Introduction to APA Style

Hello and welcome to this instruction on APA Style. My name is Theresa Bell and I am the Royal Roads

Writing Centre Coordinator.

The goal of this presentation is to provide you with an overview of the APA style not necessarily

everything that you are going to need to know about the APA style but enough to get you going in

starting to write papers.

This presentation if you are viewing it in its entirety would probably take about 1 hour and 15 minutes

and you also welcome to go to certain sections you are looking for any time you need to.

What is APA STYLE? – See Slide 1

APA Style is the style rules published in the Publication Manual of American Psychological Association,

and that is what APA stands for. The current version is a blue book, and it is the sixth edition and the

key thing for you to remember as an author of academic papers is that the book was actually written

with an audience in mind of people who are submitting journal articles from publications in APA and

reviewed journal. That means that the book was not necessarily written with students writing papers in

mind and you may encounter a few differences as you work through your program of the expectations

of what your papers should look like versus what is presented in the APA Manual. If there is ever a

situation where you have been asked to do something different by your professor or your program that

is different from the APA guide please do what your professor or program asks you to do. Program rules

or your professor expectations always over rule the APA. The APA rules are basically there for you in

lieu of other expectations. When in doubt you can use APA but if your professor of the program has

asked you to do something different please follow those instructions. If you have any questions as to

what the expectations are, those are questions that you should ask your professor or the program in

order to get their take on what formatting you should follow for your papers.

As I go through this presentation you might want to have handy the APA Help Guide. The APA Help

Guide is a booklet that I put together and the criteria that appear in that booklet are the answers to the

questions students often ask me.

Formatting – See Slide 2

The basics that you are going to be working with are a letter size page, portrait orientation and Times

New Roman and the standard APA 12 pt. font. If you do not like the Times New Roman font then check

with your professor to see if you can hand your paper in with some other font. If not, my suggestion

would be to write your paper in with whatever font makes you happy and then before you hand it in, do

a select all and shift it into the Times New Roman 12.

When it comes to formatting some of the differences with academic expectations in those of journal

article author show up in the Title Page and Table of Contents page. The title page is probably going to

have specific information requested by your professor and in the APA Manual the rules show what is

expected on the title page is appropriate for someone who is creating a journal article versus someone

who is writing a paper. What information that is to appear on your title page is a question to ask of your

professor.

If you go to your APA Help Guide and look up how to create a Table of Contents, you actually aren’t

going to be able to find information for that. The reason for that is that articles don’t have Tables of

Content. However, if you use the Word standard formatting function to create a Table of Content, that

should be acceptable. If you look at page three in the APA Help Guide you will see that I have a Table of

Contents there for that document and that gives you a standard layout, which is probably a model that

you could follow. If you are unsure of whether or not this is what your professor is looking for then

always ask your professor if you can use that model for your Table of Contents.

What I have shown you here on slide 2 are the basics so if you are about to start writing your first paper

and you are trying to tackle APA for the first time here is a few things to think about.

Spacing and indentation:

Double-space body text, including block quotations and references

That means that the first word of your body text through to the end of the references,

everything should be double spaced.

Indent first line of a new paragraph by one tab space

You can use Word’s standard setting for a tab which is usually three to five spaces but use the

tab space as it is set up as a default. Because you are indenting the first line of a paragraph by

one tab space what that does to your reader is it flags to your reader that you are starting a new

paragraph. You don’t need to add extra wide space between paragraphs because that

indentation gives that indication to your reader. If you want to see what that looks like go to

page 2 in the APA Help Guide.

Indent entire block quotation (quotation of 40+ words) by one tab space from left margin

If you would like to see what that looks like go to the bottom of page 12 in the APA Help Guide

you will see what a block quotation is.

Margins

2.5 cms/1” on all sides

Unless your program has given you other requirements the 1” margins should be on all sides of

your documents. If you look in the APA Help Guide they say anything from 1” to 1.5”, the

standard academic formatting is 1” on all sides.

