How to write a winning academic term paper in APA format
Formatting and adjusting the references will be a very important part of your paper. On the stages, when the most important goal of writing a paper is to gain some writing skills, your professor will pay attention to how you understand and use the citation style. If you have a paper in APA format to do and you are afraid that your command over this style is not good enough, check out our guidelines and you won't have any problems with it anymore.
Style of writing
APA style requires not only the specific formatting guidelines, it will also require you to use the words in a specific words. That is why you have to study the guidelines before actually writing the paper.
- Be specific. You need to give as many details as possible to make your reader understand the topic in the best possible way.
- Be careful with the topics that may cause social misunderstandings (race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion etc.).
General formatting
This is what will fall in the eye of the professor at the first minute. Check the following guidelines:
- Use an official font, like Times New Roman. As this is an official paper, it will not be the right time to experiment with fonts.
- Align the text to the left side.
- Double-space the paper.
- Outline each first line of the paragraph in one-half inch.
Headings
Writing a paper in APA style requires including headings of a specific format. There are five possible levels of headings and the properties you shall use in them.
- Centered, written in bold, each word starts with the capital letter.
- Aligned to the left, in bold, each word starts with the capital letter.
- In bold.
- In bold and italics, requires a period in the end of the sentence.
- In italics, requires a period in the end of the sentence.
Citation and references
This will probably be the most important part of your guide to the APA style. To complete a successful APA paper, you will need to create a reference page, where you will put all the sources you used in an alphabetical order. To put in-text citations, use the author-date model. You will need to state the surname of the author and the date when it was published after the citation. For a direct quote, also put the number of page.