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APA Style Guide. APA Style Essentials Douglas Degelman, PhD Vanguard University of Southern CaliforniaPrint version (PDF) Last modified July 21, 2014 The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed., 2010) and the APA Style web site ( provide a comprehensive reference guide to writing using APA style, organization, and content.

APA Style Guide

To order a copy of the Publication Manual online, go to To view “PDF” documents referenced on this APA Style Essentials page, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader. To download the free Acrobat Reader, go to The purpose of this document is to provide a common core of elements of APA style that all members of an academic department can adopt as minimal standards for any assignment that specifies APA style. Click here for an example of a complete article formatted according to APA style.Click here for an example of an undergraduate research proposal.Download a Microsoft Word template of an APA-style paper. I. II. Cornell University Library. Guides for Citing Sources Have a question about citing sources or citation styles?

Cornell University Library

Ask a Librarian. Citation Management Software What is citation management software? Citation management tools allow a user to organize and retrieve information, such as citations for books, articles, and Web sites, by interfacing with library databases. Which citation management programs are used at Cornell? Individuals at Cornell use a variety of programs. APA Style. Plagiarism.org - Best Practices for Ensuring Originality in Written Work. Avoiding Plagiarism: Quoting and Paraphrasing. General advice When reading a passage, try first to understand it as a whole, rather than pausing to write down specific ideas or phrases.

Avoiding Plagiarism: Quoting and Paraphrasing

Be selective. Unless your assignment is to do a formal or "literal" paraphrase, you usually don? T need to paraphrase an entire passage; instead, choose and summarize the material that helps you make a point in your paper. Think of what "your own words" would be if you were telling someone who's unfamiliar with your subject (your mother, your brother, a friend) what the original source said.

Top Methods of Paraphrasing Look away from the source then write. If you find that you can't do A or B, this may mean that you don't understand the passage completely or that you need to use a more structured process until you have more experience in paraphrasing. The method below is not only a way to create a paraphrase but also a way to understand a difficult text. Paraphrasing difficult texts. Plagiarism. What is Plagiarism and Why is it Important?

Plagiarism

In college courses, we are continually engaged with other people’s ideas: we read them in texts, hear them in lecture, discuss them in class, and incorporate them into our own writing. As a result, it is very important that we give credit where it is due. Plagiarism is using others’ ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information. How Can Students Avoid Plagiarism? To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use another person’s idea, opinion, or theory; any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings—any pieces of information—that are not common knowledge; quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words; or paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words.

These guidelines are taken from the Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities, and Conduct. How to Recognize Unacceptable and Acceptable Paraphrases Here’s an UNACCEPTABLE paraphrase that is plagiarism: What makes this passage plagiarism? 1. 2. Tips for Formal Writing, Technical Writing, and Academic Writing. Conversation is replete with ambiguous words like "this", "these", "his", "it", "they", etc.

Tips for Formal Writing, Technical Writing, and Academic Writing

These words have no meaning in themselves, but in conversation the meaning is usually clear from the context. In written text, however, the intended meaning is quite often not evident to the reader, because there are e.g. many possible interpretations of "it" and "this". It is a good idea to read over anything you write, searching for this sort of word. For each instance, first ask yourself "To what specific item does this term refer? ". For such a reference to make sense, the object, person, or concept must have been explicitly mentioned just prior to your reference. Handouts. Purdue OWL. Coming Soon: A new look for our same great content! We're working hard this summer on a redesign of the Purdue OWL.

Worry not! Our navigation menu and content will remain largely the same. If you are having trouble locating a specific resource, please visit the search page or the Site Map. The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. For more information about services for the Purdue University community, including one-to-one consultations, ESL conversation groups and workshops, please visit the Writing Lab site. Mission The Purdue University Writing Lab and Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) assist clients in their development as writers—no matter what their skill level—with on-campus consultations, online participation, and community engagement.