Page number

Must appear in the top right corner of every page except for the title page

You are not going to do page 2 of 8 or page 1, just the number. Except for the title page, which

comes back to the difference between academic paper and the general articles. If you look in

the APA manual, you will see that it directs authors to provide page number on the title page.

However, the academic convention for a title page is to not have a page number. It does

however count in your overall page count. So, the title page is page 1, but the number does not

show. The first page to show a number is page 2. If you go to the APA Help Guide and look at

the title page there isn’t a page number on page 1 but the next page however shows the page

number.

There are some others things that you may be asked to do as you get into writing papers. There is

something called a running head and also section headings. For more information and samples on this

and other formatting issues please look at pages 7-11 in the APA Help Guide. If you go back to the APA

Writing section of the website and formatting section you will also see a document called Formatting

Overview.

Inline quotations – Slide 3

A quotation is the direct word for word copying of text from another document into your text. The APA

breaks out quotations into two different types. The type that I have shown you is the in-line quotation.

What it refers to is:

Quotations of 39 words or fewer should continue on the same line as the rest of the text, and

quotation marks should appear at the beginning and end of the quoted text. The in-text citation

should appear after the closing quotation mark, but before the period. For example, “I quoted

this text” (Author, year, p. 4).

You see that the quotation has both opening and closing quotation marks and those quotation marks

means the inline quotation is saying to your reader that the text enclosed in quotation marks originated

with another author.

Block quotations – See Slide 4

Quotations of 40+ words should be formatted as block quotations. Begin the quotation on a

separate line, indent the entire quotation 1 tab space, do not use quotation marks, and the in-

text citation follows after the closing punctuation. For example:

Please pretend this is a quotation of 40+ words, and note that the first line is not

indented. (Author, year, p.4)

In a block quotation, the entire quotation is indented one-half space from the left margin. You will also

see that there aren’t quotation marks around text. The reason for that is because you don’t need them

since the text is indented and quotation marks aren’t necessary.

In a block quotation the punctuation comes between the quotation and the citation. In-line quotation

punctuation comes after the citation. In block quote the punctuation always comes after the quoted

text and before the citation.

For more information on quotations look at pages 12-14 in the APA Help Guide.

In-text citations – See Slide 5

Citation is the information that appears in the round brackets after the quoted or paraphrased

text

Paraphrasing refers to when you take information from another Author’s text and you present

the information in your text but in your own words. So it isn’t a word for word replication that

what a quotation does but rather you are using your own words to present the meaning. Often

times this is used if you are summarizing information. For example, if you have read three pages

of text and you want to present to your reader the two main ideas that came out of that text, by

paraphrasing it you are able to cut down the amount of text involved in presenting those ideas

but you are also showing your thinking concept, showing how you understand what those main

ideas area. It is for that reason that professors tend to prefer people paraphrase versus quote

material because it does show off that critical thinking process.

Regardless of whether you have quoted or paraphrased something you must also provide a

citation to show to your reader

a) The information didn’t originate with you

b) Give them sufficient information so they can then look up the source and references

Citation should appear after each instance of information that came from someone else’s text.

You can’t put a citation at the end of a paragraph and assume that your reader will understand

that entire paragraph came from that source. If I see a sentence with a citation at the end of it

my interpretation of that is that only the last sentence came from that source. As you are going

through a paragraph each instance of information taken from another source should have a

citation attached to it.

Include the author’s last name, the date of publication/copyright, and the location reference

For example: (Johnson, 2010, p. 4) or (Royal Roads University, 2010, para. 5)

If you look in the APA Manual you will see that the directions they offer is that quoted text must

always provide a page or paragraph number, some kind of location number. With paraphrasing text

the Manual directs that authors do not need to provide the page and paragraph number. If you look

at page 171 in the Manual you will see that the Guide suggests to authors that providing that

location reference can be beneficial particularly helpful to your reader to find the information in the

text. If you paraphrase something out of a book and you don’t provide its location reference

essentially what you are saying to your reader is it is okay go to this book and then look for this

information, but it is not in these words and I am not telling you where to look for it. That would be

a difficult task for your reader.

