One or more of your professors may have mentioned (presumably in either hushed or frantic tones) that they want the papers you write for their class to adhere to “APA style” or “APA formatting.” If you had never heard of such a thing, this request may have seemed at once both urgent and deceptively understated, as if it were of life and death importance that you follow the guidelines for an organization that you are not a part of, but also that it was to them so commonplace that it must seem peculiar that one would not instinctively understand the rules.
Saying that a paper should adhere to “APA style” is shorthand for saying that it ought to follow the guidelines described in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Your professor may have specified a specific “edition” of APA formatting that you ought to follow. We’re on the seventh edition, now. If this seems pedantic, that is because it is. But you didn’t go to grad school to not deal with things that are pedantic.
This FAQ will answer general questions about APA style and direct you to resources to help you as you write. It will be updated.
I’m familiar with another formatting style (MLA, Chicago, etc.). Is APA the same thing?
Sort of. All of these other style/formatting guidelines contain basically the same kinds of information. That is not to say that they want you to do the same thing, though. The specific rules of different systems of academic formatting reflect the kinds of disciplines that use those systems. APA style, for instance, being that it comes from the American Psychological Association, has been organized to better meet the needs of people writing within the discipline of psychology and adjacent disciplines. MLA style, on the other hand, is a product of the Modern Language Association, and has been designed by people working in the literature and language fields. You can see how and why they differ by looking at the way they cite things in text.
Both APA and MLA use in-text and parenthetical citations (as opposed to footnotes) to reference outside materials. MLA uses an author-page system; APA uses an author-date system:
MLA: “Christofer, whose story comprises the first significant narrative of Laurus, rationalizes leaving his family in a series of notes written on birch bark: ‘After all, they are already adults. After all, their child is already one year old. I am of the opinion they will be better off without me'” (Vodolazkin 14).
APA: “Habermas’ notions of engagement in the public sphere dictate a set of unwritten rules for those who have adopted a religious point of view as the basis for their pubic participation. This process demands that religious actors let the institutionalized sciences control truth-claims related to the mundane aspects of life. (Habermas, 2011).
It might not seem like a big thing (especially if you are a well-adjusted member of society), but the difference between these two systems signals what they specialize in and focus on. Scholars using MLA (esp. literary scholars) are likely to cite multiple passages from the same work and therefore it makes sense that they highlight the pages that they are quoting from. Scholars using APA are likely to compare many different articles/works in order to develop some argument about the state of the conversation that they are entering. They also tend to prefer paraphrasing over direct quoting; therefore, the date of publication is highlighted in the citation.
Of course, there is overlap (if you quote in APA, for instance, you still use the page number), but this at least demonstrates that you can sometimes figure out what a formatting style “wants from you” if you think about what most of the people who use that formatting style care about. Here’s a good overview of what APA wants from you when it comes to citing materials in text.
What besides citations does APA formatting have rules for?
Pretty much everything. Although it is easy to think about APA style only in terms of citations and reference lists, remember that the book in question is called the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. This means that a lot of the rules of APA style/formatting are only going to be of interest to people working at academic presses. That being said, a lot of that falls on you as well. Here is a brief list of things that the APA manual has rules about:
- Headings, sub-headings, titles
- Abstracts and paper sections
- Writing style and tone
- Capitalization, pronoun usage, abbreviations, spelling
- Table and figure formatting
- References and citations
Many of these things are just simple rules to follow, no different than a recipe in a cookbook. If you have never seen it, take a look at the table of contents for the APA Publication Manual.
If I have never written using APA style before, what should I focus on?
There is no such thing as a perfect paper, and people who have worked in APA for their entire careers still make mistakes. So, do your best, but also expect that you’ll always have room to improve. (Also, side bar: Not every professor you work with will care equally about all parts of the APA manual. Some professors use “APA style” as a kind of shorthand for the things they really care about, but don’t take that to mean that their demands are the be-all-end-all requirements of an APA paper. Likewise, not every journal that follows the APA guidelines follows all of them: for classrooms and journals, house style rules.)
That being said, here’s what I think you should focus on in order of importance:
- Citations and references
- Conciseness and clarity
- General formatting (headings, sub-headings, etc.)
- Rules for tables and figures
What is meant by “conciseness and clarity”?
Remember what I said earlier about different publication styles reflecting the fields that use them? Well, modern academic psychology has put a premium on writing shorter articles in greater numbers. Publication standards influence and are influenced by changes in tenure/professional development standards which influence and are influenced by the kinds of things that people are “expected” to produce and so on. In short, APA style would prefer that you write in clear, brief prose. Nothing that I have written in this post or ever before follows that guideline.
