APA Style - Errors in The First Printing of The Sixth Edition

Errors in The First Printing of The Sixth Edition

Despite multiple reviews of the manuscript at the copy-editing and proof-reading stages by senior editors, staff realized, shortly after the manual had gone to press, that the sample papers contained multiple errors. Among the detected errors were:

• In 188 style guidelines, two errors were made, and one of these was a punctuation error.
• In almost 1,000 examples provided to illustrate those rules, 36 errors were made (roughly half of these occurred in the sample papers, which were subsequently corrected and posted online). Another 10 occurred in the 374 examples that were provided in the reference chapter.
• Five clarifications to text were made. These were not errors, but rather clarified and expanded text, for example, adding a second example for both a blog post and a blog comment.
• Three pages of nonsignificant typographical errors were corrected. These included such things as changing an em dash to an en dash, changing a minus sign to a hyphen, and correcting for added space that was automatically added when a sample form was reproduced.

In the interest of transparency (and following the same procedure that was followed for the fifth edition), staff posted all of the corrections online in a single document on October 1, 2009, and shortly thereafter alerted users to the existence of the corrections in a blog entry. On the same day, the corrections were posted, an individual posting to the Educational and Behavioral Sciences Section mailing-list (EBBSS-L) of the American Library Association alerted readers to what she described as the "many" errors in the first printing, and speculated that "some but not all" would be corrected in a second printing. On October 5, 2009, APA staff responded to the note, clarifying that errors were found in the sample papers, that the papers had been corrected and posted online, that the substantive guidance in the manual was correct and accurate as printed, and that a full list of corrections could be found at the APA Style website. Nevertheless, APA refused initially to exchange submitted erroneous books of the first with corrected versions of the second edition. On October 13, 2009, the article "Correcting a Style Guide" was published in the online newspaper Inside Higher Education that included interviews with several individuals who defined the errors as "egregious" (Epstein, 2009). The article, along with rumors spread on various mailing-lists, resulted in exaggerated accounts of both the magnitude and the extent of the errors, with some reports on Amazon.com claiming more than 80 pages of errors had occurred. APA responded to the increasing confusion by issuing an apology, and implementing a return/replacement program for purchasers who wished to exchange their first-printing copies for second-printing copies of the Publication Manual. The first-edition copies returned to APA were destroyed. The second and all subsequent printings of the Publication Manual have been fully corrected.