Academic Success Center

What is APA Style? 

Source: https://apastyle.apa.org/about-apa-style

APA writing style is a set of guidelines and procedures used to format papers and cite sources in the social sciences, psychology, education, and related fields. Think of the APA style/manual as a cookbook that you have to follow closely to achieve the "recipe" you need, such as a journal article citation or a reference page. 

Headings

Headings identify the content within the sections of a paper, and they should be clear and concise to the reader. There are five levels of headings in APA formatting and how many are present depend on the complexity of a paper (if only one level of headings are needed, only use one). Please note that shorter student papers might not require any headings at all vs a dissertation or capstone. 

• Avoid having only one subsection heading within a section, just like in an outline.
• Do not label headings with numbers or letters.
• Double-space headings; do not switch to single spacing within headings.
• Do not add blank lines above or below headings, even if a heading falls at the end of a page.

Cover Page

The cover page provides basic information about your paper, take a look at the example from APA Style: 

In-Text Citations

In-text citations allow for a short reference to the work you are citing, that readers can then use to identify the full citation located in your references page. This will also signal to your readers what sections of your paper are including multiple voices other than your own. In-text citations will look different depending on the source type that you are referencing, for more information check out this page by APA Style. 

Reference Page

A reference page always appears at the end of a paper. it provides the necessary information for your reader to locate and retrieve any source that you cite in the body of your paper. Each source type has their own mechanics that need to be followed for full citations. Below is a quick reference guide for the most used source types in scholarly writing: