APA

February 18,

In this week's blog, we will talk about APA format, coming into college I had never even heard of APA format, the only format that I knew of was MLA. While writing college papers I had always gone to Perdue Owl to help myself format my papers I was also always finding myself in the writing center to receive help from students who study the format and understand it was more than myself.



Watching a video about a Stockton professor simplifying APA format in less than an hour has opened my eyes more on the idea behind the format. IN the video he talks about some key points that I would like to share with you.

One big factor with writing that I always tend to struggle with is understanding what you are actually writing about, in the video, the speaker hits on a point that is spot on. students tend to write "beautiful papers, not even related to the topic". I feel like this is something I tend to do, so always read over your paper and compare it to the topic for the class.

Something you should always keep in mind is the thesis statement, the thesis is designed to hook the reader and keep them around to read the rest of the paper, if they don't want to read the paper or understand what is going on, the thesis allows them to understand everything in a paragraph opposed to 10+ pages.



Focusing on the body paragraphs is the bulk of your paper, they can range from 3 paragraphs to 40, depending on how lengthy of a paper and how many topics you have is the deciding factor here. an important concern within your body paragraphs are your references, you need to have scholarly references to help prove your point, I tend to search on google scholar for these articles.

As at the beginning of my blog I brought up the Perdue owl, here I am doing it again, Perdue owl is amazing it brings the help right to your fingertips with understanding the intimidating APA format.

The end of your paper is the reference page, on this page, you need to set up the links for all your references for the professor to see and go to your articles to see exactly what you were researching and all the information you looked up.