About APA Writing Style

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner and today we're going to talk about how to format in APA style. APA style is the American Psychological Association's style, where as MLA style is the Modern Language Association's style. They are both ways to format research papers but they contain two fundamental differences. Number one is the way in which you cite in line citations and number two is the way in which you cite in a bibliography. The way that you site in line citations in an MLA format is you include the last name of the author and the page number without any documentation as to whether it's pg or pp or p in front the number, just the number. But in APA it's a little more technical. The last name comes and then the date of the publication is after that and then followed by a p, as we have here, p one nine seven. So we can see right here on this page was from the MLA handbook the difference between APA and MLA in in line citation. And then second we have a APA citation and a bibliography or a works cited page which contains the authors name right here, Marcuse, S, 1975. And then the book is actually italicized rather than as we see in the MLA form here on this page, the book is underlined, the name of the author is actually written out completely. So these are just a couple of differences between APA and MLA. APA is a little less common as far as if you're writing a research paper in a writing class per say, but you may need to use it in your more technical classes. So these are just some differences between APA and MLA."