APA Guide

APA Sample Paper Plain Text

The First Page of Your Paper

A common characteristic of APA style papers is to include a title page. This will be the first page of your paper, and the comments below pertain to the title page. Center the title page information, beginning with the title of the paper.

Header:

Insert page numbers in the upper-right corner. To insert page numbers in Word, click on “Insert” tab, then click on “Page Number”. Choose “Top of Page” and then “Plain Number 3”. 

Title:

Capitalize all major words in the title. Bold the title. Center-align the title in the upper half of the page (3-4 lines from top of page). Note: Title also appears centered at the top of the second page (first page of the body of your paper). 

For example: Sample Paper in APA Format: Brendan Dassey Wrongly Convicted

Space Before Student/Author's Name:

Include 1 blank double-spaced line below the title, before typing the student or author's name who wrote the paper.

College information:

After the student/author's name, for student papers, on the next line, list the department and the college, separated by a comma. Center-align this information.

For example: Humanities & Languages Department, Spartanburg Community College

Course number & title:  

On the line after the name of the department and college, list the course number and title. Center-align this information.

For example: ENG 101: English Composition

Instructor's name:

On the line after the course number and title, list the instructor with credentials if known (Dr., PhD, MS, MA, RN, etc.). Center-align this information.

For example: Ms. Patricia Weeks, MA

Due Date:

On the line after the instructor's name, list the due date. Center-align this information. This is the final line of the title page.

For example: October 23, 2024

The Second Page of Your Paper:

When you have a title page, the body of your paper will begin on the second page.

Title:

Begin the page following the title page with the essay’s title.  The title should be centered and in bold.

Paraphrase example:

You must use citations for paraphrases as well as direct quotes in the body of your paper. The following sentence is a paraphrase including a citation with 2 authors & no page numbers (using paragraph numbers instead).

For example: Police interrogation tactics can lead to false confessions, and young people with intellectual disabilities are especially vulnerable to this tactic (LaVigne & Miles, 2019, para. 22)

Thesis:

This is an example of a thesis statement. The student has taken a stance and provided the reasons for the stance that will be discussed in the body of the paper.

For example: Brendan Dassey was one of these young people with intellectual challenges, who was unjustly found guilty of murder after a false confession was coerced and fed to him even though there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime.

Use section headings:

Use section headings as needed. In this example, the student uses a heading after the introductory paragraph. Section headings capitalize the major words (same as the title), appear on a line by themselves, are center-aligned and bolded.

In-text citation with group author:

This is an example of how to cite a group author, such as American Red Cross. Additionally, it shows how to cite a source without a clear publication date.

For example: In part because of the widespread evidence that his confession was false, Brendan Dassey’s case has been taken up by several innocence projects, including one at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law (Bluhm Legal Clinic, n.d.).

Formatting titles:

Italicize journal titles as they are self-contained works; use Title case (capitalize all major words of title and subtitle, along with any proper nouns).

For example: In the Berkeley Journal of International Law, Megan Annitto (2018) shared evidence from an expert on false confession and police questioning tactics who testified in Dassey’s defense.

Narrative in-text citation:

When author or title is mentioned in the sentence, place the publication year in parenthesis directly after the author's name or the title. For narrative citations, you'll include any page numbers or paragraph numbers at the end of the sentence in parenthesis using the abbreviated p. for page.  

For example: In the Berkeley Journal of International Law, Megan Annitto (2018) shared evidence from an expert on false confession and police questioning tactics who testified in Dassey’s defense. The expert testified that the confession was coerced, citing a lot of inaccuracies in the statement and calling it “highly contaminated” (p. 194).

In-text citation with a single author and no page numbers:

The example below is of an in-text citation for a source with a single author & no page number. FYI: If your instructor requires students to count and add paragraphs when there are no page numbers, the Linder example would look like (Linder, 1995-2024. paras. 8-10).

This is also an example of using a direct quote from your source word-for-word, where you have to put quotation marks around the quote and use brackets around any words you have to make small changes to to make the sentence make sense (in this example the original quote had the word 'give' which we changed to 'gave' so that the grammar is correct.

For example:

Unfortunately, this is too common an occurrence. In a similar scenario, a psychologist testified that 17-year-old Jesse Misskelley “[gave] police a ‘false statement’ when he could ‘no longer stand the strain of the interrogation’” (Linder, 1995-2024, paras. 8-10).

In-text citation with 3 or more authors:

An in-text citation if you have 3 or more authors will use last name of first author and then follow with 'et al.' so that you do not need to list all the authors. The example below also has an odd page number, e1314, but you still include it. (Last Name et al., Year, p. Pages).

For example: The National Registry of Exonerations reported in 2020 that “of over 3000 exonerations, estimates… suggest that 12% of all known wrongful convictions involved a false confession” (Catlin et al., 2023, p. e1314).

Parenthetical in-text citation:

When author/title is not mentioned in the sentence, include the author’s last name(s)/organization name, year, and (when applicable) page or paragraph number before the period at the end of the sentence. 

For example: Dassey’s lawyer failed to defend him adequately against his false confession (Annitto, 2018, pp. 190-191).