APA Style

A Quick Guide

Additional resources can be found in the APA LibGuide, and full

style guides are available at the reference desk. If you do have

additional questions, please don’t hesitate to ask the librarians!

http://libguides.kvcc.edu/APA

Title Page:

The paper title should be on the upper half of the

page,

Capitalize all verbs and words more than

4 letters long.

Author name should be below the title

Institution name below the author

Use of date, assignment, class and instructor

names are at the discretion of your instructor.

Paper Format:

Page numbers go at the top right, and start at 1

An ALL CAPS Running Header should be on the

top left of every page

Everything should be double spaced

1inch margins on all sides

12pt Times New Roman font

Indent paragraphs 5 spaces (1 tab key)

*All these rules are at the discretion of your instructor, what it says on

their assignment sheet trumps the style rules!

In Text Citations:

Basic

When quoting or paraphrasing from a source, attribution must be given by inserting a citation. This citation typi-

cally consists of the author’s name, year of publication, and page number in parentheses at the end of the sentence.

The usage of the term “archive” has drawn some ire from the professional archival community (Flinn, 2010 p. 352).

Another option is to use the author’s name in the sentence, followed directly by the year and page number in pa-

rentheses, at the end of the sentence.

As Alcantara-Tan notes, “I do a zine [Bamboo Girl] that speaks from my point of view (2000 p. 18).

Long Quotes/Block Quotes

Quotations longer than 40 words need to be set apart from the rest of the text. Do not use quotation marks. The

quote should be in a new paragraph and indented from the left margin, just like a new paragraph. The parenthe-

tical citation comes after the final punctuation mark.

Marginalized people with little power over their status in the world still retain a powerful weapon: the in

terpretations they give to the circumstances and conditions that surround them, and the ideals and char

acter traits they possess. (Duncombe, 2007 p. 3)

Paragraph Format:

Do not justify the right edge of paragraphs, do not use a hyphen to break a word between two lines, and always

use two spaces after any terminal punctuation (periods, et cetera/etc. that ends a sentence).

References

Alcantara-Tan, S. M. (n.d.). The Herstory of "Bamboo Girl". Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 21(1/2), 159-

170. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3347041

No DOI is given for this journal entry, so a stable URL is used instead.

Duncombe, S. (1997). Notes from underground: (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Verso.

For books, the state/province/country abbreviations should be included after the publisher’s city.

Flinn, A., Stevens, M., & Shepard, E. (2009). Whose memories, whose archives? Independent community archives,

autonomy and the mainstream. Archival Science, 9(1), 71-86. https://10.1007/s10502-009-9105-2.org/

This article has a DOI, so that is used in place of a stable URL

Independent Researchers not Affiliated with Harvard. (n.d.). Retrieved from Admittance website: http://

hcl.harvard.edu/info/admittance/index.cfm#other_researchers

Web pages often don’t have an author or date given. In that case, you start with the title of the

webpage, and add (n.d.). where a date would normally be placed.

Jones, B. (1997, May 25). Why students hate APA. The San Francisco Times, p. A12

Newspaper articles italicize the name of the newspaper, and follow that page numbering system

Jones, B. (1997, May 25). Why students hate APA format. The San Francisco Times. Retrieved from http://

sanfrantimes.com/2008/APA.html

Newspaper articles retrieved from the internet follow the same format as paper, with the URL

instead of page number.

The page should be titled References

This should be centered

All text is still double spaced

References should be listed in alphabetical order

Citations that are more than one line should

have a ‘hanging indent’

Indent the second, and subsequent lines

by .5”, or 1 tab key

All months should be spelled out completely

Reference Page

The last page of your paper should be your references page.

Each in-text citation must have a full citation on the refer-

ence page, and every entry on the reference page must have

an in-text citation.

Basic Format:

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Ti

tle of article: Subtitle words. Title of Periodical,

volume number (issue number), pages. doi:http://

dx.doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyyy