut. It was still in the reference list. The two-way check caught it, and it was removed.

The check took about ten minutes for a two-page paper, and it is the step I am most likely to skip when I am tired. It is also the step that would have cost me points for a reference I did not use.

References

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

Bittner, N. P., & Gravlin, G. (2009). Critical thinking, delegation, and missed care in nursing practice. Journal of Nursing Administration, 39(3), 142-146. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNA.0b013e31819894b7

Kalisch, B. J., Landstrom, G. L., & Hinshaw, A. S. (2009). Missed nursing care: A concept analysis. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 65(7), 1509-1517. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2009.05027.x