Order ID 53563633773 Type Essay Writer Level Masters Style APA Sources/References 4 Perfect Number of Pages to Order 5-10 Pages Description/Paper Instructions
PSY240 Communication Styles Assignment
Writing for specific audiences
Our course contains a wide variety of types of communications:
- The animated Module Intro videos
- The video from The Colbert Report
- The Module instructions
- The journal articles
- The Group Discussion Board posts from your groupmates
- My announcements
- This very document
Each type of communication had its own format, formality, length, and style. In most cases, decisions about format, formality, etc. are made by considering the intended audience. You probably change how you communicate depending on who you are communicating with even if you don’t think about it explicitly. For example, do you use a particular style when texting with a friend? You might use abbreviations and emojis that you wouldn’t use in a formal paper, for example. Perhaps you’ve been told that you should follow certain rules when emailing a professor. You’ve probably learned a bunch of other communication styles in your life, like the 5-paragraph essay (yuck!), lab reports, maybe even how and when to repress your accent (very unfortunate, in my opinion).
Part 1: writing for specific audiences
Learning to alter your communication style and format depending on your audience is a very useful skill. So let’s practice writing for different audiences. Think back to all the articles we’ve read and analyzed in our class. Choose one of those articles and write XX descriptions
- Write a description of the article like you would if you were telling a friend about it. Assume the friend is not a psychology major and thus does not know any psychology jargon. You could even pretend you are telling your friend about the article in a text message. How do you usually communicate with this friend? That’s how this should be communicated.
- Write an email to one of the authors of that journal article. Did you know you could do that? You really can and you will almost always get a response. People love to talk about their own research. In the email be sure to refer to the article you read and ask a follow-up question about it. *You don’t have to actually send the email (but you could if you wanted). This person is likely a professor somewhere, so think about the best way to communicate with a professor you do not know.
Please include both communications in one document, with a clear separation between them (like a line or page break).
Part 2: APA Style
Academic psychology has its own particular communication style called APA Style (APA stands for American Psychological Association). APA style is a set of rules for how to format a formal paper that might be submitted for publication. The latest version of APA style (the 7th) even has rules for academic papers that you might write for classes. The whole idea behind APA style is that “Uniformity and consistency enable readers to (a) focus on the ideas being presented rather than formatting and (b) scan works quickly for key points, findings, and sources” (https://apastyle.apa.org/about-apa-style). We might skip APA style altogether if the only place it was used was academic psychology, but many organizations well beyond psychology have adopted APA Style. Your future career might require APA Style even if you don’t have an official “psychology” job.
Rather than make you learn a bunch of rules about APA Style, I want to give you an example of a paper written in perfect APA Style that you could use as a template to write any paper in the Psychology Department that requires APA Style. You can download a sample paper written in APA Style from this website: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format/sample-papers. Look for Student Sample Paper (DOCX, 38KB ). To prove that you’ve obtained the sample paper I want you to replace the information on the title page with your information (you can make up any title you want, but pay attention to how it’s capitalized!). You can leave the rest of the paper as it is, but be sure to look through it and notice the format of the headings, the page numbers, the margins, the line spacing (double spaced), and the citations in the References section. Submit to me your edited version of that paper.