Tips on Formatting the Essay in APA Style

This referencing style is widely used in the social sciences. To use APA well, it’s important to keep the following points in mind.

To start with, it’s important to know that entire research papers can get thrown out if the author doesn’t know proper APA formatting. The title page must have a number of relevant details like the paper’s title, the writer's name, the name of the institution, the course of study prefix and name, the professor’s name, and the paper’s due date. It’s important to format the details in the title page with double spacing and by positioning them in the middle of the first page.

Next, integrate the header. A document’s header has the title and page numbers on each page. To generate a header, click on View located on the Menu bar and select Header and Footer. Or in later versions of Microsoft Word, just double click at the top of the page. The header box will open up and sketch out a dotted line. After this, check the last tab in the header to move it to the margin since it should be indented an inch. Alternatively, you can easily click the right justify icon to navigate the cursor to the far right side of the header. Go ahead and type the topic of the research paper using at most 50 characters and select the auto page number icon.

The research paper should be double-spaced without omitting the title page and bibliography. Good documents exclude any extra space from the preliminary paragraph to the concluding one.

If you are using Microsoft Office 1997-2003, you need to make sure that your margins are correct for APA style. The default is normally set at 1.25" on the left and right while APA requires 1-inch margins on both sides. After you have fixed your margins, select either Times New Roman or Ariel and size 12 font.

Finally, list the references alphabetically by the writer’s last name and double space them. In cases where there are no authors, just leave the document’s title.