The American psychological association (APA) has a template that dictates how college and university students should format their APA college papers written in word. Mostly this style was designed to be used by the students in the social sciences faculty but in the recent years it has been used by all research related faculties such as the sciences and humanities.
Therefore understanding this writing style is very important because you will use it throughout your academic life whenever you will be required to write an APA college paper.
APA College Paper General Format
The order when writing should be as follows.
- Title page. The title page should contain your name, your department and institution, your course.
- Abstract. The abstract section should contain a brief summary of your work and the word limit should be between 150-250 words.
- Body. The body contains your arguments and points discussed in detail.
- Reference. Citation and references should be done within the body section and in the references list section.
- Appendices. The appendix sections contain the unpublished tests or other descriptions of complex nature.
- Footnotes. Footnote holds information to sustainably back the information in your texts.
- Table, and figures respectively. Finally tables are used to present quantitative data or statistical results, while the figures are used to show a particular trend, or to compare results derived from experiments.
APA College Paper Margins and Alignment
Formally the required margin size was set at one and a half inch but due to the changes that occurred the new margin size is now set at one inch on all side whether top or bottom or left or right. as for the alignment the text should be aligned left this will create and uneven right margin.
APA College Paper Template Font, size and spacing
For all APA college papers you will write under then APA style format ensure to use the times new roman font and a default size of 12 throughout. As for the spacing ensure you double space the whole document, including the appendices, footnotes, tables and figures.
Furthermore, when it comes to punctuation marks ensure that you space once after commas, semicolons and colons within sentences and twice after the punctuation marks that comes at the end of the sentences.
APA College Paper Template Titles and headings
Running heads are short titles located at the top of each of the pages of your article. Short titles on the other hands are two to three word derivation of the title of your paper.
The short tiles are written flush right while the running headings are written flush left. The running heads should not exceed fifty characters including punctuation’s.
College Paper Active Voice
Traditionally the APA writing format style required students to write in an impersonal form. This meant refraining from the use of “I” and “We” in their statements.
However, this has changed and students are required to use the active voice. For example, instead of writing “according to the report” the student should write “according to our report”. This ensures that the college paper is as active as possible.
Here is a figure showing how an APA college paper should look like:
