professional psychology journals

The paper must be written in past tense.

References must be from professional psychology journals, not books, magazines, or websites.

First and second person pronouns are not allowed in the paper, except in the critical analysis you can use first person singular words. You may not use first person plural or second person pronouns anywhere in your document.

Do not generalize and avoid absolutes, all, never, etc.

Check your grammar, and get someone to help you check it.

APA formatting is half the grade be sure your paper looks like the template, the purpose of the template is to show you the correct formatting. Pay particular attention to the running heads, title, headings, and capitalization, read the instructions on the template carefully.

Remember you can only reference and cite the journal articles you actually read, do not reference or cite materials you did not personally read. There are two types of correct citations, contextual and parenthetical, examples of these are as follows:

Contextual citations occur in the text of what you are writing and are part of the sentence. For example, Smith and Jones (2012) described the process of measuring intelligence based on stable, comparative processes.

An alternative citation using a parenthetical citation is as follows.  The process of measuring intelligence was based on stable comparative processes (Smith & Jones, 2012).

Refer to the author(s) by last name only in the text of the paper. This prevents gender bias. Do not use initials anywhere but in the references. To restate only refer to the authors by last names.

You should have a total of between three to five references, the paper you are critiquing, plus at least two others on the same topic to support your point of view. These must be professional journal articles from psychology related journals in the library databases, websites and magazines or other reference materials do not count as primary references. Do not include the references the author of the original paper used, because you did not read those. Citations and references are breadcrumbs to show where you got your information, not where the original author got theirs.

Citations should be used frequently, that is every time you take information from someone else.

Be sure your references are formatted in APA style as the instructions tell you on the template, read the template and follow instructions it will make things much easier for you.

Remember also, you are critiquing an article, not writing about the subject matter. The introduction tells why the research was done, what was important about, the literature review tells about what happened in the critiqued article and what other sources say about this topic, include what the original research did, how it was done and what it means, the critical analysis is your point of view, what could have been better, what could be addressed in future research, etc.

Paraphrase everything, direct quotes are not allowed on this assignment, you must put everything in your own words, you should not use quotation marks anywhere.

The abstract is written last, it is the summary of your paper.

Finally, grammatically, paragraphs should be relatively short and focused about a specific idea, each page should have a minimum of two to three paragraphs.

The paper will include these:

Cover page

Abstract page

Introduction (at least one full page) The title of your paper appears at the top of page three as shown in the template – note everything is double spaced including space between headings and titles, do not add extra spaces.

Literature Review (at least two pages)

Critical Analysis (at least one full page)

Reference page with one reference – references are a page to themselves.