There is leeway within the Manual for you as the author to decide whether or not you are going to

decide whether or not you are going to provide the location reference for paraphrased text. I

generally encourage people to provide the information because I think it is good practice if it is

easier for your reader to locate the information. It also makes your life easier if you decide if you

want to go back to that paraphrased information and expand on the idea. If you also haven’t made

notes of where that information is presented and resourced then you are also having to go back and

go through that resource again to locate that information.

Whatever approach you decide to take please make sure you are consistent, you will always provide

citations for quoted text. If you decide that you are not providing the page or paragraph number for

paraphrased text, keep that consistent throughout the document so that reader doesn’t get

confused as to how you are approaching it.

The decision as to whether or not you are providing a page or paragraph number comes down to

the type of document that you are working with and whether it is co-paginated or not, meaning if

you are working with a book or pdf that has page numbers assigned then that is what you could use

within your citation. If you are working with a website where page numbers are not assigned to the

document but rather you can count out the number of paragraphs on the page where your

information resides then you can use the paragraph number.

Example:

According to the American Psychological Association (APA) (2010), “references in APA

publications are cited in text with an author-date citation system” (p. 174).

I also have the abbreviation for APA, what I am doing is I am introducing this abbreviation into the

body text for the first time. When you do that you need to spell out the name in full and then in

round brackets present the abbreviation. Once you have done that you can then subsequent

reference to this organization you can use the abbreviation. You need to introduce it first.

Another way of setting up, it is called a pleated phrase, I have it in quotations, then in the citation

that follows is the author, year of copyright and location reference. The reason for the abbreviation

is because the APA treats what happens in the body text and what happens in your citation as two

separate things. To this point I haven’t yet introduced this abbreviation into my citation and it could

happen that if I introduce the abbreviation into the body text four pages ago but his is the first time

it was listed the citation. This helps to remind your reader of what the abbreviation stands for.

Subsequent citations to an APA author’s text could simply say APA rather than spelling out the name

in full.

How you decide which approach you are going to take to structuring your citation comes down to a

decision of what do you want to emphasize. What I mean by that is that I am highlighting who

wrote this information. It is important to me that the author of this text, that my reader knows that

the following quotation came from the American Psychological Association. This decision might be

whether or not presenting the author’s name as credibility to the quotation or is it important

information that the reader needs to know.

This example, however I have decided that I want my reader to focus on is the actual text itself

versus the author of the text. This is one way of making sure you are not using a very repetitive

approach to introduce the quotation in your text.

Example:

Remember that, “references in APA publications are cited in text with an author-date citation

system and are listed alphabetically in the text” (American Psychological Association (APA),

2010, p. 174).

I would like to mention what is called a lead in phrase. What this does is it sets the context for why

the quotation that you are using is important. If I just dumped a quotation into the text and didn’t

give any context for my reader to understand why I find it meaningful, what I am assuming is that

my reader thinks in exactly the same way that I do and making the same kind of connection that I

do. As the author, it is my responsibility to make sure that my reader understands what I am

thinking versus relying on assumptions.

There should never be a quotation as a standalone sentence in a paper. There should always be

some kind of other context provided whether the name of the author, according to the American

Psychological Association, or it could be Brown agreed to that, or someone suggested that,

whatever structure is appropriate or in the example it is suggested what the reader should do with

this information. Whatever approach is used, it gives that context to the reader to help understand

why the quotation is important.

Choose the correct citation: See slide Choose the Correct Citation

Look through this and chose the one that you think is correct.

The correct answer is B.

A – is incorrect because it is missing the “p.” – for page number

C – is incorrect because “page” – spelled out in full

D – is incorrect because it is missing the “year of copyright or publication”. It also could be incorrect

if RRU hadn’t been previously been spelled out as an abbreviation.

For more information on citations please see pages 15 – 19 in the APA Guide. There is lots of

information there about how to set up citations as well as examples of types of citations.

