put my essay in apa format

put my essay in apa format

APA Formatting: A Comprehensive Guide

1. Introduction to APA Formatting

These guidelines are organized into five broad categories. You may consult the following sections in this guide for more information about how to format specific parts of your APA paper. Then, carefully examine what is included in each section until you are familiar with all the requirements for each part of your paper. With its many specialized rules required to format your paper correctly, APA is one of the most difficult formal perfections to master. Therefore, we have consulted with scholarly editors of professional journals as well as APA-formatted authors in an attempt to create this full guide to formatting an APA manuscript. If you are in the process of distributing your paper or are bidding to have your APA paper published, these guidelines will make it easier for you to get an approval to proceed. To use this guide, select the type of material you are creating or citing from the options on the left.

The governing corporate body responsible for creating the standards that scholarly authors should adhere to when writing APA papers is the American Psychological Association. However, individual journals or institutions may have their own standards which may vary from the ones presented here. Always make sure to carefully follow all the specific requirements dictated by your professor, the journal or institution where your paper is to be submitted, or any instructions found in the style manual which you should use when generating your APA paper.

Revised according to the 6th edition of the APA manual, this guide includes updated guidelines that are consistent with the most recent version of this standards document. Note that the style in which you format your paper should be appropriate to the audience your paper is intended for. For example, papers written for the general public would have a different style of formatting than a scholarly paper submitted for peer review to a professional journal.

2. General Formatting Guidelines

All pages should be double-spaced, starting on a separate page with an exception of figures, tables, and references. Your order of pages should follow this sequence: title page, abstract, body, and the references page. Margins on all sides should be 1 inch to ensure alignment is even on every side of the text. To ensure proper spacing throughout your work, separate your text into sections with section headers. Use a 12-point, Times New Roman font throughout your paper. Except where otherwise noted, every page, including drafts, must be typed in the following format.

General page guidelines

When writing and submitting a paper for review in the professional fields, your work is judged by not only the merit of your ideas but also the level of care with which you expressed those ideas. Proper APA formatting keeps the writing clear and put together in a way that ensures credibility. Utilizing proper formatting prevents readers from improving your paper. Proper APA also shows that you are knowledgeable about current academic writing standards and are aware of other expert writers’ work. Institutions will be more aware of the credit shown in your submitted work if you utilize proper APA style formatting.

Why do I need to use APA formatting?

APA format is the official style of the American Psychological Association (APA) and is used in business, psychology, social sciences, nursing, and communications. The official APA guide does not provide specific guidance for certain types of writing in these fields, allowing instructors or publication editors the ability to make changes. If you are submitting work for publication, your publisher may answer questions we cannot address or may have more specific requirements.

What is APA format, and who uses it?

3. Citations and References

Reports in research papers and documents are used to show the reader where you found the data that was in your article. The reader can look at a report and see if they want to read the full article if your resource is important. Provide the reader with sufficient details to know the source and cite the source. No extra text apart from summarizing the concept that’s critical and incontrovertible. The researcher should basically agree that the truth is backed. APA writing form gives very strong criteria for references. With this precise detail, the reporter supplying the details, readers are allowed to access the delivered information.

This section contains information on the citation of sources within the text. It includes how the in-text citation can be seen, shows a variety of reference forms, and is correlated with the APA Referencing Style List. Reporting in APA refers to the manner US style database references are categorized when in the text of the article. Similar to what’s seen in the references section when the original source is seen in the text. For information on how to cite and create an APA text citation, refer to the specifics on the information page of the resource.

In conclusion, by citing your sources and mentioning the pages used to paraphrase, give due and proper credit.

Paraphrase, cite, and make references. The APA Style encourages paraphrased writing as direct quotes should be as rare as possible. A paraphrased form is often in more detail than a summary and reflects original thoughts, but in your own words. Always be sure that you do not change the meaning. In contrast to direct quotes, paraphrases show that you understand and can interpret the meaning of the work. Moreover, fewer quotes improve the quality of the text. Select phrases, sentences, and most importantly, terms that are very niche and explain them with new features and growth. In the citation, source them and when it comes to supporting external facts, cite sources correctly. Provide context and explain the content in your own words.

In general, no quotation marks are used in the paraphrasing of text from the entry in the reference list. Rather, in the text, they should refer to the writer and to the entry in perpetuating papers. In the in-text citation, always list the surname of the author(s), while listing all the name of the source in the Work Cited or reference list.

4. In-text Citations

The specific rules for including other types of sources appear in the manual, and they are too varied for us to actually provide a representative sample here. There are some general principles, though. If your citation draws on a source that has been translated, you should mention that this is so. The same general principle applies to any sources that have been quoted from other sources. The APA has special formats for both of these. The same general principle applies to electronic sources; if the URL isn’t stable, you should make clear what specific search terms produced the information you witnessed. If you are incorporating a list of references, Word will indent it according to the APA style. Simply type your list of references and ask Word to insert a Table of Authorities.

APA uses an author-date citation system. A book with one author is cited like this: (Smith, 1943). A reference to the publication you are citing is too common to include in your text, but, if you’d like, you could include the number of the page on which the cited information was found. For example, Smith (1943, p. 183) on page 183 discusses Uptain’s theory of social courting. If the author’s name is mentioned in the sentence itself, there’s no need for a parenthetical citation. For example, “According to Smith (1943), Uptain’s theory of social courting is revolutionary” should just end like that. Don’t include the usual (Smith, 1943), because it’s already implied in the flow of the sentence.

5. Reference List

Finally, if you are referencing a periodical, include the day of publication after the year, and be sure to use the specific abbreviation for pages.

If the source does not include a publication date, just end the citation with the source title. If the source does not include any specific page range, simply end the citation with the publication number. If the source does not include an author’s or the titled work, use the first few words from the title of the work instead.

When citing works with multiple authors, use the word “and” if the author list is included parenthetically, whereas use an ampersand if the author list is included as part of the sentence itself. For works containing no more than five authors, list all authors the first time the work is cited in the text; when the work is cited the next time, use the first author’s name followed by “et al.” Similarly, for works containing six or more authors, you should list the first author’s name and “et al.” for all in-text citations.

If you are using a journal article, for example, the reference will need to provide a complete listing of the authors’ names, the year of publication preceded by round brackets, the title of the paper, the title of the journal in which the paper was published (in italics), the volume number, the issue number, and the first and final pages of the publication. The basic form for an APA-style reference for a journal article is as follows: Author, A. A. (Publication year). Title of article. Title of Journal, volume number (issue number), page range.

The reference list is a separate section that comes at the end of your paper. It lists complete references for all sources you cited in your assignment. The references are listed in alphabetical order according to the first author’s last name or the title (for sources without an author). Thus, any references appearing in the text of your paper must also be shown in the reference list, and the reverse is also true.