Writing Your Research Paper in an APA Style

Before you start working on your college research paper, it is very important to decide upon the writing style and format of the research paper. Format of the research paper plays a crucial role. There are more than one standard style to write in: some schools adhere to APA, while some prefer Harvard or Chicago, and so on. In this post, we will discuss how to write an APA style research paper, since APA remains the most popular style of writing research paper.

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However, you can cope with it if you carefully follow several simple rules. Below are some of the tips that will help you write an excellent APA-styled research paper:

Formatting

The formatting of an APA-style research paper is very important. Format is very distinctive and you can tell such paper from other paper styles at a glance.

The research paper should be typed strictly in the Times New Roman font and the font size should be between 10 to 12 points. The paper size should be set on 8.5” x 11” and the writer should leave a margin of 1” on all the four sides.

Every page of the research paper must contain a header with the page number.

Direct quotations

The authors of an APA-styled research paper can place the quotations within the body of the paper. The quotations should not exceed 40 words for each and they should be enclosed in double quotation marks.

The name of the author, the year of publication and the page number from which the quotation was taken should be mentioned before the quotation begins.

Indirect quotations

When the writer explains concepts from some other author’s book or paper, then he or she should mention the author along with the year of publication at the beginning or end of the paraphrased quote.

If there are more than one author, then the writer should mention the surnames and the year along with the indirect quote. However, if the writer of the APA-styled paper has quoted the work or three authors then for the first mention, the names, surnames and the year of publication should be included, while for all the subsequent mentions, the writer may just put the name and surname of the first author and add “et al.” for the other authors.

References

Every paper should contain references and bibliography section given at the end of the paper. The references can include journals, videos, books, newspapers and websites with exact URL-links to the pages quoted. The APA guidelines do not encourage usage references from Wikipedia, and other crowd-sources pages such as Yahoo answers, ask.com, Quora and such. Any sources unverified authenticity aren’t allowed.

As you can see, the rules are straightforward and easy to adhere to, so the most important part of your success is actually conducting a thorough research.