Personal communication – See slide Personal Communication

Personal communications refers to information gathered by means that aren’t available to the

general public. That means that your information isn’t recoverable data. As you can see in the

definition from the APA Manual, and just as a side note, this information is structured in the block

quotations, so this is how one looks like. Anything that you either need to have specialized access or

if you essentially weren’t there when the communication took place, it isn’t recoverable, it comes

under this category. So things like letters, emails, interview, telephone calls comes under this

category. Where this really comes into play for Royal Roads students is that our students are

working off of pass and protected discussion forms. Those discussion forms are limited to certain

members either a class wide discussion form, team discussion form and unless you have the

appropriate permission to get into that discussion form you can’t access it.

What that means is that if a student wanted to quote something that another student or perhaps a

professor posted in the discussion form, first of all, good research practice would say that it is

important for that student to get permission from the author of the posting to use that information

because that person posted that information with the understanding that it was going to be

protected information not available to anyone outside of the group that uses that form. It is

important to get that permission. Also, understanding that since that information isn’t available to

the members of the general public it falls under this category of personal communication.

This slide gives a couple of examples of how you can cite personal communication

Example:

To cite the resource, “give the initials as well as the surname of the communicator, and provide

as exact a date as possible” (p. 179).

C. Hare (personal communication, March 31, 2010) stated that, “learning APA style

doesn’t have to be painful.”

In personal communication you don’t need to give any kind of page or paragraph number

because the information isn’t recoverable. That page or paragraph number information isn’t

useful because no one can use that information to locate it. You only need to state that it is

personal communication, you don’t need to specify whether it was an email, phone call,

interview or what kind of setting that information came to you, you just need to name it as

personal communication.

In conclusion, “learning APA style doesn’t have to be painful” (C. Hare, personal

communication, March 31, 2010).

Similar to what I explained in the previous lines the two examples asked my reader to look on a

couple of different things. By presenting the author or the person with whom I had the

communication in the first example I am saying to my reader that I think it is important that my

reader knows who said this.

In the second example, it is less important to me that my reader knows who said it but rather I

want the focus to be on what is actually said.

APA style always uses last names referring to authors. It doesn’t matter how exalted or

descriptive someone’s title might be, it is only a person’s last name. For example if you quoted

something written by the Queen, technically speaking within the citation it should be Windsor.

There are two exceptions to that, one is for personal communication and the other is if you have

two authors who have the same last name and you need to be able to distinguish between

them. In that situation you can use first initials to help your reader to tell them apart.

APA style directs readers to use the past tense when referring to another author’s published

work. The way that I understand it is because the information that you are quoting or

paraphrasing is reflective of what that author thought when this document was written and that

happened in the past. You don’t know if this statement is still reflective of this author’s thinking

at the current moment, you can only see it as a reflection of what that person thought in the

past; because of that it is presented in the past tense.

What you are saying to your reader when you are working with personal communication, that

this information isn’t available to you because you don’t have the access or the experience that I

or order to get this and because of that it is only cited in text. It doesn’t need to be in the

references because it is recoverable information.

Quiz: Using personal communication – See slide Quiz: Using ‘personal communication’

Out of the 4 choices choose one that you think is most appropriate to citing personal

communication.

Correct answer is D – all of the above

A - Refers to restricted access, if you don’t have the necessary password in order to get into the

course website you can’t access because it isn’t publicly available information

B – Means that if you don’t work for the company you can’t access the information, so therefore

it is also not available to the general public. If you happen to be using documents that require

certain levels of security clearance or they have restricted access, please make sure you have

the necessary permissions from the organization to use that information in your document

before you actually incorporate that information. Generalized internal corporate documents

they are considered personal communication.

C – Is personal communication because if you weren’t there for the interview you have missed

it. There isn’t any way of recovering that information because there isn’t a published transcript.

