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Page Formats & Headings for Final Manuscripts Synopsis:   The APA Manual is focused on preparing papers for review and publication, copy manuscripts. However, a chapter in the Manual is devoted to preparing manuscripts to be presented to the reader, final manuscripts. The distinction is important since some aspects of formatting final manuscripts are not covered in the Manual and must be inferred when preparing a paper for class use.

Article.  A published paper. Appendixes.  The APA preferred spelling of the plural of appendix. Block spacing.  Blocks of text---long quotes, headings, references, titles---single-spaced within and double spaced from surrounding text. Copy manuscript.  A research paper formatted for typesetting and publication---the focus of the APA Publication Manual.

Final manuscript.  A paper formated to emulate an article as printed in an APA journal. Heading caps.  A style of capitalization where the first letter of most words is capitalized. APA style has a rule for this. Paper.  An unpublished document or manuscript. Sentence caps.  A style of capitalization where just the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalized.

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The APA Style Page Formats for Final Manuscripts

Final manuscripts are meant to be read, not typeset. Unlike copy manuscripts, this allows tables and figures to be inserted appropriately in the text. (In copy manuscripts they are placed on separate pages at the end of the manuscript.) Since there is no need to separate the author's name on the title page from the abstract to facilitate anonymous review, these pages can be combined. There is no need for a "running head" (as shown in the Manual0, since this is used only for publication. The APA Manual encourages block paragraph spacing for long quotes, headings, references, and tables, and the placement of page numbers to improve presentation (2001, chap. 6). APA101 is focused on the research paper, 10-20 pages in length or 2,000-4,000 words. This is comparable in length and complexity to a paper prepared for publication. A thesis or dissertation is often organized into chapters and may require more levels of headings as well as front material (preface, acknowledgements, table or contents, etc.) not featured in this course. (The APA Manual offers little help, the Chicago Manual of Style more.) 4.1.  Title and Text Pages for Final Manuscripts Figure 1. APA style title and text pages for final manuscripts. Every page must be numbered. This page number is centered at the bottom of the title page, then combined with a short title header (in heading caps!) at the upper right corner of each succeeding page. Pages are numbered consecutively. The short title header is a condensed version of the title, the first few words or significant keywords. Margins are a minimum one inch around the text. A wider left margin may be appropriate when using an binder. Leave the right margin of your text unjustified (ragged) and turn off the hyphenation feature of your word processor. Hyphenation can introduce ambiguity in a text by altering the possible meaning of a word, something that must be avoided. Block quotes are covered in detail in lesson 6, the first of the two lessons on text rules. Single space within the block, double space before and after. This is block paragraph spacing. Footnotes are discouraged in APA style to report content that might better be included in the text. The exception to this is a copyright permission footnote when large amounts of material or a table or figure from another author are being directly quoted in a paper to be published. The original author's permission is required in these cases. Works not for publication, including a thesis or dissertation, generally call for an acknowledgement, but not express permission.

APA Rule. A serif font is required for APA style papers. This is a font with small cross bars on the letters. Common serif fonts are Courier and Times Roman. Use a 12 point font (or a size equivalent to an elite or pica typewriter font). Do not proportionally space or hyphenate words, use a compressed typeface, or justify the right margin.

Heading Caps. APA style, like most styles, uses heading caps for titles and some headings in the text. They have a rule explaining how to do this.

APA Rule.  Heading caps capitalize the first word, the first word after a colon; all words of four letters or more; and all adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and pronouns in a heading or title. Articles, conjunctions, and short prepositions are not capitalized. Capitalize all words of a hyphenated compound word.

