Before we get him to know how to use the APA format to cite an essay, we need to understand what the APA means. APA stands for American Psychological information. It is a formatting style that most writers use to cite their work. Let us know how we use this style when writing a term paper or research paper.
Cover pages
Cover heads must have running headings, and writers should capitalize on a 12 point font size and then times new roman font type.
Abstract
The types of papers that exceed more than five pages must consist of abstracts. Abstracts usually bring out the message of the paper. When one is writing an abstract, he should put it in the middle. One should indent the beginning lines just like other lines from other paragraphs. A student can decide to include the main points just after completing the abstract. One must write the whole text of the paper in the font size of twelve points, and font type of times new roman. Now when you come writing abstracts. An abstract contains about one hundred fifty to two hundred words.
Sub-headings and headings
Sub-Headings and headings must have a unique font from the cover Page. Many learners make mistakes in capitalizing on the theories’ titles. Students must decease from using this method. And also, one must not italicize, make the font bold, or even underline the words. The style that most writers will prefer is the A-B-C system. It is a style that they use. You arrange the titles, sub-headings, and so on. For Eg when one uses the ‘B’ kind of system, the sub-headings font style should be unique from the heading.
Now when you are using the ‘B’ style, one must not indent his work. But the first line should have an alignment of the left. Level ‘C’ kind of styles must be different from the other kinds of systems. The paragraph which follows after the heading must be direct to the headings.
In-text citations
When one is using the APA, there is a format that he follows, which is:
- Opening brackets
- Last name of the writer
- Commas
- Spaces
- A year
- Closing brackets
The illustration below can be. “(Ben, 2015)”. When you are quoting someone’s work, you add a page number to the citation, and you indicate it as P.A, which is a signal phrase, and then the last name of the author. You can use this to bring in a quotation. There are those instances where the signal phrase does not contain the name of the author. An in-text citation and the number of the page must follow. When you use two-three authors, you can still apply the same system. But you have several authors exceed 3. That is when you add ‘et al.’. Usually, when using ‘et al.’, you use before the second author’s name. That is to say “(ben et al., 2015)”. In other situations, the writer applies a semicolon to put together two or more citations with the same phrase. But the names should follow an alphabetical order arrangement (Ben,2015; Megan,2015).
References
The reference section should have a page of its own. And the writer should align the center of the page. One must not underline this heading, make them bold, and Italicizing them. The arrangements of this kind of work must be the last author’s name, comma, the first name initials, full stops, then put a space, then the publication’s title, full stops, and then space, opening brackets, the year of the article and then closing brackets.
The illustrations are as follows, “Ben, T. (2015). The advantages of robots in the modern world. Harvard press.” These formats should have hanging and alphabetical order.
For one to know how to use the APA style, one needs to know or understand it.
Conclusion
Before you start to use this formatting style, you also need to know the difference between the APA and MLA writing formats.