Overall Structure of an APA Paper

Your APA paper should include the following basic elements:

1. Title page
2. (In rare cases) Table of contents
3. Abstract
4. Body
5. References
6. (In rare cases) Endnotes

General Formatting Rules

Font

Your paper should be written in 12-point Times or Times New Roman font.

Line Spacing

All text in your paper should be double-spaced.

Margins

All page margins (top, bottom, left, and right) should be 1 inch (or greater, but 1 inch is standard). All text, with the exception of headers, should be left-justified.

Indentation

The first line of every paragraph and footnote should be indented 1 inch (with the exception of the first line of your Abstract, which should begin at the margin).

Page Numbers

Page numbers in Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3…) should appear right-justified in the header of every page, beginning with the number 1 on the title page. Most word-processing programs have the ability to automatically add the correct page number to each page so you don’t have to do this by hand.

General Grammar Rules

The Oxford Comma

The Oxford comma (also called the serial comma) is the comma that comes after the second-to-last item in a series or list. For example:

The UK includes the countries of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

In the above sentence, the comma immediately after "Wales" is the Oxford comma.

In general writing conventions, whether the Oxford comma should be used is actually a point of fervent debate among passionate grammarians. However, it's a requirement in APA style, so double-check all your lists and series to make sure you include it!

Capitalization After Colons and Em Dashes

If you have a colon or em dash (—) in the middle of a sentence, and what follows after is an independent clause (i.e., it could be a sentence on its own), the word after the colon or em dash should be capitalized (as though the following sentence were on its own). For example:

There was only one possible explanation: The train had never arrived.

Here, "The train had never arrived" could stand as its own sentence because it is an independent clause (i.e., it has both a subject—the train—and a verb phrase—had never arrived). Therefore, we capitalize its first word following the colon.

However, if we make one small change to this sentence, the rule changes:

There was only one possible person to blame: the train conductor.

Here, "the train conductor" cannot stand as its own sentence, so its first word following the colon is not capitalized.

Sentence Spacing

It used to be convention to type two spaces after every period—for example:

"Mary went to the store.  She bought some milk.  Then she went home."

This convention was developed when typewriters were in use; the space on a typewriter was quite small, so two spaces were needed to emphasize the end of a sentence. However, typewriters, and therefore this practice, are now obsolete—in fact, using two spaces after sentences is now generally frowned upon. APA style in particular includes an explicit rule to use only single spaces after periods:

"Mary went to the store. She bought some milk. Then she went home." 

A Note on the Table of Contents

Because APA style is so often used for journal articles, which appear as part of a larger body of work, it does not provide guidelines for tables of contents for the individual papers themselves. If your professor asks you to include a table of contents in your paper, they will give you their own guidelines for formatting.