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ABOUT APA FORMAT AND STYLE
APA Style is, simply put, a set of guidelines defined by the American Psychological Association for standardizing the layout, language, and organization of research papers. These guidelines are published in the 5th edition of The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. These guidelines help researchers in a variety of fields - psychology, sociology, business, medicine, and economics -- to present their findings in a systematic and lucid manner. There are two primary aspects of the APA Guidelines, that we can separate into these two broad categories: Format, and Style. Format refers to the physical layout of the paper: the width of the margins, font to be used for the text, information to be included on the title page, attributes for section headings, placement of the title, inclusion of page headers and numbering -- that sort of detail. The Dr Paper Templates allow you to create a paper that conforms to the APA (and MLA) formatting guidelines for your papers. Style guidelines have more to do with the content of the paper -- the words, in other words, and the way in which those words are used to express your ideas. Organization of papers presenting research findings into sections covering Method, Participants, Results, and Discussion, for instance, is a structural standard for organizing the presentation of research suggested by APA Style. More general rules of language governing the use of abbreviations, preferences for unbiased and nonpejorative descriptive terms, concise expression, and proper grammatical construction of sentences -- are also aspects of APA writing style. If you are new to APA Style, you will need to make sure you have access to the detailed instructions and explanations of the guidelines listed in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.
More about APA Format.
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