APA: American Psychological Association

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APA American Psychological Association
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• APA has gained wide acceptance as the style to
  conduct and write research in the social
  sciences. You will need it in any classes
  pertaining to the social sciences (i.e.
  psychology, anthroplology, education), business,
  and the biological and earth sciences.

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There are four sections to an APA style paper

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Main Body
• Reference Page
• You will not be doing an Absract

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Before we go into how to do the different
section, here are a few important things

• Verb tense is a distinguishing factor for an APA
  paper. You must use past or present perfect
  tense.
• Smiths article demonstrated or Smiths
  article has demonstrated

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• You should not use gendered pronouns.
• For example use the authors name, or say in the
  research instead of in his research.

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Research

• Your topic should be something that you can
  identify an issue or problem with that has been
  researched.
• You will be summarizing and analyzing the
  articles or books under review according to your
  findings in the research (i.e. the history,
  symptoms, and treatment for eating disorders).
• Recommend additional research that would
  logically grow from the work that you researched.
• You will need at least three scholarly,
  peer-reviewed sources. We will go over how to use
  Questia. This site and books on the topic are the
  most reliable.

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Format

• Standard paper
• Black ink, Standard font (12)
• Double spaced
• 1 inch margins at top, bottom, right, left of
  each page.
• Never divide words at the end of a line.

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Title Page

• Title a full explanation of your topic and
  issues covered.
• Your name first, middle initial, last.
• Institutional affiliation
• Running Head and page numbers. This is an
  abbreviated title printed at the top right of
  every page. NO MORE than 50 characters, including
  spaces.
• Here is an example.

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Main Body

• Begins with an introduction. This is the first
  one to two paragraphs of your paper. It should do
  the following
• Present the specific problem.
• Talk about the background of the topic.
• Contain the thesis statement where you state the
  purpose of your paper and what exactly you have
  set out to examine.

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• One of the most important aspects of a correctly
  done APA paper is in-text citations. YOU MUST
  credit all sources that you summarize, paraphrase
  or quote.
• An APA paper is strictly formal, does not include
  personal interjections or creative and poetic
  writing styles.

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• If you are simply paraphrasing or summarizing you
  only use the authors last name and year in
  parentheses.
• Holt (1998) indicates new trends in psychology.
• New trends are indicated in psychology (Holt,
  1998).

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• Multiple authors
• Two authors cite both every time (Smith and
  Holt, 1998)
• Three or more all authors in first citation,
  then ONLY last name of the first author followed
  be et al.
• Smith, Martin, Brown, and Kann (1997) mention
  that (first citation)
• Smith et al. (1997) (after first citation)

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• Exact quotations are done the same except you
  need to include the page number with p. pp.
• Ex Devlin and Brown introduced the idea of soft
  mathematics (p. 56).
• For quotes over forty words, the whole block is
  set a half inch over from left column.

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Reference Page

• Double spaced
• Alphabetized
• Type the first line of each entry flush left and
  indent succeeding lines five spaces.
• Follow exact format given to you in packet for
  the type of source that you use.