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Speaking of resources, here are some of my favorites!
This chapter
This chapter will be a great resource to explain APA Style formatting, how to do it, and sometimes why we do things the way that we do.
OWL Purdue
The Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (website address: http://owl.english.purdue.edu) has an immense collection of webpages dedicated to APA Style, including specific pages that you might need like a whole section on Tables and Figures. There’s a PDF of a sample Professional Style paper with explanations of formatting. There's also a sample paper for students, but we are using the professional version.
APA Style Checklist
This PDF is a checklist developed by Dr. MO to go through before you turn in any statistics paper that is supposed to be formatted in APA Style. You can use this for non-statistics APA Style papers, too, but there are other important features in APA Style that aren’t included because they are less important when describing a distribution compared to a full manuscript on an experiment that you conducted.
Video
Many people learn best by watching (and re-watching) videos, so here’s a good video in Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\) showing how to format a Word document into an APA Style paper. Although sometimes the features are in different places in a Google doc or on a Mac, all word processing software will allow you to make these modifications.
DO NOT USE THE APA STYLE TEMPLATE PROVIDED BY WORD. I know that this seems like an easy way to format you paper, but the template is really difficult to modify. For example, if you don’t need, say, an abstract or a reference page for your paper, it is nearly impossible to delete those from your paper when created from the template without messing up the formatting for the rest of your paper.
Sample Paper
Here is a sample paper as a Word document (.docx). Save this to your own drive or computer so that you can save and modify it. This is an example paper to show APA Style formatting, and the basic information in a descriptive statistics paper. Careful reading shows that the topic and numbers change throughout the paper because it is a combination of several different students’ papers. This is just a guide; do NOT copy the words, just the format.
Publication Manual
Dr. MO encourages you to purchase the APA Style manual if you are a psychology or sociology major. However, your school’s library has the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th ed. Note that it is typically considered a reference (like a dictionary or encyclopedia), so you probably can’t take it out of the library. Your library probably has a webpage devoted to APA Style, as well.
The APA also provides instructional aids (website address: https://apastyle.apa.org/instructional-aids), some for free and some are not. When using these, make sure to use the resources for the Professional type of paper, not the Student version (unless your instructor prefers the Student version).
Contributors and Attributions
- The Nature of Writing's APA Essay Format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrh5OC3T6dc
