MLA & APA Formatting Styles: Basic Guide for Starters

Academic writing styles are a thing that helps your project look really good. Proper MLA, APA or another formatting gives your paper a finished and tidy look and shows that you are professional. If the project is finished with violation of these demands, it can be turned down even though the research itself is great. This is why you should give enough attention to the writing style you’ve chosen for your work, or hire a professional my paper writer to help you with the research.

MLA & APA Formatting Styles and Their Peculiarities

These are probably the most popular academic writing styles that are used for projects from practically all areas of science. Each of them has their own peculiarities and specific details that should be kept in mind.

  • American Psychological Association style.
  • Choose a Serif type (Times New Roman recommended), 12pt, double-spaced. Margins should be 1 inch all around the text. Bold type is not used. Italics is meant for special cases only, such as titles of your reference sources.

    The title page should contain a so-called “running head”. Type “Running head”, use a colon, and follow it by the title or its part (no more than 50 characters with spaces). Align the body to the left side, start each page with a page header. Give attention to the way citations are done and keep in mind that all the citation sources should be mentioned in the reference list.

  • Modern Language Association style.
  • Choose a clearly readable font (Times New Roman recommended, a well), 12pt, double spaced. It’s also advised to choose a font with contrast regular and italics. Leave 1 inch all around the text as margins.

    All the pages (involving or excluding the title, depending on your supervisor’s demands) should have a header with a page number in the top right corner, ½ inch from the top. Italics is allowed for the titles of reference sources or, in case absolutely necessary, to emphasize something. Endnotes should occupy a separate page before the reference list.

Style and Formatting Guidance

It’s a great idea to use a specialized manual. Such manuals and guides are easily found on the Web. They explain every specific detail of each writing style carefully and concisely.

However, even if you have a guidebook, you should be very attentive to the demands your supervisor has. Important as they are, writing styles are not an axiom, so, you should complete your instructor’s requirements in the first turn.

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