APA In-Depth: Formatting

Rules about how to format your paper can be found on the APA website.  The website includes guidelines on:

• Order of Pages
• Title Page Setup
• Font 
• Page Header
• Line Spacing
• Margins
• Paragraph Alignment and Indentation
• Headings
• Sample Papers
• Accessibility of APA Style

The 7th Edition of the APA Manual has new rules for formatting title pages. Here is an example of the student title page, which no longer uses a running head:

Include additional headings and subheadings throughout your paper as desired or according to your assignment instructions.  There are five levels of headings in APA style:

The entire paper should be double-spaced, including the abstract, text, headings, block quotations, reference list, table and figure notes, and appendices.  APA Style papers should be written in a font that its accessible to all users and is consistent throughout the paper.  Your instructor may have a preference as far as which font face they would like you to use, but without that guidance, any standard font such as Calibri, Arial, Lucida Sans Unicode, Times New Roman, or Georgia is acceptable.

Start the Reference List on a new page at the end of your paper (but before any appendices). Formatting:

• The word "References" should be centered and bolded at the top of the page in regular type (not italicized)
• References should be double spaced, with a special indent called a hanging indent, which indents all lines after the first line in a paragraph (or in this case, a reference list entry). Reference list entries should have a hanging indent of 0.5 in.

The following sections may follow your Reference List, depending on your assignment: Footnotes, Appendices, Figures, Tables.