Secondary source citations – See Slide 12

The secondary source citation refers to when you have read an author that author quoted another

author and you want to use that secondary author’s quotation in your paper. A general rule of

thumb the expectation would be that you would go to that secondary author’s source and look up

the information yourself. The challenge is that the problem with using secondary sources is that you

are relying on the first author’s interpretation of the material to make sense of this to you rather

than going directly to the source and making sense of it yourself. You will always find that unless

your assignment has been set up to ask you to look at what are other authors interpretations of

other authors’ work, the expectation is that you will always go the primary source. There may

however be certain situations where that isn’t possible and that is what the first bullet point looks

at. Perhaps the book is out print, it is unavailable or it isn’t available in English. Before you give up

on trying to find a resource I strongly encourage you to talk to the RRU Library. They are wizards at

looking up information and they do a great job of tracking things. If the library says it is unavailable

you can trust that. If you are going to use the secondary source citation I would check with your

professor to make sure that he/she will accept it. If not, you may have to find another source. If it is

acceptable, what you see in the second bulletin is what you are going to have to do. I have “Souper

(as cited in Green, 1999), what that means is that I read Green’s text and Green quoted “Souper”.

Because of that, I need to show that I read Green’s text, not Souper’s original. As the third bulletin

explains in my references I would list Green not Souper. This means that I got the information from

reading Green.

More information for Secondary Source Citations on page 18 in the APA Help Guide.

References – See Slide The Reference List

References are called references, not work cited, works reference, bibliography, anything like that.

If you only have one reference you page should be titled reference. The information on this slide

gives you some of the basics of what the page should look like and contain. There is a lot of

information in the APA Help Guide including how to format them and lots of sample references that

you can use to format your own references. If you look at page 32 in the APA Help Guide you will

see a sample page of references, in pages 20 – 22 gives you information on how to format

references.

“References cited in text must appear in the reference list, and each entry in the

reference list must be cited in text” (p. 174).

Everything that is cited or quoted in text should have a resource listed in the references.

What is meant is you could have multiple citations for one resources. It will only be listed

once in the references. But if it hasn’t been either quoted or paraphrased from in the text,

the resource should not appear in your references. It is a good thing to check before you

hand in a paper to make sure everything in your references has also that matching either a

quotation or paraphrase text from that source. It is an easy way to lose marks.

List references alphabetically by the first author’s last name.

If you are working with a list of sources and each source has multiple authors listed. You are

not going to alphabetize the authors’ names within the reference. The authors name should

be presented as they appear in the original text. This is important because the order of the

names indicate who the primary author is and who is the secondary author, etc. You are

going to alphabetize the list of references by the first listed author’s last name.

References should have a 1.27 cm/0.5 inch hanging indent on the second and

subsequent lines

The references should all start at your left margin but they do have the hanging indent. The

APA Help Guide on pages 20 – 22 it shows an example of how to do it.

Double-space the references

Unless you are told to do otherwise by your program use double-space.

Basic Forms – See Slide Basic Forms

The basic forms as the APA divides them out is that you have periodicals and nonperiodicals.

Periodicals are published on a predictable basis whereas the nonperiodical is more of a one off.

That is the first decision that you need to make is your resource a periodical or a nonperiodical.

There are slight differences between how the references are presented so that is why that decision

is important.

Electronic periodical article – See Slide 15

This is a generic example of the information that would be presented for an electronic periodical

article. The goal here is not to instantly overwhelm you with the amount of information on this slide

but I wanted to show you that each reference is made of fields of information. For example, I have

the author field, date field, title of article field, title of periodical field etc. If you can learn the rules

for each field you actually come to do these references it can be a little less overwhelming because it

is not just a random assortment of information but rather you are bringing together these fields.

Author Field

If you have one author then that is simple, it is just author’s last name comma first

initial. Only ever first initial, you are never going to use the person’s full first name as a

reference.

If you have more than one author it is going to be last name comma first initial period

comma. There should always be a comma before the ampersand (&) and that is what

this symbol is called.

If I had three authors it would be author A comma author B comma and author C. The

reason I am pointing out the comma before the ampersand is because this is one of the

most common mistakes that students make. If you only have two authors people tend

to forget this comma.

Date Field

How your date appears is really decided by what kind of resource you are working with.

For example if you are working with a book you are only going to provide the year of

publication. If you are using a daily newspaper you would want to present the entire

date that the newspaper was published.

