Analyzing Sample APA and MLA Style

Analyzing Sample APA and MLA StyleThe US Agency for International Development, or USAID, provides many examples of APA sample annotated bibliography. In this article we will use this sample to help you decide whether or not APA and the MLA style are compatible with your style guide. If you've never used a sample or seen someone else's use it, you might be surprised at how different their usage of MLA is from what you use yourself. In any case, it should help you decide whether or not the APA and MLA styles are compatible for you to use in your writing.To start with, let's look at an example of how the MLA style and APA style can work together. Suppose you're writing a journal article about tinnitus, and you want to reference articles in medical journals. In that case, you would reference the first reference with an ellipsis to the second reference, which is what you want to do with MLA style.However, you also need to make sure you do not use ellipses when using APA style. You see, in APA style, the subject is usually written as a question mark. Here is an example: 'In the first paragraph, we explain what tinnitus is and how the condition affects the patient. In the second paragraph, we discuss a recent study that suggests that...'We can simplify this by saying that APA needs a bold or a thick line to tell you that the subject of the first sentence is a plain story, and that you can drop the subject in the second sentence. In MLA style, you would still be able to use an ellipsis to explain what tinnitus is, but you would use the dashes instead of an ellipsis. The same idea applies to the second sentence.Now, let's talk about an example of how APAand MLA style may conflict. Suppose you're writing a memoir about your grandparents, and you have the following three sentences: 'Grandpa told me the time; Grandma said...' (you are a member of the first generation). In this case, you might be tempted to add 'says...' before the first sentence, but it is wrong for the AP A style.A better option would be to leave out the 'says...' and add a period after the first sentence and leave out the first sentence altogether. Then, in the third sentence, it might be useful to tell readers what your grandparents are doing, such as that they are 'writing a biography about...' However, the second sentence cannot work if you leave out the word 'about.' This is because APA wants to stress that 'a biography' is not a plain story.This information applies to all of the examples that I have given you from the APA style guide, but it doesn't end there. The examples above should help you figure out whether or not the APA and MLA styles are compatible to use in your own writing.It is important to remember that your style guide is different from other writers' styles, and that many writers and publishers do not understand how they should be used in your work. It is only by using the MLA style and an APA style reference that you can ensure that your work is consistent with the style guides you have selected and makes sense to other readers.