Here are some suggestions to follow to help you write more concisely:
- Try not to stack clauses on top of clauses in a single sentence. Though it is ok to have a cause-and-effect or explanatory sentence, you probably don’t want a cause-and-effect sentence that outlines multiple potential effects or extenuating factors.
Less clear/concise: Though the survey results may have been influenced by later respondents learning more about the situation before they participated in the study, it is clear that most people had a positive opinion of the government’s recent policy initiatives, whether or not they would admit to it if asked directly.
More clear/concise: Survey results suggest that a majority of people have a positive opinion of the government’s recent policy initiatives. However, these results may be shaded by later respondents having learned more about the initiative than early respondents.
Even though the second example isn’t all that much shorter than the first, it does a few important things. First, for the sake of clarity, it separates the main claim from a clarifying/amending clause. Second, it uses framing language (e.g. “However…”) to help the audience understand what the relationship between these two sentences is before they read both of them. In terms of concision, the second example ditches the caveat about respondents admitting to something if they were asked directly. Unless this is a central issue within the paper/research, there isn’t any reason to bring it up.
- Avoid jargon or terms that are needlessly confusing. Writing for academic audiences doesn’t mean that you have to pull out your fanciest words. It also doesn’t mean that you should use complicated industry-specific terms unless you need to. Somewhat counter-intuitively, writing for an academic audience requires you to give enough background information and context for an audience with general expertise/comprehension (not total specialization) in your field. Sometimes this means giving up terms that are shorthand in your field–or, as is often the case, terms that have a lot of stylistic importance for an audience that you are familiar with, but little substance beyond that.
Too much jargon: To achieve synergy between its short-term goals and its long-term strategic initiatives, a company like Facebook needs to consider the scalability of its product for the future. Instead of a simple product re-imagining, Facebook needs to strive for an authentic paradigm shift.
Less confusing: Facebook needs to figure out how to balance its short-term and long-term goals. This could mean adapting its product to future changes, or it could be something more substantial.
There isn’t any hard and fast rule for what does and doesn’t constitute needless jargon. Just try not to sound like you are selling anything.
- Remember that your goal is to support an argument and not just show how smart you are. A place where this comes up a lot is in literature reviews. Though it might be tempting to show that you’ve read every relevant piece of scholarship that touches on the topic you are studying, doing so might distract from the argument you are trying to make about the pieces of scholarship that matter the most.
How does citation work in APA?
Citation is one of the aspects of APA formatting that is paint-by-numbers. The APA manual outlines specific guidelines for how to cite almost any kind of source that you will come across. The thing to remember about attribution in APA style is that there are two parts: the in-text citation and the corresponding reference entry. Every in-text citation must match with a reference entry; multiple in-text citations may match with the same reference entry.
So, for example, in your paper you might write something like:
Mikanovich (2020) argues that overreliance on established citation styles can hinder the professional development of graduate student writers. In particular, he claims that by learning to follow specific formatting rules rather than learning to understand how they mean to serve conversation in an academic community, students will only ever see attribution systems as an arbitrary system of instructions.
Here, the “(2020)” after the name “Mikanovich” indicates to the reader that you are citing material from something written in 2020 by an author whose last name is “Mikanovich,” and that they will be able to find a full reference entry for that material in the references section of your paper. That might look like this:
Mikanovich, T. (2020). Attribution and pedagogy. Journal of Fictitious Writing Studies, 14(2), 10-27.
That reference entry is for an article titled “Attribution and Pedagogy” that was published on pages 10-27 of the Journal of Fictitious Writing Studies, Volume 14, issue 2. Though different kinds of materials (journal articles, full manuscripts, individual chapters, newspaper articles, etc.) have different citation formats, they are (mostly) outlined in the APA manual.
How do I cite [material]?
If the specific type of source/material that you want to cite isn’t outlined in the APA manual, Google it. Chances are, you aren’t the first person to need to figure out how to do it. You might find multiple ways to cite something–pick the one that seems the least made-up.
This might seem flippant, but you have to remember that citation styles were designed to catalog the publications of the world; the publications of the world were not designed to appease existing citation styles. It isn’t uncommon that non-standard or unique materials will fall outside of the guidelines that the APA has set out. When all else fails, consider the following:
- One purpose of referencing the sources/materials that you use in your paper is so that your readers can go and find those materials on their own. Will they be able to find the material with the information you’ve given them?
- Another purpose of attribution is to give credit to the appropriate people. Is it clear who deserves credit for the material that you are referencing?
- Besides specific citation instructions, the APA Manual describes a general set of guidelines for referencing sources in your paper.
Another good resource is the APA Style Blog. There you’ll find questions and answers about citing weird materials, formatting issues, stylistic guidelines, and other things. It’s a bit of a grab-bag, but it can be helpful in a pinch.