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
Additional References
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.