Using APA Style in a Paper, Essay Example

Abstract

The abstract of the paper is not indented. It tells about your paper in about a few words.  If you use numbers, use them at the beginning of sentences.  100 people participated in the study, would be the correct way to type this sentence.  You can also use abbreviations, because you have to say a lot in a short space.  Make your abstract as interesting as you can.  When people are doing their own research, they read abstracts to see if they want to delve more deeply into the paper.  This is not as easy as it may seem. 120 words is your word count limit.  It is hard to summarize important work this way, but you can do it.

Using APA Style in a Paper

American Psychological Association (APA) style was developed to give a standard to academic writing.  Research that reports in APA style includes a title page, an abstract, an introduction, methods, results, discussions, references, and appendices.  The style format is concerned about typeface, line spacing, margins, and page headers.  Five levels of headings frame the details of an APA paper.

Language bias is to be avoided. Plagiarism is avoided by citing sources within the text.  For example, if this sentence was taken from an article Smith published in 2003, the end of the sentence would end (Smith, 2003).  If Smith was quoted there it would end (Smith, 2003, p. 3), placing Smith’s exact words in quotation marks.  If the Smith quotation was longer than 40 words, the entire quotation, without quotation marks, would be indented.  Numbers less than 10 are written out, for example, two, three, or nine.

Reference lists, placed at the end of the paper, need to be as comprehensive as possible, listing information about the author, year of publication, title of work, publisher of work, and page numbers, in that order.  References use hanging indentations, meaning, the first line is flush left while subsequent lines are indented. Running heads are formatted to show at the top of each page.  Abstracts are not indented and usually are not more than 120 words. APA papers are double-spaced.

APA is now in its 6^th Edition.  The newest changes reflect changes that technological searches bring to academic reporting.  Now, two spaces after a period, rather than one, are recommended for ease of reading.  Numbers representing lengths of time get full lettering instead of using numbers.

Conclusion

In this section, all you want to do is summarize the main points that you have made and express your key findings succinctly.  After the Abstract, this is the second most read part of your paper.  Researchers who find what they are interested in here decide to read more from the main body of your work.

Reference

American Psychological Association’s Style Manual (6^th ed.). (2009). Arlington, VA: Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.