You will see in the blue box of the slide the format for how the date should appear. It is

always year comma month day. You are not going to use any abbreviations nor are you

going to use any kind of additional information on the date. What I mean is that it

wouldn’t be 2013 comma Sept 9th, rather it would be 2013 comma September 9. Always

spell the month out in full and the day is just the number no additional information.

Title of the Article

The title of the article is called sentence case. That means that the first letter of the first

word, the first letter of the first word of the sub title and all proper nouns are

capitalized, everything else is lower case. A proper noun refers to a specific person,

place or thing. For example, if this title includes the word Canada, Canada would be

capitalized. The title of the article is not italicized.

The first line of the reference is a line flush with the left margin. The second and

subsequent lines are all indented ½ space. The entire reference is left aligned it is not

justified and that is true for the entire document.

When you get to the title of a periodical, is in title case. This means that all major

words are capitalized and it is italicized. How to remember what is italicized and what is

not is to think about the levels of information, that is the title of the periodical is the top

level of information. The article is presented within the periodical, it is kind of sub level

of information. The title of the periodical which is the top level of information is

italicized.

It is a similar thing within the volume number and the issue number which follows the

volume number round brackets. The volume number is italicized because it is the top

level of information. The issue number comes beneath it. It is the qualifying

information, therefore it is not italicized.

Page Range

It is just the numbers.

DOI (Digital Object Identifier)

The DOI serves as locator information.

Electronic journal article with DOI – See slide Electronic Article With DOI

On this slide you will see there is all of the fields that I have just talked about.

The DOI is a string of letters and numbers. What is does is that it serves as a unique identifier to this

particular resource. If I copied and pasted this string into either a Google search window, into the

search window at DOI.org or into the Royal Roads search function, information about this article would

appear. If the article is available for free and full text online it will be available just by searching with

DOI. The DOI if you are working with resources that have them it is the preferred way of showing your

reader where he/she can locate this information. All your reader needs is the DOI, a computer and

internet access and he/she can find the information, it doesn’t require any more specialized access. If

you have a DOI this is all you need to do. You will know whether or not if the resource has a DOI

assigned to it. Most often it is going to be something that you have taken out of one of the electronic

data bases and when you get into those data bases and you get to the description of the resource, if a

DOI is available it will show on that page.

Electronic journal article without DOI – See slide Article From Electronic Database

Not all resources have DOIs. If you have taken something out of an electronic database that doesn’t

have a DOI there is the same information such as author, date, title of the resource, title of the journal,

volume number, issue number and page range. What is different is the retrieval statement. This is what

you should do which is a little different than what you are going to see in the APA Manual because the

APA Manual directs authors to provide the home page URL for the electronic database. The problem

with that for Royal Roads students is that they don’t go through the home page of the database because

they access the database by the Library homepage.

There is another resource which is separate from the APA Help Guide that says that if the resource is

primarily available through a database that instead the name of the database can be provided.

You are going to name the specific database where the resource was retrieved. We have a couple of

databases with EBSCOhost, ProQuest that are a database of databases. When you get into these you

have to select which database you want to be searched within the mega database. When you are

structuring your reference you need to name the specific database, not the bigger or generalized

database in order to help your reader find this information directly. For example, Academic Search

Premier is one of the databases within EBSCOhost. If I name EBSCOhost in my reference it is not specific

enough I need to instead give the specific name of the database where this information can be found.

This directs the reader to how they can access the information regardless of how they are getting to the

database. Electronic databases are like a spoke wheel, the databases are at the centre of the wheel and

there are various points of access and it doesn’t matter whether I am coming from Royal Roads,

University of Victoria, University of Toronto, the Public Library or some other means, my point of access

may be different but the database itself is still going to be the same.

The reason why you are not going to provide URL for where you retrieved the page is because these

databases are all password protected because most of them are only available by subscription. If you

give the URL for how you accessed it, probably anyone outside of the community to which you belong

isn’t going to be able to use that URL it is going to break. Instead what this does it says to your reader

find your own way to this particular database, once you get there here is the information you need to

have in order to find this resource.

