American Psychological Association (APA) style is a method of formatting and referencing works in research papers and manuscripts. This style is most commonly practiced by academics within the social sciences, including the fields of education, psychology, political science, and economics. APA style provides writers with a consistent formula for acknowledging the works of others by using parenthetical in-text citations and a page listing all references. Additionally, APA style makes use of specific guidelines concerning the structure, content, and order of each page of a research paper or manuscript. Adhering to the uniform standards of APA style will enhance your paper’s organization and allow readers to review your work with greater clarity.
Not all social science instructors use APA, and you should always follow their individual style preferences, but the ultimate goal for APA formatting and citation standards is to provide everyone with a common template to draw from. If you’re still inclined to dismiss documentation as overly zealous attention to comma placement, it might help to think about the philosophy behind documentation styles, which is essentially to give students clear tools with which to enter academic conversation. Editors want you to have the tools of the trade, so spending a few minutes on documentation styles—and the plural is important because a liberal arts education such as Geneseo’s asks you to recognize that academic disciplines have differing conventions—is in line with Geneseo’s writing seminar’s emphasis on academic writing as a process in which students are introduced to the conventional moves that structure this variety of writing, have opportunities to practice the moves and improve at them, and know where to find resources to refresh their memories when they need these skills in future classes.
Let’s be frank about the number of details that go into a correctly formatted APA document! Yes, there are a lot of details, and yes, it’s time-consuming to check that you’re attending to all those details while you’re constructing your argument. Try thinking about it the same way you would approach assembly instructions for something like a futon: if you eyeball the hardware and all those flat-pack pieces of wood, and decide that it really doesn’t matter whether you differentiate 3-inch from 3.5-inch bolts, or whether you assemble Part C before Part D when Part D is the one in your hand right now, you know in your heart of hearts exactly what will happen to your futon! When you’re holding a buckled armrest or find yourself suddenly collapsing to the floor in the middle of the night, you’ll appreciate that yes, it would have been better to read the manual closely the first time (or to have read it at all…) instead of displaying a warped futon or having to unpick your mistakes now when you’re tired and it’s dark and you really have better things to be doing with your time. The authors of APA style have made their documentation conventions as clear as possible, but there’s no escaping the fact that sometimes you just have to put in some careful work.
The APA articles and templates on this website were developed in accordance with the 6th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, which has been in use since 2009, but a seventh edition was published late in 2019. In the decade between editions, citing online material has become more common, and the use of inclusive and bias-free language has become an important convention, so we have updated our conventions and advice where relevant. Consult the Publication Manual (7th ed.) for more details about formatting and organizing your document.
