Many students are unsure about how to format a paper in APA style, but it isn't that difficult if they keep certain guidelines in mind.
Colleges and universities require papers to be formatted according to specific guidelines. There are, however, several different sets of guidelines, for example, those established by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and the American Psychological Association (APA). Many institutions, though, have decreed APA the preferred formatting method, except perhaps in chemistry, where ACS remains the norm.
The American Psychological Association provides rules that were originally developed to govern manuscripts submitted for publication in journals. As stated in The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2003), “These rules introduce the uniformity necessary to convert manuscripts written in many styles to printed pages edited in one consistent style” (p. xxiii). In other words, these rules provide consistency in written submissions.
To help ensure that papers are formatted correctly, students should be able to answer “yes” to each of the following statements:
References are alphabetized by authors’ last names. The first line of each reference is flush with the left margin while subsequent lines are indented five spaces (hanging indents). Moreover, the reference page contains full biographical data about utilized sources:
For information from a website, provide the author’s name, but if no author is given, use the name of the organization that published the material, for example, American Red Cross, followed by the year of publication. If no publication year is available, however, use the year the information was retrieved. Finally, conclude the reference by providing the retrieval date, for example: “Retrieved October 3, 2009 from professional essay writing service.” Plus, for direct quotes, provide the page number for articles longer than two pages and, for short articles, the paragraph number.
Note: Providing only the URL (Web address) of a source is not sufficient.
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For every source on a reference page, there must be at least one corresponding citation and vice versa; moreover, anytime information is not “common knowledge” but has been gained through research, the source must be cited within the paper. (The purpose of the citation is to refer readers to the actual source, which is on the reference page.) Normally, a citation includes the author’s name, if not mentioned in the text; publication date; and page or paragraph number for a direct quote (see above).
There are, however, several ways to cite a source:
There are additional APA formatting requirements, specifically those that apply to citing various types of sources; however, these requirements are too numerous to address in this article, so students are advised to keep a copy of the APA Manual nearby when writing papers and to consult the Manual on as as-needed basis.
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Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2003) Washington, DC: American Psychological Association