APA: The Easy Way! – An excellent guide to APA Formatting

APA is a popular formatting style used in essays, books, journals, and other publications. It’s wide popularity is often attributed to its overall “ease” of use. In general, the rules are consistent throughout and rarely change so if you do learn APA formatting, it should stay relatively the same for many years to come.

The best resource I have found and that I often recommend to my students is APA: The Easy Way! [Updated for APA 6th Edition]. Not only does this book cover APA formatting, it is very easy to use as a reference for all things APA related. If you have a question about APA, this book will help you! I keep a copy of it handy at my desk at all times to review and reference whenever I am helping a student with formatting.

In general, some guidelines for APA formatting are:

• Double spacing throughout the document.
• 1″ margins on all sides of the document.
• A page header at the top of every page with page numbers and title of the paper.
• Preferred to be in Times New Roman, 12 pt. font.
• Includes four major sections:
  • Title Page
  • Abstract (a brief summary)
  • Main Body
  • References
• Each paragraph has a first line indentation of one tab (or .5″)
• All text is in black color.
• No extra spaces between paragraphs.
• Spacing after the period is consistently either one space or two spaces throughout the document.

Formatting in-text citations and references in APA formatting is also fairly easy, and covered in another post. Be sure to check out more information on APA formatting here!

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