Since college is often the first (and only) place that many people will need to use the writing style set forth by the American Psychological Association (APA), the method is often new…and can be rather confusing.
In the U.S., one ubiquitous method for determining a student’s comprehension of concepts is written essays. Papers. Along with original thoughts and explanations of concepts, students are required to support their analysis with outside resources.
APA style not only guides the tone and formatting of the page, but deals heavily with how to properly cite the relevant resources. For many students, the precision of APA style can make the production of a paper downright painful.
Albert Einstein is credited with saying,
“I do not have to know everything. I just need to know where to find it when I need it.”
In that spirit, let us share a couple of our favorite resources for assisting students with APA style for their papers.
1. Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab)
Purdue is excellent at teaching writing styles and this web site is loaded with answers to all your APA questions. Prefer video? While their web site is more comprehensive, you can also check out their tutorials on Purdue’s YouTube Channel.
2. Citation Machine
There are few different reliable citation generator applications out in the cybersphere. Whichever one you choose, this is a quick way to get the citation information ordered correctly – for both the reference page and in-text citations.
But even with this tool, students still have some important responsibilities:
- Be sure you have all the relevant information from the source (author, title, publishing date, access date, etc.)
- Be sure you enter the title according to APA capitalization rules. (Hint: Not every word in a title is capitalized. Check the rules first.)
- Be sure to place both the in-text citations and the full citation in the appropriate places. For example, the full citations are to be listed in alphabetical order on the References page of your paper.
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Please use these shortcuts on your papers as you work toward your college degree.
Check out our programs to see which is best for you. http://www.bottega.edu
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