APA Style (American Psychological Association Style)
When compiling your thesis or dissertation, the APA Style guidelines specify certain types of pages, as well as formatting guidelines for those pages.
The APA Style rules for formatting a thesis or dissertation are specific, ranging from the proper font size to the proper margins to the type of paper you should use. Here are 14 formatting tips.
In your APA Style thesis or dissertation, the reference list provides an alphabetical listing of all the sources you used to create your paper.
Within the main text of your thesis or dissertation, you may need to organize the text and information beyond the standard blocks of text.
When writing an APA Style paper ( American Psychological Association Style ), it's required that you properly cite any sources you've used. Citing sources is important for a few reasons.
APA Style has many rules, guidelines, and formatting requirements for your paper that it can be overwhelming to think about all of the opportunities for mistakes.
Writing that first thesis or dissertation can be a daunting task on its own. Throw in a need for APA Style guidelines in the paper, and it can be downright intimidating for the student who has never used APA Style in the past.
Determining which set of formatting rules, or styles, to follow is a decision you and your instructor will need to make. A few different popular formats exist.
When writing a dissertation or thesis, your instructor probably will require you to follow one of two popular style formats for your paper, APA Style or MLA Style.
MLA Style (Modern Language Association Style)
Most people think of MLA Style when trying to determine how to cite sources used as references in the paper. However, MLA Style includes rules for many aspects of formatting the paper beyond citing sources.
When citing non-traditional sources in MLA Style, such as Web pages or electronic media, you need to follow specific rules, just as you do with traditional print media, such as books and scholarly journals.
When citing sources in an MLA Style thesis or dissertation, you'll need to follow two different formats. In-text citations are references to sources that you make within the main text of your paper.
Unlike some other formal styles for writing scholarly papers, MLA Style does not specify a large number of specific pages that you must include in your paper.
Even though MLA Style lacks explicit rules about specific pages to include in your paper and how to organize those pages, it does have many formatting rules that you need to follow.
Writing in MLA Style is one of a few different writing styles you can use to format academic papers that require sources in an educational or professional setting.
The Works Cited page in MLA Style is important to your thesis or dissertation because it gives readers a list of sources you used to reach your conclusions. A well-researched paper will have high-quality sources.
When writing a dissertation or thesis, your instructor probably will require you to follow one of two popular style formats for your paper, APA Style or MLA Style.
You can choose from several writing and formatting styles when you write your dissertation or thesis, including MLA Style and Chicago Style, also called Turabian Style or Chicago Manual of Style.
Chicago Style / Turabian Style (The Chicago Manual of Style)
The basic guidelines for creating a thesis, dissertation or formal paper using Chicago (Turabian) Style are straightforward. Most of them use common sense rules and formatting options.
Although college students can use several formatting styles to create a thesis or dissertation, there's one style that works in almost every circumstance: Chicago Style (also sometimes called Chicago Turabian Style).
With Chicago (Turabian) Style, the bibliography page is where you list all of the sources you used to create your paper. You need to follow a variety of formatting rules when listing the sources.
Any time you use an idea that was introduced in another place -- whether it's a book, a Web site, or another scholarly paper -- you must give credit to the original author, by citing the source.
Chicago (Turabian) Style provides the writer with a few different options for breaking up the blocks of text in the main text area of the thesis or dissertation.
If you are writing a thesis or dissertation or any formal paper using Chicago (Turabian) Style, you have several options for deciding which pages to include in your paper. Some pages are required, while others are optional for your thesis or dissertation.
The basic guidelines for creating a thesis, dissertation or formal paper using Chicago (Turabian) Style are straightforward. Most of them use common sense rules and formatting options.
If you follow information and instructions from publications and Internet resources devoted to Chicago (Turabian) Style, then writing a formal paper isn't as difficult as it sounds. Following all the rules can be tricky, but it's not impossible.
For the most part, Chicago (Turabian) Style is designed to be a general style that works well for all types of college students in all types of subjects.
Most of the differences between Chicago (Turabian) and APA Styles involve in-text citations. Both styles include the last name of the author and a page number in parentheses for the in-text citation.
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