A Quick Orientation to APA Style
What is APA style?
Like all documentation styles, APA style provides a standard system for giving credit to others for their contribution to your work. It’s what we call a “parenthetical” documentation style, meaning that citations to original sources appear in your text. This allows the reader to see immediately where your information comes from, and it saves you the trouble of having to make footnotes or endnotes.
APA style calls for three kinds of information to be included in in-text citations. The author’s last name and the work’s date of publication must always appear, and these items must match the corresponding entry in the references list. The third kind of information, the page number, appears only in a citation for a direct quotation.
APA style includes guidelines for formatting documents. For most academic writing, the most important aspect of these guidelines involve formatting the References list and headings. When applying APA style to these elements, it is important to remember that the intent of the Publication Manual is to assist the editorial staff of APA journals in typesetting. If you are preparing a paper for a class assignment rather than a journal, you are in a sense publishing it yourself. Consult your instructor or advisor for specific course requirements.
When should I use APA style?
The APA documentation system is commonly used in the social sciences. If you’re taking a psychology or sociology course, chances are you’ll be expected to write papers in APA style.
APA style exists so that readers across different disciplines in the social sciences have a standard format for papers and citations, which makes it easier to find what you’re looking for when you’re looking at published work. Compared to other documentation styles, APA style emphasizes the date the work was published. The date something was published will appear each time that you mention it. APA also emphasizes empirical research, which is why there are lots of rules and formats for citing works published in academic journals, but you might not find a clear rule about how to cite non-academic or research-based sources.
What do I really need to know?
In any paper that refers to other sources, you must cite these sources properly. Failure to do so could result in charges of plagiarism by your instructor.
How should I best use this resource?
First, determine what types of sources you have, whether they’re journal articles, books, or interviews. Then use these pages to learn how to cite them within the body of your paper using APA parenthetical citations and how to create an APA reference list.
Once you’ve cited everything properly, refer to the APA Headings and APA Formatting pages to find out how to make your paper visually conform to APA guidelines.
Finally, if you’re writing a paper in APA style for a course, keep in mind that instructors may have specific guidelines of their own. When in doubt whether to use a particular aspect of APA style, always ask your instructor to clarify.
General Advice for Learning and Using APA Style
Create an APA paper template document with all of the aspects of an APA described here (title page, abstract, etc.). Each time you start a new paper, open that template and tailor it. This will save you time, help you get started, and ensure that you have all the aspects of your APA paper correctly formatted without referring to a guide each time.
- There’s a lot about APA style that you might quickly and naturally memorize, especially when you use the rules repeatedly. For example, you may soon memorize the basic rules for in-text citations and how to make the reference for a journal article and book. These are often the most common things you’ll do in an APA paper. Generally, though, it may not be helpful to memorize this information. APA style changes, there are a lot of details, and you probably have a lot of other information that’s much more important to keep in your head!
- Pick an APA guide (like this one!) and become familiar with it. When you need to find the answer about something, you’ll easily be able to access it.
- Observe the consistencies of APA features in the papers and books you read.
