APA Format: An example of paper of writing
American psychological association or APA is a style of documentation, which is widely accepted style, and especially in social sciences. This style has specified names, order of headings, organization of citation, formatting, order of references, arrangement of tables, arrangement of figures, arrangement of footnotes, arrangement of appendices, manuscripts and other documentation features. It uses author date system of citations with parenthetical referencing which is keyed to a list of references, which is known as Harvard referencing. The manual of American psychological association publication provides basic guidelines for documentation of print and electronic resources. The electronic resources is updated and supplemented around 2007.
Examples of APA format
The title page with APA format can have running head with short title of your paper. Then on the lower part of that page, you can write the title of your paper, then your name and then school affiliation. You can write short title on the top and right side of the page. The example of the reference page can have short title on the top at the right side of the page. Then with the heading of references, you can name all the references. The example of tables in APA format can have table no, then headings of tables and columns in which, you can write data and numbers.
Reference list
The rules of reference list in APA format are different from other formats of writing. The reference section, bibliographies and other names in the list should be written by the surname first and the first alphabet of the name should be written in capital after the surname and a comma, like if the name is Qazi Taukeer then it should be written like “Taukeer, Q”. If the name is Arabic, then the prefix should be hyphenated and the preference should be given to the surname.
Writing
To write in APA format there are few rules like there should be one inch margin on all sides with fonts of 12 pt and the font should be in times roman and courier. There should be double spacing throughout, which includes title page, body, footnotes, etc of the document. There should be one spacing after all punctuation marks at the end of every sentence. The alignment should be left and the paragraph indentation should be 5-7 spaces. The page number should be one inch from the right end of the paper or at the first line of every page. The first few words of the title should be five spaces to the left of the page number except for figures. The active voice should be used instead of passive and the order of pages should be title page, abstract, body, references, appendixes, footnotes, tables, figure captions and figures.
Citation
It includes author’s surname, date of publication within parentheses, which should be separated by comma and placed after the reference or sometimes at the end of the sentence where reference is written. The citation can be done differently with different number of authors like single author, two authors, three to five authors, six authors or more, multiple publication with same author and multiple publications with different authors.