APA style is one of the most common citation and formatting styles you will encounter in your academic career. Any piece of academic writing can use APA style, from a one-page paper to a full-length book. It is widely used by hundreds of scientific journals and many textbooks. If you are writing a paper for a psychology or sociology class, it is possible that your professor will ask you to write in APA style.
The APA Manual
APA style is based on the style guide of the American Psychological Association (APA), officially titled the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. But APA style is not used only in the field of psychology; in fact, it is extremely common throughout the social and behavioral sciences, and somewhat common in other scientific fields, such as medicine.
The most recent version of the APA manual is the sixth edition, second printing (which corrected errors found in the first printing), published in 2009. The sixth edition introduced guidelines for citing online sources and online-access journal articles.
The Purpose of APA Style
The APA style guide aims to accomplish several goals:
- to ensure consistent formatting and presentation of information, for the sake of clarity and ease of navigation;
- to ensure proper attribution of ideas to their original sources, for the sake of intellectual integrity; and
- to provide a clear structural scaffold for an experimental paper, for the sake of scientific rigor.
Grammar and Formatting
APA style includes many basic grammatical rules. For example, APA style does use the Oxford comma, which some other citation styles (e.g., AP style) do not. Other examples include rules about what punctuation should be included inside a quotation and when to use what type of dash.
APA style also has rules about formatting, such as how to use different levels of headers throughout your paper and what size margins you should use.
Citations
APA style also puts forth guidelines for citing your sources—in fact, this is why it is called a "citation style." For example, APA style has specific rules for what information to include in your References section, how to cite quotations within a paragraph, and how to incorporate block quotations.
The Scientific Method
APA style rules are not limited to grammar and formatting; in fact, it was originally developed as a set of guidelines for writing without bias in the sciences. The guidelines for reducing bias in language have been updated over the years and provide practical guidance for writing about race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status.
APA style provides a roadmap for the structure of a scientific paper that closely mirrors the scientific method, with sections for the Introduction (including your hypothesis), Method, Results, and Discussion.