APA Writing Guidelines

This week we're reviewing how to use the APA writing guidelines. APA was developed by the American Psychological Association. For school purposes, it is mostly used in Psychology and Science classes. The majority of the papers I've had to write in my school career have required the MLA citation style. However, it's important to review the proper way to cite APA, as not to confuse it with MLA, because while similar, they do have their differences.

From: http://theportableblender.info/apa-style-term-paper-sample-6/

One of the first differences between MLA and APA, that jumps out at me, is the fact that APA requires (if the professor requests it) a title page and an abstract.

According to Hodges' Harbrace Handbook, fifteenth edition, a title page includes:

1. The manuscript page header
2. The running head
3. The title
4. The author's name
5. The author's affiliation

An APA abstract is basically a short summary of the paper, not over 120 words.

A great link that I found from the Lesson Lecture APA Tutorial shows an example of a correct APA title page and abstract: http://supp.apa.org/style/PM6E-Corrected-Sample-Papers.pdf 

From: http://jeps.efpsa.org/blog/2012/07/10/the-origins-of-apa-style-and-why-there-are-so-many-rules/

Another difference between APA and MLA, is that APA only requires the author's last name and the publication date for a source quoted within the paper's text. In MLA, a book's page number is used.

All of the sources used are organized alphabetically on the Reference page. Here is a link for an example of a correct Reference page: http://flash1r.apa.org/apastyle/basics/data/resources/sample-references2.pdf