APA (American Psychological Association) is mainly used when writing Education, Psychology, and Sciences essay. An essay that uses APA style must follow these basic requirements;
Font.
The essay should be typed using 12 pt. Times New Roman font. It should also be typed on standard-sized paper (8.5″ x 11″) with 1″ margins on all sides and must be double spaced.
Page header.
- Every page must have a header which must be in capital letters and must not exceed 50 characters including spacing and punctuation.
- But the first page (title page) header is different from the other pages. On the left, the page header reads running head followed by a colon and then the short version of the paper. It would appear like this “Running head: APA STYLE.” The page number is on the right hand.
- For the other pages, the short version of the paper appears on the left but with no ‘running head’ and the page number is on the right side of the paper.
Title page.
The title page should contain four things;
- The title of the paper
- The name of the author
- Institution affiliation
- The date.
They should appear around the middle of the paper and must be centered. They must appear in the order given from top to the bottom. Also note that they should not be bolded, underlined or in italics.
Levels of heading.
1st level - It is Centered, Boldface, Uppercase and Lowercase Headings
2nd level - It is Left-aligned, Boldface, Uppercase and Lowercase Heading
3rd level - Indented, boldface, lowercase heading with a period.
4th level - Indented, boldface, italicized, lowercase heading with a period.
5th level - Indented, italicized, lowercase heading with a period.
In-text citations.
When writing an essay, some of the ideas that you include are from other sources. It is a requirement that you cite appropriately as a way of giving credits to the owners. In-text citations come immediately after a quote or a paraphrase from another work. But it is important to note that for every in-text citation, there must be a corresponding entry in the references at the end of the paper.
- In APA in-text citation are the author’s last name and the year of publication. Assuming the last name of the author is Dickson and the article or book was published in 2011 it will appear like this; (Dickson, 2011). For direct quotes or if it is a requirement by the instructors you may have to include the page number which will appear something like this; (Dickson, 2011, p.223).
- For a source with more than one author separates the authors with a comma then put “&” sign before the last name. It will look something like this (Dickson, Richard, Joyce & Tutus, 2011).
- For a source with more than five authors write the name of the first author followed with et al. So it will appear something like this (Dickson et al. 2011).
- If the name of the author is not available, you can use the name of the article or book followed by the year of publication.
- If the date of publication is not included then use “n.d.” after the author’s last name or after the title of the article where the name of the author is not available. Your in-text citation will look something like this (Dickson, n.d.)
- NOTE: You don’t need to do all this manually. There are sites that will help you generate the in-text citations as well as the references from the article or book that you are using. One of them is “cite this for me” and the other one is “citefast”
The reference list.
Writing the entries manually in the reference list is something that you may not want to consider because it may be tedious not to mention that you are likely to mess in one way or the other. I, therefore, recommend that you consider reference generating tools available online such as “cite this for me” and the other one is “citefast”. Once you have generated them and listed them down in the reference page, then you must do the following;
- Ensure that they are arranged in alphabetical order.
- They must be double spaced.
- They must be hanging.
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