In this video I'd like to show you how to format your essay using the APA
guidelines, 7th edition. Now, with the 7th edition there are some changes, and in
particular students no longer have to supply an abstract or a running head. If
your instructor does ask for one of those things, then just stay tuned for
the end of the video and I will cover these items there. The first thing you
want to do in your essay is [to] provide a page number. There are a couple of ways to do
this in Microsoft Word. You can simply double click at the top of your page, and
it will open up the design tab, and you can click on page number. The other way
to do it is to go to the insert button here. That provides another option as
well. So we'll click on page number, top of the page, and plain number 3. Now, you
want to make sure that you use the same font and the same font size throughout
your essay. The only exception would be [for] footnotes, which can be smaller, and some
tables and figures. There's some room there as well. So I'm just going to press
Ctrl-A, which highlights all the text in the headers, and go back to home. I'm
going to use Times New Roman size 12, because I like that font but the 7th
edition of the APA guidelines allows you quite a bit of flexibility. There are
some other fonts that you can use as well. So, having done that, I'm going to click
outside of my header area. And I'll put our cursor at the top here. Now we're
going to set up the rest of our paper, and we want to make sure that all of our
paper (I'll press ctrl-a again here) ... all of our paper is double spaced -- so 2.0.
We also want to make sure there's no extra spacing before or after paragraphs.
Alright, so having done that, and having made sure
that we use Times New Roman, size 12, [we'll] get rid of the bold for the moment, [and] we now
need to press ENTER 3 to 4 times. 1 2 3 4. Okay, 3 is fine as well, and we're going
to add our essay title at this point. We'll center it, and then we'll type
it out. So let's come up with a title here. Let's
see here: "Transference in the Classroom."
We'll add a subtitle: "A Case Study of PSY 303." There we go. Now we need to make sure
that our title is bold and centered, as mentioned, and it should also be in title
case, which means that important words in the title are capitalized but smaller
words such as prepositions and articles and so on are not. Notice that after the
colon, however, we do capitalize even the smaller words. If your title is quite
long then you can put it across two lines, and this works especially well
after the colon. So you could do it like this, but in this case, because the title
is short enough, we can just keep it on one line. So there we are again.
We're going to press ENTER a couple of times after our title, which means that
there's going to be a space, a bigger space between our title and the rest of
the information that goes on the front page. At this point we put our own
name, so let's just make up a name here. Make sure you also add your initial in
the middle, and if you have multiple people working as a group you can
provide a second name by just putting "and" and then the other name. If you have
even more names than that then just separate them with commas and put "and"
before the final name. After this we're going to make sure we add our Department --
the Department of Psychology let's say -- followed by the university. We'll
just make up a fake University here. Next line is going to be our course name. So
let's just call this PSY 303, and we'll call this [class] Freud. There you go --
that's as much as I know about psychology. Then we add the instructor's
name. So Dr. James H. Hanson, let's say, and finally the
date. Now, the tendency, or the preference withAPA is that you write out the entire
month (let's say, January 27 2020), but there are some different date formats as
well. You could reverse the month and the day, for instance. So there are
different options at this point. The next thing to do is we need to go to
the next page to start our essay. To do that we're going to insert a page
break ... Do that for each section of your paper because it
really nicely keeps things separate and stops things from
... moving around to the wrong place. At this point we need to repeat our
title, so I'm actually just going to copy and paste our title. There we go.
There's our title. Again, it's centered, and then once we start our text we're
gonna make sure our text is left-aligned, but we also want to indent our first
paragraph. In fact, every paragraph is indented. So let's just pretend that our
essay starts here. Notice that there is no extra spacing before or after
headings. You also don't have to add a heading
that says "introduction" or something like that. There shouldn't be
additional headings between the title and your first paragraph. Later in
the essay you can use other headings to organize the information, and these might
be headings such as "method" or "results" or "discussion." Those are common headings.
As you organize the information the APA provides five different levels of
headings. These have changed a little bit from the sixth edition, so try to figure
out which ones to use, and for all of them you're supposed to use title case.
So make sure again that you capitalize important words. The last part of your
essay is the references page. To show what that looks like, I've
formatted it here already. Again, "references" ... the word
is going to be in bold, in the center, and then your first entry is going to be on
the left here (so left aligned). But I've also used a hanging indentation.
To do that go to "paragraph," click on the little button, and go to
"special," and select "hanging," and from this point on all your entries are going to
be hanging. When you press ENTER it'll go back to the left margin, but as you
keep typing it will indent each line after the first for every single entry.
So that would be the references page. Now if your instructor does ask for an
abstract or running head, let me show you very quickly how to do that. First, the
abstract. For the abstract, we need to go back to our first page and then we
need to insert a page break. There we go. I'm going to type "abstract," and we will
bold it. Then we'll start our abstract and again this needs to be not bold and left
aligned. There we go, and in this case the paragraph does not need to be
indented. This is the one exception in the essay. So, don't intend this one. Also,
make sure it's a single paragraph and it's a maximum of 250 words. Then
finally, for the running head, you can do this in any header really ... but you just
double click in the header. You start typing and you can use a shorter version
of your title. It doesn't even have to be exactly the same words. You can kind of
paraphrase. But make sure that you use all caps. So everything is in capital
letters. There we go, and make sure that it's no longer than 50 characters.
That also includes the spaces actually between the words. After you've typed
that, press the tab button twice. One, two. And now it's on the left side, while your
page number stays on the right. That's it for how to format an APA paper!