The preferred way of providing that electronic retrieval information is to present the DOI. If the DOI

isn’t available then you can name the database.

Non-periodical: book vs. e-book – See slide Non-periodical: Book

Book

There are similar fields – author, date, title of work. What is different is that a location

and publisher name are provided.

If you are referencing a book the title of the work is italicized and presented in sentence

case. The first letter of the first word, the first letter of the first word of the subtitle and

all proper nouns are capitalized everything else should be in lower case.

The location, the APA Help Guide rules states that if the publication location is a city in

the United States the information should be presented as the name of the city comma

and then the abbreviation. For example, New York, NY. If however if the city is outside

you are going to provide the city and country name. For example, Toronto comma

Canada. Canada should not be abbreviated it should be spelled out in full.

E-Book

For referencing an e-book, you have the author, date, title of the work. This time the

DOI is presented.

The publisher name is usually available on the title page of the book it is also available

on copyright page. You want to make sure you are using the specific publisher name

that actually published the book and not the parent publisher company.

If you have a resource that has listed multiple locations for the publisher you can use

the first one in the list. The reason is that because it is likely that first listed location is

where the company headquarters are located so if someone needed to track the

publisher or to request a copy of the resource they would be able to do that by the

headquarters.

For referencing the e-book it follows a similar format shown earlier on in the

presentation with e-books sometimes it gets a bit trickier to provide that location

information because the book isn’t paginated or page numbers depend on the size that

you have chosen to read it on your e-book reader of if there are a lot of different

options.

This link takes you to information off of the APA style blog as to how to cite e-books.

You can also look at page 15 in the APA Help Guide for more information. If you just

keep in mind that your job as the author is to present as much information as possible

to your reader to help him/her to locate the information that is really the guiding

principle. Sometimes you may be presenting a section heading, page title, it really

depends on how your book is broken out.

Website content with no publication date – See slide Website

This shows you how to reference a web page that doesn’t have a publication date. This is a situation

where I have gone to a website and I am quoting or paraphrasing something off the web page versus in

a separate document like a PDF or a report or something like that.

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). APA

Style . Retrieved from http://apastyle.org/

I have presented the author, American Psychological Association. When you are doing

your references any abbreviations that you have used in text should be presented in full

in reference. That means in the author field I would always use American Psychological

Association never APA.

There is a notation that stands for no date. This is what you can use if you are working

with a website that you don’t know when it was published. You can use it both in your

reference as well as in the in-text citation, which is in this example further down the

page.

What that does for your reader it shows that you have looked for it but there isn’t a

date available versus that you have just forgotten to put this information in the

reference.

The title of the pager is not italicized. It is also in sentence case.

Retrieved from statement

o Retrieval date unnecessary if working with the final version of resource

Unless you are working with a wickey, which by its nature is going to

change over time you can assume that you are working with the final

version of the resource. It is not your responsibility to know whether it

is or not because obviously you don’t know if the company is going to

change its website. As long as it isn’t wickey you don’t need to provide

a retrieval date. If you were working with a wickey and needed to

provide the retrieval date it would be retrieved from July 12, 2013 from

the………

o No closing punctuation after URL and no hyperlink

It is not an active hyperlink nor is there any closing punctuation at the

end of the reference.

Both of those are because if your reader needed to type out this

address character by character, if the URL is hyperlinked and any

underscores in the URL your reader would miss that underscore

because the hyperlink would cover it. Similarly if you put any closing

punctuation after the URL, if the reader included that closing

punctuation in the address window it would break the link. Word will

automatically transfer a URL into an active hyperlink, as soon as you hit

the space bar after you finished typing it, it will become underlined. It is

very each to remove a hyperlink, put your mouse pointer over the

hyperlink and do a right click on our mouse. A pop up window will

appear and one of your options will be remove hyperlink.

First in-text citation: (American Psychological Association (APA), n.d., Learning APA section,

para. 2)

As far as the example citations that are provided, the reason is that I wanted to show

you an example of how you can cite information on the web page that perhaps has

numerous paragraphs.

