APA Proofreading

Students who have written papers in MLA for their first year often have trouble switching over to APA. Here are a number of things to check before turning in a paper in APA style.

Within the Paper

• Check your verbs-they should be in past tense for the reporting of any information (e.g., Researchers found . . . . )
• Check that your citations have 3 items if you are giving a direct quote: a last name, a year, and a page number with the p. or pp. For example: (Shannon, 2008, p. 43). It is ok to put the name and/or the year in the sentence itself, but all three items should be referenced if you give a direct quote. Sometimes the page number is not available, but it needs to be included when possible.
• Watch your headings. Level 1 headings are centered with uppercase and lowercase capitalization. Do not leave extra spaces between paragraphs and do not underline or boldface level 1 headings. If you go to another level of headings, those are italicized.
• Make sure you include a Running head in the upper left-hand margin and a page number in the upper right hand margin.
• Check that you use the ampersand (&) in in-text citations with two authors but the word "and" in the sentence itself.
• APA has an entire chapter on numbers-watch that yours are correct.
• If you are citing a web site, put the title of the web site in quotation marks; do not put the URL in the text.

The Reference Page

• Are the titles of books and journals in italics?
• Are article titles left alone (no quotation marks, no underlining)?
• Watch your capitalization of articles: in APA, make sure only the first word in the title, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalized. All the others are in lower case. Example: Studies of orphanages in Indonesia: One variable is resilience.
• Is the 2nd line and subsequent lines indented 5 spaces?
• Is the ampersand (&) used between two or more authors?

For more help with APA, please see the following web site:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/

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