APA Formatting - The Title Page
Plagiarism is preventable. Proper citation on a paper can mean the difference between a well-researched and well-written paper and a plagiarized paper. Many colleges have plagiarism detection software used to scan student papers for proper formatting and credit. It is okay to borrow words ONLY IF you give proper credit to the original source of those words. Additionally, no more than 20% of your paper should be cited words or reference of other's work. This means you need to give your opinion based on the facts you uncovered and convey this in your own words.
Did you know turning in the same paper for two different classes without permission of the instructor also is considered plagiarism? That is right, you can plagiarize yourself and that is also a no-no. My school gives an "F" on the paper for the first offense, and "F" in the course for the second, and you are expelled for the third.
Imagine all the money you have tied up into your education. Now imagine having to pay for an education you could not complete because you failed to give proper credit in your research paper. This is absolutely preventable.
I am going to share a recent paper of mine with you. I did receive a 99% on this paper. My only correction is paragraph 3 on page 4. It originally read "I mentioned". This is another no-no. Research papers are not to be written in the first person. I guess I got a little carried away after writing so many blog posts!
In the interest of space, I will break this post up into three parts: the title page, the body, and the reference page. Here is an example of a properly APA formatted title page:
This is the easiest part of the entire paper. It is simple to format. Set the alignment of the page (not just the lines) to center and your word processing program should automatically set your information to the center of your title page. The easiest way to do this in MS Word is to go to print preview and select page setup. Then look for the image of the entire page. This defaults to top alignment. Just change this to center and click okay.
Be sure to add a header with page numbers. The header is a snippet of your paper's title. Then add the full title of your paper. I separated my title into several lines for aesthetic reasons. Next comes your name, your class, your instructor, and the date. That is it!
Tomorrow I will go over the body of your paper. This will include proper formatting and in-text citations.
For more information on APA formatting check out the OWL at Purdue. (OWL stands for Online Writing Lab.) This is one of the very best resources on the internet.
