APA Style
First, APA stands for the American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization in the world. APA Style writing guides have been adopted around the world as the standard for social science writing, but also in other fields of science.
The APA Style of writing originated in 1929 when a group of psychologists, anthropologists, and business managers sought to establish a set of guidelines for scientific writing. Through the years the APA Style Manual has become the most popular professional style writing manual in the world.
The purpose of APA Style is threefold. Scientific and academic writing should embody:
Learning APA Style
The APA itself has copious online resources to assist you in learning how to writing in this professional style. Dedicating some time to learning this style will benefit you. As you practice writing within the rules and guidelines of the APA Style, you will free yourself from that pressure in order to focus on what you are trying to communicate in your writing in the first place!
This really is the definitive site to learn more about APA Style.
Other APA Writing Resources
Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
Another very popular (and free) resource on APA style is the Online Writing Lab sponsored by Purdue University. This site is very authoritative and is kept up to date with the latest expectations of the APA. It is also geared toward students.
The APA publishes a guide regarding the writing standards of APA style specifically for students.
Concise Guide to APA Style (7th Ed.)
The Official APA Style Guide for Students
Peruse through this manual and familiarize yourself with its organization and the various elements of writing that are addressed in it. Throughout your college career, you will find this manual to be a handy reference for your writing.
While we often use the guide to simply look up how to do a citation, it is valuable to spend time in the first three chapters.
This part actually makes for some interesting reading about how to shape your academic voice early in your career.
The next three chapters take on details related to formatting sentences and other elements of your paper.
Since we are often writing material that is supported by quantitative data (numbers) and we often wish to summarize this data into tables and graphs, the next two chapters discuss these guidelines.
As students, you are often asked to write about the work of others. Even when you are asked to draw your own conclusions, you must provide supporting evidence and data from other authors. You accomplish this by giving credit to others’ knowledge as you write about it. You then provide a way for your readers to look up these original sources themselves.
The manual ends with a chapter full of examples of different types of sources you may encounter. In the modern world where a lot of information is published online and in digital formats, the formatting of references to the works is continually challenging.
Also, don’t neglect the fact that the book also has an Index. The index sorts all the important terms in the book and provides you with the page or pages where these terms are used. This is an incredible useful way of using the book and getting right to the section that you need.
Microsoft Word and APA Style
Microsoft Word is a powerful word processor that enables you to format all aspects of your document into APA Style. Some of these processes are automated but many of them require that you become pretty skilled at using Microsoft Word!
Many of the default settings such as margin space and the use of headers and footers are already set to APA expectations.
Here are two great videos:
APA Citation Generator
Although I don’t always trust web sites that claim to be able to generate citations for you, this one has been pretty good. A neat aspect of this tool is you can generate citations for websites and vides by simply pasting the URL!
You can also get the full APA citation by simply pasting the DOI number to any article.
Keep in mind that you have to double check the formatting to be sure it is correct.