Headings help organize a paper in meaningful topics. APA style makes provision for five levels of headings, but in a complex hierarchy that changes depending on the number of headings used. Three levels are consistent in their order of use and these are usually adequate for most papers. These are labeled levels A, B, and C below, corresponding to APA levels 1, 3, and 4. The APA Manual does not suggest using a bold font for headings, although published articles often do, thereby adding clarity to the organization of a paper. Figure 2. APA headings for research papers. Seriation is the technique of enumerating a series of topics in the text. This is essentially an extension of the process of using headings to organize a paper. APA style provides for two types of series: (a) topics enumerated in running text with lowercased letters in parentheses, and (b) numbered paragraphs. Numbered paragraphs are used to list the steps in a procedure or itemize the parts of a conclusion. For example, APA101 is organized around three groups of topics: 1. Documentation is the process of citing and referencing sources referred to in the text. This is a minimal requirement for research writing. If you are unable to get this right then . . . 2. Page formatting follows a style that is uniquely characteristic of APA style papers. However, many features, such as the width of margins, are conventional. Block paragraph spacing is encouraged for final manuscripts as noted in . . . 3. Text rules reflect APA preferences for modes of writing and presentation that are not fixed by convention. For example, APA style uses unconventional symbols for some statistics, and has rules for when to spell numbers and when to . . .. The items enumerated must be conceptionally equivalent, that is, one cannot be a subset of another. Many students find it difficult to find enough to say to fill 10 or 20 pages. However, once you have a topic that is robust enough to merit publication the opposite is more often the case. Seriation is a useful technique for condensing text as well as keeping it organized. Remember, use letters in the text, numbers for paragraphs. 4.2.  Tables & References: Block Spacing Block paragraph spacing single spaces within blocks of text, but double spaces between the blocks and the rest of the text. Double space most of the text, except for headings and titles, the title page, block quotes, tables, and references where block spacing is more appropriate. Note, copy manuscripts must double space everything. This can be hard to read, especially with tables and references. Figure 3. APA style table and reference list for final manuscripts. Tables and figures are covered in detail in the next lesson, lesson 5. Appendixes (APA prefers this spelling) are rare in publication. However, the APA requires authors to make their raw data available to anyone for 5 years after publication (APA, 2001, sec. 8.05, p. 354). If you are working with research data it is appropriate to include it in an appendix. Otherwise, if the material is central to your paper, why is it not included in the text? If it is not important enough to include in the text, why include it at all?

APA101: Exercises for This Lesson

What's to study? Page formatting is straightforward in APA style. Chapter 6 of the APA Manual gives instructions for research papers not destined for publication. The short of it: Make it look good to the reader. There is not much point to testing your ability to format heading caps, or reset the font in your word processor to Times Roman. Therefore, the exercise for this lesson will introduce you to the classic organization of the research paper. Research papers usually follow the IMRAD model. This stands for Introduction, Method, Results and Analysis, and Discussion. The APA Manual prefers to shorten this to IMRD, but the initials are hard to pronounce and remember. There are other kinds of papers, such as reviews, theory papers, or commentaries, but it is surprising how often the IMRAD model appears even in these papers. You begin with what you are going to talk about and why it is important, an introduction. How you are going to investigate the topic reasonably comes next; the method you are to employ. This is followed by what you discovered, the results and what you make of them (analysis). Finally, you discuss what the results mean, how they might be interpreted in the context of the topic presented in the introduction. This is the organization of the classic research paper. Lesson 1 introduced the following article and explored the findings the study reported. Your assignment is to find this paper and identify the IMRAD parts to it. There are no headings in the text, and it has just 12 paragraphs, but the classic construction of the paper is evident. Can you find it? Brewer, B. W., Scherzer, C. B., Van Raalte, J. L., Petitpas, A. J., & Andersen, M. B. (2001). The elements of (APA) style: A survey of psychology journal editors. American Psychologist, 56, 266-267. Answers to Exercises

Required Text for APA101

Amazon.com

American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author. New prices: $33.95 spiral bound, and $26.95 paperback (free shipping, no taxes). Fifth Edition.   The APA Publication Manual is the commanding guide in psychology, and found in other fields ranging from education to literature. The new edition shows how to format papers (40 pp., 15 with diagrams), expands coverage of tables and figures (50 pp.), adds Web sources to the 95 references sources covered (75 pp.), and refines the best section on avoiding bias found anywhere (15 pp.). The spiral bound edition lies open to the page you select, not a trivial convenience!

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