A number of students get perplexed when it comes to writing their academic papers in a particular referencing style such as APA. High school students are at times asked to write term papers, essays etc, where as college or university students have to indulge in academic writing for all their courses. A referencing style is required in all academic papers for the student to give credit to his sources of information. This means that all the ideas and findings mentioned in the paper which are not yours must be referenced as the original author's work. This also enables readers to use these sources to conduct their own research.
When to Use APA Writing Style?
The APA (American Psychological Association) writing style was basically created to cite sources in psychology and certain science documentation. But with time, APA format has started to be used by several others disciplines such as medicine and education. The documentation in this writing style is very rigorous.
Specification
It would be just about impossible to cover all the specification of the APA format as it just might fill up a book. A few of the most important specifications of the APA writing style can be mentioned in this article. Those are:
In-Text Citation
When using the APA format, in-text citations must be used to credit the original author. Citations are to be put in parenthesis. The name of the author as well as the publication date must be provided in the parenthesis. Mention 'n.d.' if the date of publication is not available.
Footnotes
Footnotes are also used in all academic papers that are referenced according to the APA writing style. Footnotes are not commonly used now, but were used as the only citation source a long time back. Still, it is important for writers to know how to use them in case they are required.
Endnotes/Bibliography
Endnotes are very similar to footnotes. They are used to provide information about the sources. All of the references must be placed on a page at the end of the paper. The bibliography page is extremely important. It identifies every single source that has been used for the production of the paper. All of the sources included in this page must consist of the author's name, title, place and date of publication. The entries must be put in alphabetical order, must be punctuated, indented, and styled according to specific rules of APA format citation.
Terence Reed is an Academic Writing Specialist, working with Essays Aid to serve a diverse body of students with their term papers.