You don’t want to be counting out 37 paragraphs on a page nor does your reader. With

this formatting law you can see that I have Learning APA section. This directs your

reader to the closest section heading on the page and then counts down the number of

paragraphs beneath that section and that is where your information can be found. This

is one way of approaching citing or reference something from a web page where you

have many paragraphs and avoiding having to count out a lot of them. For information

on citing resources and including this kind of format go to page 15 of the APA Help

Guide.

Subsequent in-text citation: (APA, n.d., Learning APA section, para. 4)

This is an introduction to the APA first in-text citation, second and subsequent citations

abbreviations are used, I have n.d. for no date, section title and then paragraph number.

What wrong with this reference? - See slide What’s wrong with this reference? and Slide 21

Here are few examples of different types of references. If you look at pages 23 – 30 in the APA Help

Guide you will see many different types of examples.

If you have any questions about the information or from this presentation you are more than welcome

to get in touch. I will give you my contact information at the end of this presentation.

Take time when you have a moment, just to look through some of those examples to see what is there.

Chapter 7 in the APA Manual is entirely devoted to examples of different types of references. All you

need to do is go to the Manual or the Help Guide and look up the type of resource that you are working

with, see the example that is presented in either resource and you then have samples to format your

own reference.

I have put together a sample reference for a real resource but there a lot of mistakes. I suggest that you

go through this reference and see if you can find the mistakes. Look at each one of the fields, go back in

this presentation or look up the examples in the APA Help Guide to help you identify where the errors

are. Once you have done that then you can restart the presentation and the next couple of slides will

give you the answers where the mistakes are.

Here is a list of the mistakes. If you are looking at this and have any questions about why the references

aren’t formatted correctly please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

Corrected reference – See Slide Corrected reference

Madigan, R., Linton, P., & Johnson, S. (1996). APA

style: Quo vadis?. American Psychologist, 51(2)

64-68. Retrieved from PsycARTICLES.

This is the corrected reference. I have author fields, date, title of the article, title of the

journal, volume number, issue number, page range and because this article doesn’t

have a DOI attached to it, I have given the specific name of the database where this

resource can be found.

Citation resources – See slide APA Resources

These are resources that are available to you to help you learn APA Style. In order to find this

presentation go to the Royal Roads University website as follows:

APA6 section of Writing Centre website

o APA (6th edition) help guide – document that I relate to in the presentation

o Formatting overview – one page document front and back focuses on formatting

rules

o “APA Exposed” tutorial – put together by the Harvard Graduate School of

Education. The information presented is straight APA as it is presented in the

Manual and there are some differences between how APA style is used for

academic audiences versus people writing journal articles. It is however a

fantastic resource.

Citing Canadian statutes, cases and legislation

o Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 7th ed. (print copy on reserve in

Library)

If you are citing Canadian statues, cases or legislation there is an entirely separate

referencing system us the above Guide. I have links to information off the Writing

Centre website that will take you to examples of how to cite these different type of

legislative documents. Please be aware of the separate system and if you are using this

kind of citations you might want to check with your Professor first to make sure that you

should be following the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation. If you are here on

Campus we have a copy of this book in the Library.

Citing Statistics Canada materials

o Within the citation section of the APA Writing website there is a link to the resource off the

Statistics Canada material that will take you through step by step how to format those

references.

Contact the Writing Centre – See slide 24

If you have any questions about any of the information presented throughout this presentation,

anything about the Writing Centre or just want to get in touch please don’t hesitate to contact me.

http://library.royalroads.ca/writing-centre - website

writingcentre@royalroads.ca – my email address

(250) 391-2600, ext. 4353 – my direct line

1-800-788-8028 – toll free RRU main line, ask for Writing Centre

If you are phoning from outside of North America and would like to chat by phone, please send me an

email, your phone number and give some suggested times as to when to call you keeping in mind the

time difference from where you are and where I am. I would be happy to call you back.

I hope that you found this presentation helpful.

Good luck with all your writing.

o My email address