Give three of the rules for using APA style when writing a research paper. Explain why students might make mistakes on these, and give tips on how to help remember the rules.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Ans: For many students coming from high school into an Introductory Psychology class, the shift from MLA or another writing style to APA is a difficult one. The question arises why there are so many styles and why all of the fields cannot agree on just one. For the most part, however, students find APA to be simpler and easy to follow once they get the hang of it. There is also the understanding that many of the rules make sense for a social science where the focus is on research rather than past writers’ work. One rule that makes sense in APA is the in-text citation. For other styles, the use of the footnote gives information about the reference right there at the bottom of the page. However, while science relies on past literature to some degree, the focus is on what the past literature stated and the research being conducted rather than the source itself. Therefore, it makes sense to only have a few sources that stand out in the text and the others fade in the background. Running heads are shortened paper titles that appear at the top of each page. This is an old publishing tool that helps the reader remember what paper he or she is reading. It also helps when many students are printing at the same time and the pages get confused. Page numbers should start on Page 1 with the title page and continue consecutively through the paper. The reason we include the title page is because the title page also takes up space in a journal and needs to be accounted for. Overall, while there are a lot of little rules in APA style, the main ones make a lot of sense and help the reader understand difficult material.