APA Style

Overview

The American Psychological Association publishes a style guide, which details writing conventions that have been adopted as the standard format for scholarly publications in many disciplines, not just psychology. The APA style is one of many professional styles. During the course of your career, you may be asked to write according to APA style or one of the other styles. Even if you are not writing to a given style, adopting the conventions of APA format will help you to standardize your writing and communicate with your intended audience more effectively. Remember that the goal of a writing style guide is to improve communication. The definitive source for APA formatting style is the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th edition). There are numerous additional resources available from a variety of sources, but the Publication Manual itself is the source authority.

Topics

Word Usage
Grammatical Structures and Punctuation
Citations and Quotes
Reference List Elements
Headings
Title Page Elements
References to Numerical Information
Table and Figure Formatting

Additional References

Official APA site
OWL site at Purdue
Other resources listed at the OWL site

Purpose

The purpose of this site is to help you practice identifying correct and incorrect instances of APA formatting. For this site, practice with APA formatting includes issues of word usage, grammatical structures, punctuation, citations, references, headings, title page elements, references to numerical information, and table and figure formatting.

Intended Use

Read the APA Publication Manual and the content at the linked sites, and then practice identifying the correct and incorrect applications of the APA formatting style.